Library:Research Skills For Engineering Students/Module 01/Page 03

From UBC Wiki

Before you begin searching for information about your problem, you first need to identify what the main concepts of your question are. This will help you determine the best places to look, and the best search terms to use.

Think about how your problem can be simplified to 2-3 main ideas or concepts. Can you ask the question in one sentence? What are the key terms? If you could find the perfect journal article, what would it be about? What would its title be?

Think about all the different ways you could describe your topic(s), such as:

  • Synonyms
  • Broader and narrower terms

As an example, let’s look at the question: What would the impact of an earthquake be to wired and wireless communication networks?

Our main concepts might be:

earthquakes AND communication networks


We then want to think of the different ways we could describe these concepts:

earthquakes AND communication networks
seismic events communication service
seismic damage telecommunications
seismic reliability emergency communication
post-disaster communications


We might also want to look at wired and wireless communication networks separately and specifically, to find more detailed technical information about each. Wireless communication networks could also be called:

earthquakes AND wireless communication
seismic events mobile communication
seismic damage cellular communication
seismic reliability satellite communication
wireless sensor networks


Depending on the focus of your research question, there could be more or fewer terms to try.

As you research your topic, you will increase your knowledge and learn terms that could potentially give you better results!

If your topic is very specific and you’re not finding many resources, you may need to look at broader concepts. Then, you could support your report by extrapolating the broad information to your specific topic.

You should look for existing research about your topic to understand the past and current landscape of your engineering problem. What has already been done, and how can you take this further? Understanding the broader context of your problem will give you a deeper understanding of the problem itself, so that your work is truly innovative. You’ll also want to learn about the social contexts, so that you can acknowledge the potential experience of the end user and possible impact on the environment.