Posted: January 15th, 2016

What strategies did you use to identify and locate the seminal works related to your inquiry topic? Which strategy seemed to work best? Why?

Learning to uncover, analyze, and reflect upon the influence of the seminal works in your field is an essential part of becoming a scholar-practitioner, and it involves developing both process skills and content knowledge. Consider the following:

• What strategies did you use to identify and locate the seminal works related to your inquiry topic? Which strategy seemed to work best? Why?
• How confident are you that you have uncovered the key works that have been influential in shaping the pursuit of knowledge on this topic? Given that the seminal work on your topic may have been conducted more than 20 years ago, how relevant do you think this work may be today?
• Based on your reading of some of the seminal works, what methodological or philosophic paradigms seem to have been guiding this early work?
• How have the methodological approaches or paradigms used in this early research and underlying philosophic orientations influenced subsequent research and theory in your field?