Over the course of the first half term we looked at research methodology, referencing, citing, search engine and search operators and the different types of research methods and techniques. All to get us ready for our assignments over the UAL course.

We were told that for all our assignments this year any citation or references in our work would need to be in the BU Harvard format. This uses the author date format.

When we looked at research methodology I found a quote that summed it up very well and I decided to reference it to practice my referencing:

“A research methodology describes the techniques and procedures used to identify and analyse information regarding a specific research topic.” (Sreekumar, 2024)

Sreekumar, D. (2024) What is research methodology? definition, types, and examples: Paperpal, Paperpal Blog. Available at: https://paperpal.com/blog/academic-writing-guides/what-is-research-methodology (Accessed: 07 October 2024).

We were taught about research methods that we were told to make a poster about to reinforce our learning.

We looked at the different types of research that we could use within our work including: Surveys, Interviews, Case studies, Focus groups and Content analysis.

We looked at what different search engines offer us, like google scholar where you can search through papers. This is an important one as scholarly papers are review and approved before they are published making them more reliable.

We also looked at search engine operators, these can be used to look for more specific information like between certain dates, searching a specific website or searching a specific word. A list of search engine operators used by Google can be found here Search Engine Operators.