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Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership

This research guide is for students in the Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership program.

Resources to Help at Each Step of Your Research Paper or Project

It is difficult to recommended one database for finding resources in Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership where many topics are cross-disciplinary.  

  • USE the search from the Library home page.  
    • This search will simultaneously search for books and ebooks as well as articles found in many of our library databases.
    • Use the facets on the left to limit your results to articles or ebooks.
  • USE Google to search for information from organizations. 
    • Limit your searches in Google to include only organizational sites by including "site:.org" with your keywords when searching. 
    • To remove .com sites from your search, include "-site:.com" with your keywords.
  • USE Springerlink to access a large collection of scholarly ebooks in a wide variety of disciplines published by Springer along with journal articles from the journals they publish.  New titles are added on a continuing basis.
Whether you start with the "ALL" search, a specific database, or Google Scholar, the best research strategy is to use the iterative research process, where you perform multiple searches, refining your research criteria based on what you find.  Each iteration will take you closer to your desired goal. 

Consider installing and using Zotero, software that you can use to organize your citations and help with writing and citing.

Before using any information source in your paper, whether it is a book, article, or something from a webpage, you need to carefully evaluate the information to make sure it is both reliable and appropriate. Use this list of questions to help you evaluate information. Depending on your information need, different criteria will be more or less important. 

  1. Authority - Who is the author? What is their point of view? 
  2. Purpose - Why was the source created? Who is the intended audience?
  3. Publication & format - Where was it published? In what medium?
  4. Relevance - How is it relevant to my research? What is its scope?
  5. Date of publication - When was it written? Has it been updated?
  6. Documentation - Did they cite their sources? Who did they cite?

Additional information at - Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask  Steps and Guidelines for effectively evaluating websites. (UC-Berkeley).

It is not always easy to figure out if online sources are credible. Below are four short videos showing some tools you could use to help you determine if a source is credible.

  1. Watch a short introduction about sorting fact from fiction
  2. Tools to use to investigate the source
  3. Tools to find the original source
  4. Tools to find a trusted source


3:13 minutes

2:45 minutes

1:33 minutes

4:10 minutes

Consult the Qualitative Research Guide

The Guide provides:

  • An overview of qualitative research including data collection techniques and data analysis.
  • Links to free software like QDA Miner lite, and Taguette and purchased software like NVIVO.

Consult the Quantitative Research Guide

The Guide provides:

  • An overview of statistical analysis.
  • Links to free software options for doing statistical analysis and tutorials for using SPSS and R.

 

Consult these resources to help you write your literature review.

Short 3-minute video explaining how to synthesizing literature when writing a literature review

The Wheaton College Writing Center has resources to help you with writing and formatting your paper.

Video: Literature Reviews: A Guide for Graduate Students created by the North Carolina State Libraries.

Zotero is a reference manager that can not only hell you organize your research resource but it can also help you with formatting in-text citations and your bibliography.

Citation style guides