4 Introduction to Research

Learning Objectives

• Understand the Library’s importance for LaGuardia students.
• Be able to write a research question.
• Be able to find resources through the Library website that support your coursework.

Welcome to the LaGuardia Library

Introduction

The Library Department is dedicated to educating one of the most diverse student populations in the country and supporting research efforts among LaGuardia’s students, faculty, staff, and neighboring community. The Library builds and provides access to dynamic physical and digital collections, including Open Education Resources (you are reading one right now); preserves materials related to the College’s history in the Institutional Archives; and creates a supportive environment for study, inquiry, collaboration, and lifelong learning. Visitors can read the printed collection of books, periodicals, and textbooks; access millions of articles, books, and videos using subscription databases; use one of three computer labs with printers; and access free wi-fi with their own devices. The Library provides many in-person services to help as you get used to college life. Librarians at the reference desk can answer questions about finding items, research, and citation. Staff at the circulation desk will check out books for you to take home or to use in the Library. Media Services staff will help check out technology items for you like laptops, Chromebooks, and iPads. The Library also provides the Ask a Librarian online service, which can be reached via email or online chat. Visit the Library’s website to read more about our services and explore the online collections.

Who Can Use the Library

The Library at LaGuardia is open for on-site use and borrowing of materials to anyone holding a currently-valid ID from any college of the City University of New York (CUNY), any CUNY-affiliated school, and the Empire State College of the State University of New York (SUNY).

Non-CUNY affiliates are welcome to visit the Library, subject to LaGuardia’s current policies and procedures.

Useful Links

Library homepage

Ask a Librarian live chat with a LaGuardia librarian and email service

Frequently Asked Questions and Handouts

Why Do Community College Students Need Libraries?

What the library provides

The LaGuardia Library serves many of the roles Carla Hayden details in the above video: quiet refuge, leisure reading, and free internet. But the Library’s primary role is to support students’ research needs for their classes. With so much information available on the Web, how does the LaGuardia Library fulfill its mission? As the graphic below illustrates, the Library provides you with access to content that is not available for free on the Web. In fact, the Web is a small percentage of what is available on the internet. Think of the internet like an iceberg and the tip is the World Wide Web–the part that is visible to everyone. But most of an iceberg is underwater, hidden from view. Much of the internet is not available to the public, from secure banking records to scholarly articles in subscription databases.

For LaGuardia students, library subscription databases are critical for your coursework. They provide access to the following:

• Ebooks
• Scholarly articles
• News articles
• Popular magazine articles
• Videos
• Statistics
• Primary Sources
• Other sources necessary for college level research

When you are at LaGuardia, you automatically gain access to these databases. You can also access them remotely by logging in with your MyLaGuardia username and password.

What is college level research?

College level research requires you to be especially responsible for how you find and share information. You will need to go beyond superficial googling and learn how to identify and report on what sources you find.

Consider the context of what you are writing and who you are writing it for. If you are presenting your research in front of a room full of your professional colleagues, you want to make sure that you are using information written in reputable sources. When you “cite” or refer to other writers, you are taking part in a conversation with other scholars. You will want to learn the language used by your colleagues in your profession. This can enable you to further your own research, and make sure that you find the right kinds of information.

For example, as a health sciences major you need to shift your mindset from that of a patient to that of a practitioner. This means that you need to approach your need for information like a healthcare provider, rather than as a person seeking health care. A patient may use the popular website WebMD to find information about their symptoms. You, on the other hand, will routinely rely on your research skills to keep up with new treatments in your field, to confirm diagnoses, or to investigate unfamiliar symptoms. A database like PubMed provides you with access to millions of scholarly articles, written by doctors, nurses, scientists, and other professionals, to meet your needs as a practitioner.

Research Questions

What is a research question?

Research is an attempt to give an original answer to a question you develop (or one that’s assigned to you). In college writing, an important part of research is consulting what others before you have said about your topic. You incorporate their ideas into your writing by pointing out where you draw on others’ work, and where you differ. In this way, research is essential to building your own arguments in the service of answering your research question.

Developing a research question is an excellent first step in the research process and it will help you to organize and focus your ideas on a topic. Developing a specific research question can be challenging. The less you know about a topic, the broader your initial question is likely to be—and you may not realize that your question is not yet specific enough to be useful in research. As you do research, you will have other, more specific questions to choose from. That’s why we talk about developing a research question. It’s an ongoing process, and you can expect your question to change more than once.

Regular questions vs. research questions

Most of us ask questions and seek answers every day. Are research questions any different from most of the regular questions we ask? Yes.

Generally, our everyday questions have quick answers. For example, you could easily find the answers to these questions:

What time does the grocery store open?

What other movies has that actor been in?

Even questions that seem more academic, if they can be answered definitively using a single source, don’t make great research questions. For example, how many languages are spoken in Jackson Heights, Queens? It might take some time to find the answer, but that doesn’t make it a great research question. A good research question asks how or why. In this case, a stronger research question might ask, how have the languages spoken in Jackson Heights, Queens, changed over time, and what factors drove that change?

From broad to narrow

Research questions are more specific than the general questions we answer every day. Here are some examples.

Regular Question: What can I do about my insomnia?

Research Question: How do flights more than 16 hours long affect the reflexes of commercial jet pilots?

Regular Question: How many children in the U.S. have allergies?

Research Question: How does poverty affect a child’s chances of developing asthma?

The steps for developing a research question, listed below and included in the video, can help you organize your thoughts.

• Step 1: Pick a topic (or consider the one assigned to you).
• Step 2: Write a narrower/smaller topic that is related to the first.
• Step 3: List some potential questions that could logically be asked in relation to the narrow topic.
• Step 4: Pick the question that you are most interested in.
• Step 5: Change that question you’re interested in so that it is more focused.

 

Developing a Research Question

Activity: Regular Questions vs. Research Questions

From Questions to Keywords

Concept Mapping

One way to organize your thoughts on a topic is to create a concept map. The video shows you how to make one and the ways it is helpful for the research process, which include.

• Organizing your ideas and show how they are related to one another
• Generating keywords you can use to search for sources
• Developing and refining your research question

Make your own concept map using this template.

Using Keywords

Keywords video

It is important to come up with specific keywords to search for articles, books, and other sources. These keywords can be used one at a time or combined for complex searches. Library subscription databases don’t understand sentences or questions (like Google does) so you need to choose only the most relevant keywords related to your topic.

Activity: Write keywords and synonyms for the following research question:

How does poverty affect a child’s chances of developing asthma?

Searching for Sources

Google and the Library Website

The open web (searching Google) is a helpful starting point. Still, you often run into obstacles that prevent you from accessing or using the information:

• Paywalls (subscription only databases, journals, magazines, and newspapers. For example, scholarly articles where you are prompted to pay).
• Inaccurate or dangerous advice from amateurs (subreddits where people post advice on doing electrical work; food safety and wellness influencers)

While the Library’s subscription databases can’t solve all these problems, it is often a better starting point for the college-level research you need to do as a LaGuardia student.

• The Library prioritizes scholarly or professional publications written by and for students, scholars, and other experts in their respective disciplines.
• The Library pays for the content you access through the Library website; these are not free articles to the public.
• The Library is not trying to sell you anything.

Anatomy of library sources: stacks, textbooks, databases, etc.

You can find information in many forms at the LaGuardia Library. In person, you can browse thousands of books. We buy copies of every textbook assigned in your classes; fiction and nonfiction books relevant to the topics you study, as well as books for leisure reading and children’s books. We subscribe to many newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals that are published throughout the year, these are called periodicals. The Library Media Department even has thousands of DVDs, CDs, and LPs!

Online, we provide access to millions of ebooks, articles, and videos. Most of these are available to you through subscription databases. You can search for (almost) everything at the same time by using OneSearch, which is kind of like Google for the Library; it is the default search on the Library’s homepage. You can also search databases individually, which can help you focus more on a topic. The Library subscribes to databases with articles on many topics (Academic Search Complete) and specialized databases for narrower topics (Medline Complete for health sciences). These databases are only available to LaGuardia students, so you have to access them from the Library’s website, but you can login with your MyLaGuardia username and password for remote access off campus.

What is a primary source?

According to the Library of Congress, primary sources are the raw materials of history — original documents and objects that were created at the time under study. These include letters, photographs, and works of art. However, in the sciences a primary source is an article, a piece of original research, that includes the results of an experiment conducted by the authors.

In contrast, secondary sources include accounts that retell, analyze, or interpret events, usually at a distance of time or place. For example, a book about the Vietnam War, written by your history professor at LaGuardia, is a secondary source.

Stay Organized

Gather and organize citations

Citations are a necessary part of many college assignments. Citations are what you use to tell your readers where you got your information. Think of them like an address that directs your reader to a source. Any source you use needs to be cited, from scholarly articles and books to tweets and TikTok videos. If it’s not your idea or work, you need to cite it!

Sometimes you will be asked to provide a list of references or a works cited page in an assignment. There are many different citation styles, but MLA (Modern Language Association) and APA (American Psychological Association) are the two most frequently used at LaGuardia. Generally, MLA is used in your English and humanities classes and APA is used in math, natural sciences and social sciences classes.

Thankfully, the research tools available to you help you easily gather citations. Whether using the Library’s catalog (called OneSearch) or a subscription database, you will typically be able to automatically create an MLA or APA citation. To ensure you properly cite your sources and stay organized, copy and paste citations into a working document. Often, research is a time for gathering sources, to be reviewed later. Save them now, read them later, and avoid the frustration of losing or forgetting where you found an important source.

WHAT’S NEXT: CAMPUS NAVIGATION

Next, you will explore Campus Navigation. This chapter will help you become familiar with LaGuardia’s campus, providing tips and resources to make your college experience smoother. You will learn how to navigate the campus confidently and discover various departments and services available to you as a LaGuardia student.