Writing research papers can be a difficult and tedious process. I am currently writing a literature review for one of my psychology classes. With this being a difficult and time consuming process, I thought I would share some things that I have learned about my own process of writing this paper. First, doing basic Google search of topics can be a good place to start when thinking of research topics or questions. It helps to get a sense of some of the information that already exists on the subject. Conducting basic Google searches also helps you to get excited about the topic at hand. I personally like to see if there are any TED Talks on YouTube that might relate to my topic to try to ease into finding articles about the research. In this search some valuable information to look for might be reputable newspaper articles or information from websites that are also reputable in the field of study. Depending on the assignment, information from a basic Google search should be further explored and proven to be accurate through academic sources, such as peer-reviewed articles or studies. Again, an internet search is mainly to explore basic information about the topic and to get ideas about how to proceed in the search for academic sources. Second, finding academic articles from educational databases sort of goes without saying. This is going to be critical to proving your thesis and citing what academic research or literature exists on the topic. It is important to use good search terms in the search boxes to narrow down your topic. For the type of research paper that I am doing, I prefer using the EBSCO database because they provide abstracts on the topics so you get a better understanding of what the article is before having to read the whole thing. This feature saves a lot of time because then I can decide if I am going to incorporate that article or not into my paper. Third, I find it really useful to take detailed notes on the articles that I am going to be using for the paper. I was first introduced to this idea of taking detailed notes by a professor who made this an assignment for the class. Typically what I do is read and highlight the article while creating almost an outline of the information that I learned from the article. I use bullet points to organize the information by introduction, hypothesis, method, results, and discussion. This method helps me to summarize, paraphrase or write direct quotes that might be useful for me later on. These outline notes usually are full sentences with correct citations so that way I am able to pull direct quotes from the text easier. I also can keep track of any information that I might be paraphrasing or summarizing. In creating these detailed notes I can also take the full sentences I already created in the notes and use them for my outline or paper. This makes writing the paper less daunting and I am also able to play around with the organization to see what information fits where. If creating these notes seems like a helpful idea, I recommend finding or trying different systems that work for you. Fourth, I personally like using citation generators. They are a good resource to keep all of the articles in one location and to have the citations ready for the final reference or works cited page. The Seattle University library has an article storage service that is free for students. It keeps all citations and links to the various articles that you use for the paper in one website location. The website is called Proquest RefWorks and if you attend Seattle University this service is a great tool for research. It is pretty simple to organize and attach academic sources from databases into different folders on RefWorks. With using this software you are able to upload pdf documents of the articles and it then creates a citation. Always, double check that the citations are correct once you place them in the reference page. I have been using RefWorks and it is a great way for me to keep all of my articles in one place and I am able to easily copy and paste my citations for the reference page. I highly recommend using this service when writing a research paper. Finally, creating an outline is helpful for organizing your thoughts and seeing how the paper flows. Creating a very detailed outline is helpful for determining where to place information from the articles. An outline is also helpful when writing the first draft because you can play around more with the flow while not becoming disorganized in changing paragraphs. For me, I have always had a love hate relationship with outlining. However, after trial and error I finally found systems that work for me when writing different papers. Creating an outline is a tool for you to be more organized in your writing, so find something that works for you. If you would like more information about outlining, there is another blog post called Outlining: Finding What Works For You that has some helpful tips about the different methods and formats of outlines. Hopefully this post provides some helpful information about the process of writing a research paper.
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January 2024
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