[MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: You can expect to use many sources of information during the research process. But essentially, your research will fall into one of two categories: primary and secondary. Let's take a look at secondary research at work. 

Secondary research involves consulting existing print and online sources. When you conduct secondary research, you work with materials that someone else, an expert in the field, a government agency, even a competitor, has published, posted, or distributed. Secondary research requires that you consult sources that have already been available as opposed to interacting directly with people, places, and things via direct observation. Secondary research involves gathering documents and reading, summarizing, and incorporating them into your report. 

As part of your workplace research, you can expect to use one or more of the following types of libraries: corporate libraries, public and academic libraries, and e-libraries. Databases are among the most helpful resources for doing research. These online indexes allow you to search for and retrieve a wealth of magazine, journal, and newspaper articles, as well as reviews of books, films, art, music, and so on categorized and classified by various categories. These databases can be located through a library's online catalog or through databases in a link in an e-library. 

In addition to finding articles in databases, reference works, available in print or online, are useful for workplace research. These include encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, and atlases, as well as government documents, industry dictionaries, handbooks and manuals, and statistics. Statistical reference works are available in numerical data and give a wide range of business-related subjects like employment, housing, immigration, population, pollution, technology, and oversea markets, among others. 

When you begin your search, start by using a search engine. A search engine scans web pages to find keywords most relevant to your research. It then indexes the information it finds to create a frequently updated database of results. The search engine ranks the results of your search using a computer algorithm that takes into account the popularity of websites, their contents, where the keywords appear on the page, and other sites that help link to the page, presenting you with the most relevant matches for your keywords. 

To use search engines effectively you need to know how to conduct a keyword search. As you've seen, when you enter a keyword into a search engine, it goes through its index websites and presents you with those that feature your keyword in the title, heading, mega tags, or text of the page. Follow these guidelines for successful keyword searches: be specific, modify your keywords, use boolean connectors, use delineators, and use shortcuts. 

The criteria used to evaluate websites are similar to those you use to assess print documents. Just as not everything you read in print is accurate and unbiased, not everything on the internet will be correct, up-to-date, objective, and useful. Secondary research allows you to gather information to support recommendations and make decisions. 

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