This checklist walks you through each step of the research process.
| 1. | Start Your Research Early | It will take time to go through all your sources, and will also take time for books to arrive if you have to order from other libraries. So don't wait until the last minute--start your research early enough to compensate for any delays. |
| 2. | Pick Your Topic | Find a topic that speaks to you. You'll be spending a number of hours researching, reading, and writing about this subject, so picking something you find interesting is essential. |
| 3. | Establish Your Research Question | Make sure your research question is: Clear: specific enough so an audience can understand it without additional explanation Focused: narrow enough to be answered within the length of your paper Concise: expressed in the fewest words possible Complex: cannot be answered with just "yes" or "no" Arguable: potential answers are open to debate, rather than just simple statements of fact |
| 4. | Identify Keywords | You'll conduct much of your research by using keywords, so it's important to select ones relevant to your question. You might find them by reviewing reference articles on your topic--try Wikipedia or encyclopedias and other books on the library's first floor reference section--and might also locate additional keywords in the library's catalog or databases once you've found your first source. Check out that source's subject headings or read its abstract to see what keywords jump out at you. |
| 5. | Determine Your Source Types | Books? Peer reviewed articles? Websites? The source type will dictate where you need to look to find your sources. |
| 6. | Search for Your Sources | 1. For books, use BearCat, the library's catalog. 2. For articles, use the library's databases. |
| 7. | Check Subject Headings for More Sources | Every book and article in the library's catalog and databases have subject headings attached to it. Clicking on one of those will take you to every other source also cataloged under that subject. This is a very easy method of locating other sources on your topic. Just finding that first book or article can lead you to the others you need. |
| 8. | Check Citations & Lit Reviews for More Sources | Every scholarly source, both books and articles, will include citations, a bibliography, or similar list of references. Also, many scholarly articles and books will include a literature review as a part of their introduction in which an author walks you through what others have written on the topic. These form handy lists of other sources on this same topic, so make use of them to find additional sources. |
| 9. | Track Your Research | It can be incredibly frustrating to find the perfect source, fail to record where you found it, and be unable to locate it again. The library's databases offer a number of tools to keep track of your sources, including saving article citations to your Google Drive or One Drive, emailing the citation to yourself, or providing a permalink you can copy to a Google doc. Use a method that makes sense to you, but be sure to do something to track your sources. |
| 10. | Evaluate Your Sources | It's always important to evaluate the information you are using for your research papers, and doubly so when you're using non-academic sources such as websites and blogs. Check up on the author's credentials to ensure that they're an expert you should trust; do a web search for the organization or author to see what others say about them; check how recently the article was published (particularly important for subjects that evolve quickly, like STEM or education). Keep in mind the motto "Garbage In, Garbage Out"--if you rely on poor quality information to write your paper, your paper will be of poor quality, too. For more information on evaluating sources, check out our Fake News guide. |
| 11. | Read & Understand Your Sources | This is the main event. Read through your sources, or at least the parts of them that are relevant to your research question, and take notes on the main ideas that will help you write your paper. It's even a good idea to record the page numbers where you find each piece of information so that you have it handy when you create your citations and don't need to hunt through the source for those page numbers. If you come across jargon or words you don't understand, look them up before you move on so you don't become confused later in the source. |
| 12. | Identify & Fill Any Gaps in Your Sources | Once you've gone through your initial sources, you may find that they don't answer every question you need to address on your topic. If that's the case, search for additional sources that will answer those questions and fill those gaps. |
