This course guide is designed to be a resource for you as you move through the various stages of writing your thesis. While many of the sources you find on this guide are also available through the library's main website, here you will find a particular focus on the subjects of interest and skills required to complete your thesis. Learning how to do primary and secondary research, and then how to present that research, is as much a part of the thesis process as what you’re actually studying. You should therefore expect to spend time and energy learning new skills, as well as new information.
Just a few ways the library can support you:
Online guides which walk you through research strategies and APA style
Meet with a librarian for personalized support on how to find sources
Meet with a librarian to get an overall review of APA or for help in citing that particularly difficult source
Finding sources for you not held by Pacific Oaks Library
Yvonne N. Bui's How to Write a Master's Thesis is a step-by-step guidebook that demystifies a process that can often prove to be overwhelming and confusing to graduate students. The tone and format of this applied book is reader-friendly and includes practical suggestions that go beyond informing what "should" be done. It is chock full of detailed explanations, examples, and supplemental materials that have been used successfully in advising students in completing their master's theses.
The information world has undergone drastic changes since the publication of the 3rd edition of The Oxford Guide to Library Research in 2005, and Thomas Mann, a veteran reference librarian at the Library of Congress, has extensively revised his text to reflect those changes.
The style manual of choice for writers, editors, students, and educators in the social and behavioral sciences, this updated "Publication Manual" provides invaluable guidance on all aspects of the writing process, from the ethics of authorship to the word choice that best reduces bias.
This title offers readers essential guidance on creating figures that present their findings effectively.
Illustrates all the steps in preparing qualitative and quantitative literature reviews. Emphasizes topic selection, locating literature, and avoiding major pitfalls in evaluating and synthesizing literature. Shows students how to blend qualitative and quantitative approaches to preparing literature reviews without being overly mathematical.
Rules for Writers is a college writer’s companion that covers writing, grammar, research, and documentation in an extremely affordable and portable spiral-bound format. From the best-selling family of handbooks, Rules has consistently been the best value for college writers. Now it’s even more so. The Seventh Edition actually teaches students how to make better use of their handbook. With new material about how to integrate the handbook into lessons and class activities, Rules for Writers is an even more useful tool for instructors. Read the preface.
The eagerly anticipated Fourth Edition of the title that pioneered the comparison of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research design is here! For all three approaches, Creswell includes a preliminary consideration of philosophical assumptions, a review of the literature, an assessment of the use of theory in research approaches, and refl ections about the importance of writing and ethics in scholarly inquiry. He also presents the key elements of the research process, giving specifi c attention to each approach.
Online resources have given us access to more knowledge than ever before. We're buried in data, and defining what is and what is not genuine information becomes more of a challenge all the time. In this fifth edition of Research Strategies, author William Badke helps you make sense of all of the available information, shows you how to navigate and discern it, and details how to use it to your advantage to become a better researcher. Badke focuses on informational research and provides a host of tips and advice not only for conducting research, but also for everything from finding a topic to writing an outline to documenting resources and polishing the final draft.
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