The Bedford Researcher Chapter 8: Summary and Discussion

Chapter eight focuses on learning how to collect information. Palmquist reviews ways to search for sources on digital databases and tips on how to narrow a search using key words or phrases. The internet can be a tangled web of information and learning how to navigate it takes practice. Palmquist has the writer refer to the original research question and chops it into segments that can be researched individually. He notes that synonyms for certain words can either broaden or narrow a search and learning how to include or exclude certain phrases while performing an advanced search is useful.The chapter reviews keywords, phrases, and wildcards, as well a commonly used Boolean operators.

I took a lot away from this chapter and was able to apply it to my ongoing research. The table on page 152 was seemingly redundant at first, but after going over each prompt in my head when performing a new search, I was able to narrow things down and find a lot of useful sources. If I had to critique my list of sources at all, I’d say that they mostly all fall into the genre of scholarly articles. I didn't necessarily think it was a bad thing but in order to balance my paper out, I decided that I needed to broaden the genre a bit. In doing so, I've found some really useful periodicals that I've included in my working bibliography.