These guides are designed in particular for Masters, PhD students, postdoctoral, early career researchers and academic staff.
See the university website for an overview of research activities at City St George's. Research is organised by schools, academic departments and in smaller clusters called centres and institutes, there is further information on the Research centres and groups webpage.
It is best to access all of the library resources from the Library Services website and see also our Seven things about Library Services interactive presentation which introduces some of our services.
It is a good idea to set up Google Scholar to link directly to City St George's online subscriptions, see our guidance. You can also add browser extensions such as LibKey Nomad on your browser toolbar to assist with finding subscription and open access articles etc. for your research.
Library Search is a great place to start your research. You can quickly discover relevant information on any topic across the Library's collections.
Quantitative research gathers data in numerical form which can be put into categories, or in rank order, or measured in units of measurement. This type of data can be used to construct graphs and tables of raw data. Quantitative research is about asking people for their opinions in a structured way so that you can produce hard facts and statistics to guide you. To get reliable statistical results, it’s important to survey people in reasonably large numbers and to make sure they are a representative sample of your target audience.
Qualitative research generally deals with speech or language rather than numerical or statistical data. It is concerned with the meanings people attach to their experiences of the social world and how they make sense of that world. It therefore tries to interpret social phenomena (interactions, behaviours, etc.) in terms of the meanings people bring to them.
Main methods commonly used in qualitative research include observation, interviews and group discussion. Questionnaires or surveys can also be used to "interview" a large number of people. The researcher has to select which method would be more appropriate to answer the research question, or may use more than one method. The researcher in these different designs plays the role of observer, interviewer or group moderator.
The essential goal of mixed methods research is to tackle a given research question from any relevant angle, making use where appropriate of previous research and/or more than one type of investigative perspective.
Sometimes referred to as mixed methodology, multiple methodology or multi-methodology research, mixed methods research offers you the best of both worlds: the in-depth, contextualised, and natural but more time-consuming insights of qualitative research coupled with the more-efficient but less rich or compelling predictive power of quantitative research.
You might like to explore SAGE Research Methods Online which is an online research methods tool designed to help you create research projects and understand the methods behind them. It includes content to support your research, from basic definitions and practical guidance for using methods to detailed case studies and theoretical discussions and advice on writing up your research. It also contains a project planner and a Methods map which shows visualisations of research concepts.
SAGE Campus is a collection of over 35 self-paced courses covering critical skills and research methods that can be applied across all stages of academic study and research. Topic areas include: navigating information, data literacy, research skills, data science skills, and getting published. There are useful courses on choosing a research question, writing a research proposal and Research design in Social Data Science and how to write a journal article. You will need to register with your @city.ac.uk email to use SAGE Campus.
Library Services has a scheme called Read for Research which allows research students, postdoctoral early career researchers and academic staff doing research to recommend titles either for their own research area or generally useful research titles for purchase by the library. You can request books using the Read for Research webform on our website.
You can see some titles ordered by our research students and staff on our online Read for Research reading list.