When is enough, enough?

A major portion of my discussion with my practicum supervisor on Monday revolved around determining when the research portion of the project is complete and the actual doing part can begin. In the past, I have only had to conduct research in a simulated setting to discuss features and benefits of a ProQuest product during my time working there OR as a student where time was of the essence. As a student I would generally gauge how many items were required by the length of the paper that was assigned. If it was a 10 page paper, generally 10 journal articles (each over 5 pages long) from peer-reviewed journals would suffice. Typically, I rely on a couple of articles for the majority of my quotes and support for my argument and supplement the rest of the paper with the other seemingly less relevant articles.

But what do you do when you have ample time to conduct research and no fixed deadline. How do you know you are done?

My guess is you are never really done. There will always be something new to read on any given topic. Some rock that remained unturned, some resources undiscovered! But then how does the researcher make this process manageable? Here is what I was able to ascertain upon discussing this issue with several librarians...
- you are done when you start to read the same types of things over and over again
- you are not learning anything new
- you set the parametres of time for yourself in order to define the research that you are conducting. For example, only documents between this and this date were used
in this paper. Typically you would define the date range as appropriate to the topic. If you were discussing distributed learning like we are, than the last four years of information is probably enough. In fact, I have already found this to be true as a lot of the older articles are speaking of obsolete technology.
- you give up? No, but at a certain point, I would guess that you would get sick of reading about the same thing
- you need to starting "doing"