Research made easy

CONDUCTING original research is Pakistan is still a distant concept. There are very few people who are seriously interested in doing research that goes beyond copying and pasting from various sources. For some fortunate souls, the chance to do research under supervision comes while they are studying in universities. This is the time when they actually learn how to do it, albeit as an academic exercise.

When starting out to conduct research on any chosen topic, one of the key steps is to review the studies that have already been done on the same topic. This gives an idea about the study and whatever has been covered in your area of interest, that is, your chosen topic. Moreover, it beams on the scope and available methods with which you can conduct research.

For many, reviewing the researches seem quite a tedious task. In fact, it is quite tedious, at least at the initial level; but with the passage of time you get more and more involved. It is a quite a time-consuming activity and one is resigned to spending long hours in libraries poring over journals after journals, trying to find relevant and appropriate research studies.

The internet however, once again comes to the rescue. you can now use websites like Find Articles (http://www.findarticles.com) to access at least some of the journals and research articles.

Find Articles is a repository of research journals and research articles on almost every subject that you can imagine. Of course, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. All the journals are divided into ‘Free’ and ‘Premium’ sections. So it may happen that whatever you want to access is falling under the Premium section, which means that you have to pay a certain amount to find access to the articles in it. But there are loads of journals which are free and you can easily avail their services.

If you are new to Find Articles, the sheer amount of research material here can overwhelm you. The best way to browse is to first search for the journals which are relevant to your topic. You can choose the ‘Explore Publications by Title’ link to navigate there. You can either go through all the journals manually – they are arranged in an alphabetical order -- and by subject matter (arts, business, health, sports and technology to name a few).

The other option is to search the journals for key words. You can enter a few words or phrases in the search box and check the search results. Once you have the journals relevant to your research topic, the next step would be to go through the different issues of that journal to see if the study is relevant to you. Find Articles has several issues of the same journal with the full text of the articles (if it falls under the ‘Free’ section), so there is quite a lot of material to choose from.

But, if you do not want to go through the procedure of looking up journals first, you can always search journal articles only. There is a search box on the main page which gives the option of searching articles among the free or premium section, or both of them.

One way in which you can make use of these journal articles is to go through their list of references and check out which journals and articles were used in the preparation of that research study. Even if you cannot find on Find Articles, you can always look up Google Scholar.

Needless to say that the internet is the marvel for today and tomorrow, especially for a person surfing for educational purpose, and conducting the preliminary stages of his/her research. However, it is important that one does not copy/paste from journal articles, but simply use them for his/her literature review. This essentially means that one credit all the articles in bibliography.