Welcome!  This research guide has been created to help you locate, access, and evaluate sources for your WRT 104 or 106 research. If you need further assistance, please don't hesitate to reach out to a librarian.  Learn more about how to contact a librarian here: Reference & Research Help.

By the end of your library instruction session, you will be able to...

• Demonstrate flexibility and resilience in the research process by reframing search queries in response to initial results.
• Find credible sources using relevant keywords from a research question.
• Apply the CRAAP test to evaluate the relevance, currency, and authority of a selected source.

Here are a few research questions that you might see modeled in your library instruction session:

• How have health disparities impacted COVID-19 treatment in the United States?
• What are the effects of caffeine on health?
• How has climate change impacted Rhode Island, and how are communities responding to these changes?

Concept mapping is a useful activity that helps you brainstorm and identify connections between the critical concepts involved in your topic.  Visualizing the relationship between these concepts is an important step towards crafting your research question.

Use the worksheet below to develop a concept map and create a research question for your topic.

Using a research question to set the parameters for your research can be highly beneficial in helping you determine what sources are relevant and useful to your research as well as when you're done with your research.  Below are a few examples of strong research questions:

• What impact has fake news had on recent American presidential elections?
• How has DACA impacted college students? 
• How do media stereotypes of masculinity impact adolescent boys?
• How did colonialism influence travel writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
• How has engagement with social media impacted writing processes? 

J. Kinnie and N. Fosher, 3/11, J. Kinnie 6/17, A. Vaandering 7/20, A. Vaandering 9/22.