Some Tips for Remaining Factual in Academic Research

Off the heels of an earlier post on how to find academic articles outside of academia, imagine yourself writing a research paper on a very contemporary but niche topic. For example, let’s say you’re a psychotherapy graduate student in a counselling research class. You’ve been tasked with writing a research paper on providing culturally specific therapy towards a cluster of racialized LGBTQIA+ people from a specific country, who have recently migrated to Canada as immigrants.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash — Research: a rather laborious process.

The problem is that most of the vetted research studies you find are a bit limited:

• The study was over 10 years old and uses slightly outdated vernacular.
• The study addresses your niche immigrant group but is from another country…that does things in the exact opposite way to Canada.
• The study addresses a specific therapy for LGBTQIA+ youth only.
• The study addresses multiple clusters of immigrants as if they were one collective unit.
• The study was not a clinical trial, but a meta-analysis.

Understandably, you’d be frustrated. Considering world events, you’d think there would be more resources on said topic, and there is. It’s likely that academic researchers are doing the…