Starting the Research Process

My research process involves reading through many news articles. Since my paper is all about American media in the Chinese market, it has fairly easy to find information on this topic from online news sources. Also, since this topic is quite current, I have been able to find many articles with Kairosis! This has been useful because if I was only finding older information about this issue, my paper wouldn’t have any relevance. One thing that has been a bit difficult is my search for peer reviews.  Since the Chinese SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and Television) isn’t willing to release information pertaining to their guidelines, it has been difficult to really understand their system of censorship.  From what I have already been able to tell in the little research that I’ve done, the best way to really understand what kind of content they are censoring is to just look at a list of banned films and to look for patterns.

The way that I have conducted my research thus far has been mostly through “Google News” and the “Opposing Viewpoints in Context (GALE)” through the HBLL Research Starter Guide.  Both have been very useful, but I actually found that the best source material was coming from the HBLL Search Engine.  They seem to pull from a variety of quality sources and eliminate the bad ones (which come in on Google Search). Also, as I have learned to master the art of using “keywords” I have been able to get sources which are super relevant to my topic.

One thing that I could I could improve upon as I move forward with this paper is sorting through and organizing all of the information that I am finding through my research. As we discussed in class, it is important when researching to have some way of keeping track where all of your information is coming from. Whether this be by creating a Google Document to store keep track of which info is coming from which sources or by creating a table in a Windows application like Word or Excel to keep this organized.  I also want to make sure, as a complete my research process and begin writing the actual paper, that I am not plagiarizing in any way.  I want to begin to separate my own ideas from the ideas found in my sources. I need to start now to implement these techniques so that it will save me some time in the future.