UA Library’s Education research guide
List of resources specific to education research.
Finding a Topic and Beginning Research
A guide from Dr. Dianne P. O’Leary at the University of Maryland. Quite good.
How To Do Graduate-Level Research: Some Advice
Specifically, see chapter 3, “The Craft of Research—Basic Skills.” Good for undergraduates to sink their teeth in, too.
Yes, it’s focus is statistics but it’s an incredibly useful resource. Great assistance with graduate-level work, though it’s no replacement for a methods course. Even at the undergraduate level it is very useful.
Not everything here is going to apply to every assignment but they will definitely come in handy at some point.
Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL)
Bookmark this. Get to know it. Shower it with affection. This will likely be your best friend in university.
This is a great way to make sure you’re actually following the required style guide, especially if you’ve never done it before. Of course, I would suggest you try using an automated process that lets you focus on the quality of your content and less on how it looks.
Incredibly handy little tool, this. For when you just can’t think of the right word or concept. From the website: “This tool lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be anything at all: a single word, a few words, or even a whole sentence. Type in your description and hit Enter (or select a word that shows up in the autocomplete preview) to see the related words.”
Shows you just how accessible your writing is in terms of scientific jargon.
The literature review is intended to be a comprehensive look at the literature on a particular topic. Writing one can be devilishly difficult. Here is a guide.
In case you go down the Citavi rabbithole.
Accidental Plagiarism and How to Avoid It
Using a citation management system like the ones below can go a very long way to preventing this. A very important read.
UA South provides free tutoring for writing and math, and various other related subjects, at multiple locations and fully online. Students can access free tutoring in- person at our Cochise and Yuma County locations, at the UA Think Tank in Tucson, as well as fully online from the UA Think Tank.
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A quick resource. Good for getting an overview. Certainly is not a replacement for some of the more specialized databases (see below).
Great way to search lots of social sciences research. Filters are your friend. Lots of peer reviewed journals and will likely serve as your source for much of the foundational theory and core research. Tip: pay attention to suggested readings after finding an article that’s very well suited to your search.
Educational Resources Information Center. Sponsored by the Department of Education. Focus is on pedagogy and education in general, not technology (though it may be included).
Formerly EdITLib. Contains a considerable amount of research from technology-focused conference proceedings, journals, and eBooks. Great place to find niche research.
Found the perfect article and want to see what’s cited it and progressed the research? This is your best friend.
Much like CrossRef but I’ve had better results with it.
UA Library’s Citation Tools Overview
The library put together a brief page with descriptions and a comparison of the various citation mangement choices. It’s worth a look.
I love Citavi and really wish I could get into it more than I do. Maybe it’ll work for you. It’s very in-depth.
I believe EndNote is the library’s citation mangement software of choice.
A popular citation plugin.
Another very popular (and now my service of choice) citation and reference management system. Seems to be popular with the humanities.
My (former) citation software of choice and I’ve tried a lot of them. Downside (if this bothers you): it was purchased by Eselvier.