Secondary Research
I. Goals
For your Research Proposal and Final Project, you will be working with topics for which you will need a wide range of research. Resources from the library might be useful in some cases. Some level of online research will also be necessary. As explained elsewhere, you will also be required to conduct primary research.
II. Requirements
For both the Research Proposal and the Final Project, you are expected to have a bibliography of at least ten (10) secondary sources (your primary research will appear in separate appendices).
For the Research Proposal, you will use MLA citation Links to an external site..
For the Final Project, how you cite your sources both within your document and at the end will likely depend on the document type you choose. For example, an Onboarding manual will likely not have traditional MLA in-text citations. This is a decision you will need to make on your own and then be consistent.
III. Library Research
To conduct meaningful secondary research, it is worth (re-)familiarizing yourself with the resources available to you. If you have not used the UMD library system (recently), please review the tutorial linked here.
In particular, you should look at Module 3: Finding Information.
Library resources are often a good first step towards better understanding the broader context of issues we are interested in.
IV. Online Research
Once you narrow your focus, and your audience becomes more and more specific, library resources often become less useful, as will be the case with the projects in this class. In this case, online research will be very important for many of you.
For example, say you are interested in introducing a new technology to an office you've worked at before. The most useful research for a topic like this will be looking into other similar businesses and alternative technology solutions, all of which will require detailed research online.
For instructions on making your online searches as successful as possible, start here Links to an external site..