Shelly Warwick, Ph.D – Permission is granted to reproduce and edit this work for non- commercial educational use as long as attribution is provided and the edited work is also available under the same terms of license.

Questions You should be able to answer after this unit What are the three basic types of research? Why is a review of the literature always important. Be able to identify the type of research approach in an article.

What Is Research?? Research is a systematic approach to locating existing information or discovering new information.

Types of Research Seeking to locate known facts, data, procedures, concepts, knowledge etc. Seeking to discover or create unknown facts, data, procedures, concepts, knowledge etc. Can involve experiments/interventions or using existing data to answer new questions

1- Literature-Based Research This is the type of research done to locate already existing information – it can be as simple as looking up the ingredients in a medication or as complex as locating and reading many, many original research reports for a systematic review or a meta-analysis

2 – Observational Research this type of research is done to better understand something as it already exists. This is the research method used by anthropologists who observe groups and by scientists who observe natural phenomena, such as weather or the progress of a disease for which there is no known treatment or cure.

3 – Interventional/Experimental Research in this approach the researcher makes a change in the condition of what is being studied to see how this affects the nature of the object of the study. Some interventions can cause a desired change, some an undesired change, and some no change, or a neutral change. Interventions can range from education on an issue to the systematic combinations of substances to develop a new medication

Doing Research Isn’t Simple Answers to big questions often found through combining answers to smaller questions – need to break questions into chunks

No Matter the Type of Research You ALWAYS need to search the Literature To find out if what you think is an unknown is a known To find out if what you think is a known is an unknown To find out what approaches others have taken toward the problem/concept, etc.

MOVE ON TO MODULE 2 –THE SCHOLARLY INFORMATION LIFE CYCLE