Find academic sources for your reflective journal and report
1. What do you need to do?
This guide will assist you with finding relevant theories within academic sources for your reflective communication journal and report.
Tip: For full assessment details read the assessment details in your course website and course outline
2. What is reflective writing?
Reflective writing is not just describing an experience, it is about exploring your reactions, thoughts and questions to the experience. The below resources will help you understand more about reflective writing:
3. Plan your search
Before you start searching for academic sources it is a good idea to plan your approach.
For example, if for your reflective journal you want to explore the causes of miscommunication within the workplace start by:
- Thinking about what your key concepts are.
- Then brainstorm other synonyms or alternative concepts you could use in your searches.
Consider word plurals, different word endings, common acronyms or different word spellings. This is important as not everyone refers to ideas in the same way.
A mind map or table can be a good strategy for organising ideas:
| Key concepts | Miscommunication | Workplace |
| Alternative concepts |
miscommunicating misunderstanding communication barriers communication distortion |
work organization organisation job |
As you start searching you can add to the table or mind map.
Do the same for your reflective report. Remember for this assessment you will need to choose:
- An organisation or group which you belong to. If you do not have work experience consider the below options:
| Work place | University group | Sporting Club |
| Social group | Volunteer group | Religious group |
- A communication exchange
| Social Media | YouTube video | Current affairs |
| TV show segment | Novel | Other creative work |
For more help read or watch:
4. Where to search
As well as referring to your readings for topics for both assessments you will also need to find academic sources to support your analysis. Academic sources are sometimes referred to as scholarly or peer reviewed sources.
We recommend the following places for searching:
| Getting Started | Key databases |
| Library Collection Help | Business Source Ultimate |
| Google Scholar |
5. How to search
The Library Collection can be a useful starting point in locating academic references. The library collection contains resources such as print and electronic books, DVDs, journals and theses, together with journal and newspaper articles from numerous databases.
To do a search, try using
- double quotes for phrases
- truncation* to find the plural and other forms of a word
- connect using AND, OR and NOT
At the results list you can:
- Limit to articles from Peer Reviewed publications
- Limit by Date eg 2010 to 2020
- See the full text for many items by selecting the title, then look for the Online link
More help:
-
Library Collection HelpSee Library Collection Help for additional searching tips
Business Source Ultimate provides information covering all areas of business including accounting and finance; banking; finance and insurance; construction; computer science; economics and more.
How to search Business Source Ultimate:
- Type each of your different concepts into a search field. The connector AND will find concepts in your search results.
- You can broaden your search by adding synonyms or alternative concepts using the connector OR.
On the results page, you can limit your search by date range and to Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals Using the menu on the left-hand side.
Google Scholar searches only within academic or scholarly sites, rather than over the whole internet like a regular Google Search.
Make sure you access Google Scholar from the library website. You will be able to link directly to articles that the Library has access to by clicking on the Full-text at UniSA link.
Watch the video: Why use Google Scholar? to find out more.
6. Putting it all together
Once you have all your information it is time to put everything together, the below resources from Study Help will help you:
-
Referencing Roadmap (Harvard)For referencing help, including FAQs and the referencing forum for more complex referencing queries
