Research Guides: Senior Thesis Resources: Advanced Research Skills

Level Up Your Research Skills

Your senior thesis is a synthesis of what you've learned over the past four years, in addition to requiring new knowledge and skills. The links below provide tools and resources that are useful for a longer-term research project.

Organizing Your Research

The quantity of information you will deal with during your senior thesis can be intimidating. That's why it's important to get organized! The resources below will help you develop a research organization strategy that works for you.

Organize Your Sources with Zotero
A citation manager helps you keep track of your sources while searching, and cites them when writing.
Get Started with Your Literature Review tutorial
Many senior theses require a literature review; this tutorial suggests strategies and tools to make it pain-free as possible.
Literature review tracker
This Google spreadsheet helps you track sources for a literature review. Make a copy to your Google drive to use it for your research.

Resources for Research Proposals and Methods

Sage Research Methods This link opens in a new window
Sage Research Methods is a database dedicated to research methods in a variety of humanities and social science fields. Use it to learn about and select research methods for your senior thesis.
This resource also includes a Methods Map, a Project Planner, Statistical Methods selection tool, and further reading lists.
Language: English

Collecting & Visualizing Data

The library can also help you find, analyze, and visualize data and statistics.

Copyright and Fair Use

It's important to understand the basics of copyright and fair use, so that you can use copyrighted works correctly in your thesis and understand your rights as an author.

Copyright and Fair Use resources
The library's copyright and fair use page is a good starting place if you plan to use copyrighted materials in your senior thesis.

Search Strategies that Go Beyond Keywords

We often think of keyword searching when it comes to database research, but there are lots of other search methods that your research will benefit from. Reach out to your subject librarian to learn more about search methods specific to your field and databases.

Field Searching

Field searching allows you to choose exactly where you want your keywords to be found and makes your search more precise. For example, in an author search (above), you search in the Author field. You can also limit your search to titles, abstracts, and more.
Search for authors using the last name, first name format and the Author field in a database. This is a useful strategy when you want to find all of the publications by a specific scholar.
Search for the title of an article or book by locking it in "quotes"

Chemical Structure Searching

Use chemical structure searching in chemistry and biology to find all of the publications that refer to a specific chemical structure. This search strategy is available in a limited number of databases.

Citation Chaining

Citation chaining uses a specific source as a starting point to find other sources in conversation, and consists of forwards and backwards searching.

Subject Term/Controlled Vocabulary Searching

Many databases use subject terms, also known as controlled vocabulary, as part of the metadata attached to the sources in the database. Subject terms/controlled vocabulary are specific words that have been assigned to a concept so that it remains consistent across a database. For example, "high school", "secondary school", and "ninth grade to twelfth grade" all mean the same thing in the United States. A database might assign the subject term "secondary school" to any article that references the above terms, so a search for "secondary school" will return all articles on the topic, even if they use the term "high school" in the article.
Using subject terms in your searching can make your searches both more precise and more complete. Talk to your subject librarian about strategies for finding subject terms in the databases in your field.