University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
School of Information and Library Science
Syllabus / Schedule (today) / Assignments / Additional Readings / Sakai site
The primary purpose for this course is for each class member to develop a strong and workable proposal for a research study or project to be completed during INLS 992. The finished proposal will consiste of three chapters: an introduction, which provides a rationale for pursuing the research problem/question; a literature review, which synthesizes what we already know about the resarch problem/question; and a methods chapter, which describes the data collection and analysis methods to be used to address the research problem/question. These three chapters will be developed iteratively during the course, with peer and instructor review and feedback. They will be combined in the final proposal, due on October 22.
The specific due date for each chapter is listed on the class schedule. The chapters and their drafts or other intermediate deliverables are listed here:
Preliminary research question
For the purposes of this assignment, the statement of your research question should consist of two paragraphs. The first paragraph should introduce the general area of your research and situate your question within that area. In other words, the purpose of the first paragraph is to provide a rationale for your research question (the rationale will be elaborated further as you develop the Introduction chapter). The second paragraph is the explication of the research question itself. The question should be stated (either as a question or formal hypothesis) and any additional information needed to provide context for the question should be provided.
Attach a glossary to your question definition. In the glossary, there should be an entry for each critical component of your question. For example, if your question were, "What are the effects of a person's domain knowledge on their formulation of Web search strategy?", you would have entries for at least the following terms: domain knowledge, formulation, Web search strategy. Each entry should define the term (including clarifying the scope of the term), and examples may be provided if appropriate.
Introduction chapter
Develop your research question into a brief chapter (usually 4-10 pages, double-spaced). Provide a strong rationale for pursuing your area of research. Explain the motivations behind the research you're proposing: why is it important to pursue this research?
At this point, you will drop the glossary, though those definitions will be incorporated into your proposal; they may be most appropriately provided and discussed in the Introduction chapter, as sections of the Literature review chapter, or as definitions of the variables provided in the Methods chapter.
Literature review search plan
The purpose of the literature review is to place your research questions/study in the context of what we already know about the research area. The Introduction chapter will have begun this process, but in the Literature review chapter, you will provide a much more detailed discussion of the intellectual context of your study. There are two primary steps: identifying relevant literature and synthesizing that literature. The search plan will document the ways in which you will identify relevant literature.
Decide which databases/sources you will search and what search strategy(ies) you will use in each. Start with those articles that are most core to your interests (i.e., directly addressing some aspect of your research question) and work your way out from there. You will modify your specific research question(s) as you learn more about the research area and open questions within that area.
Bates (1989, p.412) suggests a variety of ways to identify relevant literature; these can serve as a guide for your own literature searching. They of course include subject searches in relevant databases, but they also include footnote chasing and citation searching, author searching, and browsing journal tables of contents and bookshelves that might be particularly fruitful. You are expected to incorporate all or most of these methods in your own searching.
There will be a lot of variability in the number of articles and other materials you might include in your literature review, but here is a bit of guidance on scope/scale: I would expect that you might identify hundreds of potentially useful documents through your literature search; I would expect that you would closely examine the abstracts of over 100 documents; I would expect that you would examine the full text of 50-70 articles; I would expect that you would identify and read/examine 30-50 articles to be cited in your literature review.
Deliverable: List each database searched. For each database/source, provide the details of the search terms/strategies used and the number of items retrieved with each strategy. This search plan should be a bulleted list or outline format, rather than narrative. There's no limit on its length, but it is likely to be 1-3 pages, single-spaced.
Literature review chapter
As you identify and examine the relevant literature related to your research question(s), you will be developing your own knowledge about your research area. In your literature review chapter, you will summarize/synthesize this knowledge. What do we know in relation to your research question, generally, and in relation to specific aspects of it? In what ways are past findings linked to your research plans? What questions remain unanswered? Which of those is the most important to pursue next?
A brief article that will guide you through this process is: Webster, J., & Watson, R.T. (2002). Analyzing the past to prepare for the future: Writing a literature review. MIS Quarterly, 26(2), xiii-xxiii (available in UNC libraries via JSTOR). Webster and Watson's advice is particularly useful for helping you to structure your review.
The final version of the literature review chapter will likely be 12-30 pages, double-spaced, depending on how much relevant literature exists. At the end of the literature review, state your research questions very specifically and clearly.
Methods chapter
In this chapter, you will describe your plans for how you will conduct your study. The plans should include descriptions of the way(s) in which you will collect the data needed to address your research question(s), the source(s) from which you will collect your data (including how you will identify and recruit/gather those sources), and the way(s) in which you will analyze the data. It should conclude with a paragraph or two related to the anticipated implications of your study; i.e., given the results that may come from your study, what impact might they have in the world? While speculative, this final section should tie back to the rationale for the study provided in the introduction.
While the methods chapter does not need to be long or excessively detailed, it does need to be clear and unambiguous. The reader of this chapter should be able to carry out your study in the way you would wish, without having to ask for clarification of any of the procedures.
Extensive feedback will be provided on each intermediate deliverable; no grade will be assigned until the final proposal is read by the instructor.
The proposal will be evaluated in terms of the significance and potential impact of the proposal study (i.e., the research question/problem); the completeness of the literature review; the quality of the synthesis/integration evident in the literature review; the quality of the reasoning/logic connecting past studies to the proposed study; the validity and practicality of the data collection and analysis methods proposed for addressing the research question; and the clarity of the writing.
There will be a variety of ways in which each class member can participate in this class, including participating in in-class discussions (general and team-based), by providing comments and suggestions on the drafts created by other class members, and by posting relevant comments and questions on the online discussion forum.
Syllabus / Schedule (today) / Assignments / Additional Readings / Sakai site