Libraries   

Research Will Save Us provides an overview of social science research planning, design, organization, execution, and reporting. The course covers topic selection, literature review development, methodological selection, data collection and management, descriptive and inferential statistical techniques, and scholarly communication. The course offers students annotated reading lists, audio-visual instructional aids, skills-building activities, journaling prompts and worksheets, and the opportunity to engage in a research community. Our disciplinary focus is library and information science, but the course is open to all students regardless of educational or professional background.

Learning Objectives

1.  Articulate, explain, and justify a research topic or area that matters to you 
2.  Create organizational systems and marshal human support for your research
3.  Understand and plan for reliable, valid, and high-quality research
4.  Systematically search and retrieve existing research and information relevant to your topic
5.  Map, plan, write, and refine a scholarly literature review
6.  Develop clear, cogent, useful, and scientifically-rigorous hypotheses and/or research questions
7.  Explore, describe, and adopt social science research methodologies 
8.  Describe and follow human subjects research ethics rules and guidelines
9.  Discover or create research data collection instruments 
10.  Understand and perform descriptive statistical analysis
11.  Understand and perform inferential statistical analysis 
12.  Interpret and report your original research as findings, results, discussions, and/or conclusions
13.  Analyze a range of publishing genres and strategize your scholarly communications
14.  Navigate the publishing process, including submission, revision, technical edits, and publication sharing
15.  Meet other researchers and find connections in a research community

About the Creator

Sarah Ryan, MLS, JD, PhD, Esq., is an Associate Professor of Information Science and Director of the Law Librarianship Program at the University of North Texas. Dr. Ryan was a founding editorial board member of the international journal Energy Research & Social Science, a recent-past editorial board member of the Law Library Journal, and current co-editor of the Journal of Library Research Sharing (with Janelle Foster, UNT Libraries). Dr. Ryan has published in Communication, Gender Studies, Information Science, Law, and Public Affairs. She is author of Empirical Legal Research Services (2022) and co-editor of Dialogues Across Diasporas: Women Writers, Scholars, and Activists of Africana and Latina Descent in Conversation (2012), which included her interviews of women’s agronomy organization leaders in Rwanda. Dr. Ryan’s favorite class to teach is applied research methods because she gets to share her joy for archival research, semi-structured interviewing, surveying, participant observation, and more. 

Research Will Save Us is a IMLS-grant funded course as part of a collaboration among UNT Libraries, UNT College of Information, Department of Information Science, and four additional universities.