COMM 4600 Communication and Emotion

Since you are new to CommStudies, it may be hard to think up a reasonable research topic.  Here a few suggestions to help you choose. 

Consult a few volumes of Communications Yearbook or consider your concentration area and find a journal that is devoted to that topic of Communication or Journalism.  Examples include:  Journal of Public Relations Research or Argumentation and Advocacy or find a journal (or book) that deals with your general idea of what you want to investigate and see how it gets chunked down.  You might look in the Journal of Family Communication to get ideas if you know you are interested in communications in families.  Handbooks are also a good choice here, so you might consult, The Handbook of Family Communication to get ideas.  If you already have a topic, continuing reading on this page.

Let's say I want to find journal articles about how men and women represent themselves when using online dating sites.  Selection of search terms drives the results you will get from a research database.  In all three boxes above, I've put synomyms together using the connector OR.  I've ANDED together terms that I want in the search but represent different concepts.  You will notice I put the asterisk after DECEPT* which will give me both deception or deceptive.  Decept* is also a good example of a scholarly word.   Scholars tend to use words like that deception for lying or gender for sex. I could have also used the word dishonest*, but you get the idea.  You can find those terms by running a search with your terms first and then looking for other ways to represent the concept with these specialized terms and OR them to synonyms, but AND them if they represent another concept. 

Notice I'm NOT using the word communication.  The whole database is devoted to communication topics, you don't need to use it. But if you drift outside of a CommStudies database, you might throw the concept of communicat* (or some variation related to a comm topic) back into your search. 

If you are ready, click on the ARTICLES tab to get started.

When you get search results back, scan the titles to see what "looks useful."  This can take a while at the very beginning but will speed up as you move along.  So with our search above, I get:

This one looks very promising.  But with the same search I also get this one: 

Which is not so useful.  Scan the titles of articles to see if they are on topic. Skip over ones that are obviously not going to help. 

Once you find a good title, click on it!  You'll open up a record for the article.  Which will look like this:

READ THE ABSTRACT!  It is a summary of the article and it will save you time.  If the abstract isn't luring you in, don't bother.  Go on to the next article or try your search again.