Hints and tips
Research is not just large projects undertaken by academics. At some point practitioners also carry out research. It may be a small project to enhance your own teaching and your students' learning experience, or it may be a large project designed to impact on the whole library.What ever size project:
- Discuss with colleagues (fellow librarians, academics, any one who might be able to help) what you are trying to achieve and the best way to go about it. Collaboration can make research run more smoothly.
- In fact, discuss your research at different stages: other people can help you decide what approach to take, what to do next, and when not to give up.
- Consider whether you need funding, there are several different organisations who fund research.
- Match your research question with the right research method.
- Make it simple: don’t try to do too many things in one piece of research.
- Learn from the literature. Someone may have done something similar before. If you use their approach this is replication not plagiarism ;-)
- Never underestimate how long research can take (literature search, collection of data, analysis, write up). Especially the time it will take to analyse your data. Think of a time period and double it, then add some…. Data which is collected and not analysed is a waste of time.
- Never underestimate the difficulty of getting a good sample for your research.
- Consider ethics procedures especially if you are involving children or the NHS and do not under estimate how long approval can take.
- Pilot your interview or questionnaire: it saves grief and embarrassment later on.
- Tell people about what you’ve done. Research can make a difference, but only if people hear about it.