Phases of research (3/10)

The quality of your work strongly depends on your research sources. The search and evaluation of literature is the starting point for any research and it shapes the process of academic work in many ways.

To begin with, you should search and explore resources that deal with your topic of interest. This will help you to refine or narrow down your topic and come up with a specific research question.

When you have narrowed down your topic, you should be able to list individual aspects or arguments which will, in turn, require systematic search – you will find tips for that in chapter 2 of this course. Later, during your writing process you will occasionally go back to literature search but your search will be shorter then and more specific.