Undertaking a research project such as a dissertation or capstone can be one of the most rewarding aspects of a student’s degree programme. It provides them with the opportunity to apply what they have learned in their course to explore a topic of personal interest. It also enables them to develop independent research skills, a sought after competence among many employers. However, for many students, the experience can also feel daunting and at times, overwhelming.

Join Gary Thomas, author of ‘How to Do Your Literature Review’ as he discusses questions which arose in his recent webinar, ‘What is a Literature Review in the Age of AI?’. A link to the webinar recording can be found at the end of this blog post.

Guest post from Christopher Lamont and Mieczyslaw P Boduszynski , authors of Research Methods in Politics and International Relations, on the importance of methodology in PIR research.

The new AI tools for conducting a literature review provide a remarkable resource both for professional researchers and students. They can rapidly scan millions of papers, provide digests and summaries in seconds, link cognate literature, and even draw maps of the literature showing how one piece relates to another.

Suggestions and resources to help you collect data with online interviews.

Researchers can easily access user-generated public videos. See this multidisciplinary collection of open access articles about quantitative and qualitative approaches to collecting and analyzing videos from YouTube or TikTok.

Let’s use this open-access research case to think through the possibilities and potential problems involved with studying blog posts and online discussions.

From the moment social media platforms began to welcome user-generated content, researchers have looked for ways to study it. Learn more with open-access articles about social media platforms.

Do you think about research questions as an insider, outsider, or somewhere in between? Why is positionality important in online research?

Doctoral student Sandra Flores discusses her research in Puerto Rico, and what she learned from the experience.

Learn about action and participatory research methods, and ways to design and carry out research with, not on, communities.

Is it too hard to address problems in our complex world with one type of data? Mixed methods might be the answer. Find explanations and open-access resources in this post.

The process for researching literature on research methods is somewhat different from the process used for researching literature about the topic, problem, or questions. What should we keep in mind when selecting methods literature?

How do researchers make design decisions about the methodology and methods?

Learn about connecting the unit of analysis with the qualitative methodology.

Read this collection of multidisciplinary articles to explore epistemological questions in Indigenous research.

Find suggestions for navigating the problem formulation stage that precedes research design in social science research.

This post includes tips about writing qualitative proposals excerpted from Research Design by Creswell and Creswell.

Find a collection of open-access articles about ways to apply critical and creative thinking in your research.

What does it mean to be central to your research? In this post we are defining a method that asks researchers to be at the center of their studies, and looking for explanations and examples of autobiography.