Skip to Main Content

FW 506: Graduate Certificate Capstone

Resources, tools and tips for OSU Fisheries and Wildlife students working on their graduate certificate capstone projects

Where should I look for sources?

Find information on current events. Learn about popular perspectives or controversies.

Questions to guide your search for stakeholder perspectives

I want to... Where should I start? When & How to Use

Get a broad overview of what's available on a topic (both scholarly and popular viewpoints).

Questions to guide your search for background literature

1Search (OSU Libraries)

Google Scholar

Google

Wikipedia

When: At the beginning of a project, for idea generation and definitions.

How: These sources will not ultimately be used in a thesis or research-based work.

Find information on current events. Learn about popular perspectives or controversies.

Questions to guide your search for stakeholder perspectives

News Databases & Newspapers

Google News

When: At the beginning of a project, to learn about the cultural implications of your project.

How: These sources will not ultimately be used in a thesis or research-based work.

Explore the literature in a specific academic discipline (e.g., Fisheries, Wildlife & Conservation Sciences). Find scientific reports based on rigorous research.

Questions to ask about methods

Questions to ask about data

OSU Libraries Databases

Research Guides for Specific Disciplines

When: Throughout your project, depending on how much background knowledge of your topic you already have.

How: In your introduction, literature reviews, and in your discussion of results to help give context about the scholarly conversation on your topic, and to situate your own work and idea.

These sources will be used in your reference list.
Find demographic facts, figures, or statistics, including opinion polls.

Facts & Figures

Government Information

NOAA Fisheries Population Assessments (just one example among many)

When: Depending on your project you may need to consult government data on fisheries to better understand populations or trends over time, or you may seek out information about human-environment interactions and context about people's response to policies to better understand management issues.

How: This information might be used in your own scholarly writing or may inform your broader understanding of the larger sociocultural context.
Find statutes, laws, cases or other legal information  Legal News and Cases databases
 

When: Depending on your project, you may need to understand legal or political issues that impact protection of species or management choices.

How: This information might be used in your own scholarly writing or may inform your knowledge of the larger political and legal context.

Questions to guide your background literature search

  • What is the main idea?
  • What kind of research has been done on this topic?
  • What do I need to learn more about?
  • What language or special terms do people use to describe this topic?
  • Do I know what all of this language means? (if no – look it up)
  • Is there current research on my topic?
  • Is this topic still under discussion?
  • Is there enough here for me to keep going?

Questions to guide your search for stakeholder perspectives

  • Who are the stakeholders? What organizations do they belong to?
  • What kind of arguments do they use?
  • What concerns do they have?
  • What evidence do they use to back up their arguments?
  • Have they used legal means to try to make changes?

Questions to ask about methods

  • What method do they describe?
  • How and where do they do the testing – in vivo/in vitro, observational, in a lab, in the field?
  • What are the research questions – what are they observing? E.g., behaviors, habitat change, disease response, psycho-social, physiological
  • How large was the sample? Were observations made over multiple seasons?

Questions to ask about data

  • What are they describing overall, is this a reasonable way to get at that information?
  • Does this data make sense based on the methods used?

  • How are they presenting this data?

  • How does this specific information relate to your larger questions?

Searching Tricks

Here are some tricks of the trade to make your searches more effective (these work in most databases):

  • Use quotes to search for an exact phrase or name
  • Use an asterisk with word roots to expand beyond an exact word

 

Searching in Google? Try these tricks:

  • Search for a specific file type - filetype:pdf
  • Search within a particular website - site:nytimes.com
  • Look for related words with a ~

screenshot of google search bar

From: Hack College, Get More Out of Google