Answer:
Reflection on Research Process
My Portfolio
My research process was one of trial and error. Having only a little experience doing research from high school, I often found myself navigating around to find the best way to approach things. Starting off my research I really didn’t know where to go. Although, we had learned about the several environmental studies databases that were available, I was unsure if human population growth would be covered in totality on one of those more environmental specific databases. However, I gave it try and looked through a few of the databases including Wildlife & Ecology Studies and Web of Science only to find articles that were very specific and overall not what I was looking for. Therefore my next step was to see if I could find a different database that would entail a more broad overview of human population growth and its aspects. Therefore, the next step I took was to look for a more general database that encompasses more than just environmental fields. This lead to me JSTOR where upon typing in human population growth I received over a 300,000 articles on population growth. In need of some dire trimming I sorted the articles by date most recent and to only show journals that were peer reviewed. From there my results were nearly cut in half and I began looking through the names and abstracts of the articles to find ones most relevant to the aspects of human population growth I was looking for. It wasn’t long before I found many articles on future population calculations, human population growth effects on species worldwide and world population capacity that fit perfectly with what I wanted to look into and research. The most profound thing I learned from my research is that when searching for the articles the problem will never be that you cant find any but rather that there is too many to even look through. This calls for the need to do excessive narrowing by what exactly you are looking for as well as being as specific as you can. I feel I was fairly lucky that most of the articles I found didn’t take excessive searching to find but the potential for a difficult situation definitely stands. I also learned the the best sources are peer reviewed journals. This is for many reasons including legitimacy but overall they seem to have more precise information that is useful for a research project.
