How do you define your research strategy? Here are some tips. The next section discusses how to find sources and critiquing your findings. Hopefully, you’ll be able to define a research strategy and use it to your advantage! Read on to learn more. This research strategy will help you find the best possible sources for your project. And remember, you’re not alone! Many others are facing the same problems!
Defining a research strategy
Defining a research strategy is important to a university. The strategy should be specific and include an appropriate set of internal structures. The chapter discusses the role of a research office and research management in defining a university’s research strategy. A case study of the Medical University of Graz is used as an example. In defining a research strategy, the goals and objectives should be clearly defined. If a research office does not exist, there is no strategy at all.
To define a research strategy, identify your question and then compare it with the options that can answer it. Then, sort the research options by paradigm, approach, methodology, and data collection. Keep in mind that you can combine these options, as long as they are justified and not mutually exclusive. In the case of my research question, I chose a realist paradigm, inductive and deductive approaches, action research methodology, and reference to documentation.
Prioritizing research based on the priority set may also help determine the type of research that’s needed. Unfortunately, the National Research Council’s document provides little guidance on this important topic, namely how to prioritize research. It fails to provide a framework for prioritizing research based on knowledge gaps. Further, it doesn’t specify how many of the research needs must be addressed in a chronological order. In addition, this strategy ignores the fact that many types of important research can be pursued in parallel.
Accessing sources
The first step in developing a successful research strategy is to evaluate the sources you are using. Using critical thinking skills, you should evaluate the source’s credibility and relevance to your research questions. To do this, you should consider the intended audience and purpose of the source, its author’s credentials, the reputation of its publisher, and other criteria. A more thorough evaluation of sources will also consider their overall quality of writing. This article will discuss how to assess the reliability of sources in research.
Once you’ve identified dozens of potential sources, the next step is to decide how to use them. If you’re a novice, ask yourself: What is the most relevant information for my topic? Then, focus on the most useful sources. Do not read everything you find; reading and taking notes takes time and energy. By using critical analysis, you can narrow down your list of resources and choose the ones that will be most useful.
The third step in developing a research strategy is to create a notebook. This notebook can be a hard copy or an electronic folder. A notebook allows you to designate several pages or files for each source. Each source should have its own separate column for responses. This will make it easier to organize and analyze sources for future research. If you have access to a computer, use the tab “giving credit where it’s due” for resources you’ve collected.
Critiquing findings
A critical reading of a research article involves the objective appraisal of the major methodologic and conceptual decisions made in the study. Critical reading skills improve as you read through the book. The objective assessment of the study’s strengths and weaknesses should lead to recommendations about the study’s clinical relevance and validity. A research critique focuses on the study’s findings, methods, and conclusions, and usually ends with a brief summary of its merits and recommendations for improving the study.
Before conducting your own research, it is important to understand the methodology and findings of other studies. Qualitative research, for instance, often requires a more detailed review of the methods employed to collect data. While quantitative studies are generally more straightforward and can include descriptive statistics, qualitative studies require a different type of critiquing strategy. This is due to the fundamental differences between quantitative and qualitative research, which generate distinct terminology and methods of reasoning. Qualitative research is considered more difficult to critique than quantitative research, but there are still several key similarities.
While critically evaluating an article, the student should also analyze the article’s underlying assumptions and its methods. For instance, it may contain an overstatement of importance due to the author’s personal beliefs. Or it could contain an overly logical fallacy. Nevertheless, it is challenging to distinguish a non-reliable source of information. The goal is to identify unreliable sources, and then determine whether their claims are valid or not.