Research is a process that takes time. This page will give students research tips and tricks to make their research more effective and efficient.
Students will learn:
Research is a process that takes time. Expect to spend 50% of your time researching and 50% writing.
The research process includes the following steps:
Now that we know all of the steps involved in writing a paper, we can plan out a schedule consisting of milestones to be accomplished by pre-determined dates.
Example:
Before you begin researching, plan how you will collect and organize your notes.
Before you start researching, you need to know what resources are available to you.
The library contains a plethora of resources, including databases.
Getting Started with Library Databases
The Internet also contains many resources you can access, often for free. There are search engines (e.g., Google, Duck Duck Go), academic search engines (e.g., Google Scholar), digital repositories, Wikis, social media, videos, and more.
Be attentive to when a source was published.
A great starting place for research is to discover who the leaders are within your field of research.
Once you have found the names, and perhaps major works, of a few leaders, you can:
Once you have found a great source, whether it is a book or article, skim through the references/bibliography and make note of all the titles that interest you or may be relevant to your research. This is also a great time to see what authors have contributed research to the subject.
Search for either the title, title and author, or full citation of each source you have made note of in your library's database.
If the library has the article, perfect!
If not, well, not all is lost. You have a few options at your disposal:
To find an author's body of work, you can search the author's name:
Research can be long and tedious. Here are some tried-and-true tips to help you find sources more efficiently:
You may have already come up with a research question, or at least a topic, to research. It is fairly likely that your research question or topic is multifaceted or complex. Fear not - we will provide you with a few tips to get you started with your research.