Advising Service

Informationists offer expert guidance, insights and feedback in the following areas:

Preliminary topic investigation

This service is especially useful before a research topic is selected.

Informationists will provide guidance on what a preliminary topic investigation entails, and recommendations to identify and map concepts utilizing published literature and available data.

Literature reviews

This service is especially useful after you have finalized your research topic, problem statement and hypothesis.

Informationists will guide you through the published literature review methodologies and standards. In addition, Informationists can recommend strategies to conduct appropriate literature searches, such as database recommendations, available tutorials, and ways to locate terminology.

Search syntax

This service is especially useful when you need constructive feedback or technical advice about your search strategy.

Informationists can provide objective feedback on your search syntax to help optimize your strategy based on your stated goals. If your search is capturing too many, too few, or irrelevant results, Informationists can suggest strategies to increase specificity of results without compromising sensitivity.

Making sense of search results

This service is especially useful at various stages of the research process when you are searching in bibliographic databases and need to make sense of large sets of search results. It is also useful if you are embarking on a longitudinal study and need to plan to work with search results over an extended period of time.

Seeking specialized information

Informationists provide suggestions when you need to know how, and where, to locate a specific type of information; such as data sets, psychometric tests, and psychological or behavioral questionnaires, measurement scales and tools.

What you can expect

To provide advice, Informationists may ask you to provide additional information. Concluding your interaction, you will receive a summary of recommendations with relevant resources via email.

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