7.5 Organizing Your Research
Jackie Hendricks; Amy Lueck; Loring Pfeiffer; and Maura Tarnoff
Putting It All Together: Using Notecards or Sticky Notes to Organize Your Research
- Review your annotated bibliographies and reread what you have written.
- Starting with one of your sources, use notecards or sticky notes to write out ONE idea or major claim from your summary. Bonus points if you can connect a quote or note a page number where the author discussed this idea or claim.
- Write at least 2 to 3 main claims per source, and attach or cluster the notecards to the annotated bibliography; you may color-code the cards or sticky notes, or code them by number, letter, or symbol, to keep track of each author’s claims.
- Once you have multiple notecards or sticky notes per source, you can begin to rearrange them on your desk. Cluster different authors or sources together based on the BEAM categories: what sticky notes can you place in the Background, Exhibit, Argument, and Method categories?
- Remember: the authors do not have to agree on a certain claim, necessarily, to be clustered together in the same category of ideas. What you are starting to do here is introduce your various authors to each other, to bring them into the “same room,” to meet each other and have a conversation that will eventually show up in your essay.
- When you have at least two authors in each cluster of notecards or sticky notes, you can start to see connections with which you can draft an outline. In the outline, you can plan to organize your body paragraph topics based on the BEAM categories and the claims presented by various authors.
- If you prefer, you can also use your notecards to create a mind map based on the similar categories of ideas from your authors, to show how each author “branches out” from the same idea or claim in their own way, and further branch out from the authors with the evidence they use to support their stances.
Consider Together: Using a Table to Organize Sources
Another method for organizing sources is a table with color coding to indicate what section of the paper the sources will be used. Look at student Megu Kanzawa’s table below for her paper researching data mining, and note the assessment of her table that follows.
Guiding Questions: Using organizational tools like tables can be easily personalized to suit your preferences, supporting your individual writing style and approach. Using Megu’s table for inspiration, design and create your own table to sort your sources.
- How did you condense the main points of each source into bullet points that fit in a table?
- What color coding scheme did you use to designate different sections of your paper?
- Upon completing the table, what was your assessment of your sources’ strengths and weaknesses?
Research Highlights
By Megu Kanzawa
Legend
Definition
Applications
Ethics
Methodology
| Number & Source | Overview | Which Section of Paper |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Scholarly Data Mining: a systematic review of its applications |
|
Definition of Data Mining
Applications in Academia Applications in Gov Methodology of Scholarly Data Mining |
| 2. A survey on data mining techniques used in medicine |
|
Definition of Data Mining
Applications in Clinical Research Ethics: Privacy Concerns, Human Errors |
| 3. Research on Data Governance in Food Safety Regulation |
|
Applications in Food Safety Regulation
Ethics: Niche Topics Methodology of Food Safety Regulation |
| 4. Identifying Characteristics of Reflection Triggers in Data Science Ethics Education |
|
Applications in Academia
Ethics: Privacy Concerns |
| 5. Responsible Big Data Analytics for E-Business Services |
|
Definition: Use of Data Mining
Ethics: Government Laws |
| 6. Mining for data and personal privacy: reflections on an impasse |
|
Ethics: Data Protection Laws & Policies |
| 7. Big Data Governance Challenges Arising from Data Generated by Intelligent Systems Technologies: A Systematic Literature Review |
|
Applications in Academia
Ethics: Data Governance Policy Methodology of Data Governance Model |
| 8. Ethical Considerations in Data Mining and Database Research |
|
Ethics: Bias & Invasion of Personal Data |
| 9. Data mining in clinical big data: the frequently used databases, steps, and methodological models |
|
Definition: Data Mining in Clinical Research
Applications in Clinical Research |
| 10. Pragmatic evaluation of data mining models based on quality assessment & metric analysis |
|
Definition: Data Mining Evaluation Methodology of Data Mining Evaluation Models |
| 11. Data Mining: Past, Present, and Future |
|
History of Data Mining |
| 12. PATENT: Parsing Messages with Multiple Data Formats |
|
Methodology of Data Mining |
Next Steps:
Overall, it seems that I have a lot of ethical sources but lack the background information on data mining and data mining evaluation, as well as data governance. I might go into more sources in regard to that.
Attribution
“Organizing Your Research” by Jackie Hendricks, Amy Lueck, Loring Pfeiffer, and Maura Tarnoff is adapted from “Notecards, Outlining, Mindmaps, and Going Back to the Writing Process” from Reading and Writing Your World by Dan Curtis-Cummins and Jolie Goorjian, used under CC BY 4.0. “Organizing Your Research” is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
