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saved by18 people, first byJoel Liu on 2007-08-03, last byAnne McKague on 2008-08-08

• Advice for Students: 10 Steps Toward Better Research
• A little while back, I wrote about ways for students to add a little extra “kick” to their research papers. Those strategies were meant for students who had already mastered the basics of performing research, not students just getting started doing research and writing papers. As with writing, though, research skills are rarely taught very clearly — professors assume students know or can figure out how to do good research, or at best turn their students over to a librarian for a tour of the library’s facilities and resources. Is it any wonder that so many university students rely on Wikipedia as the first and last stop in their research itinerary?
• Schedule!
• Write up a schedule with a series of milestones to accomplish by a specific date (e.g. find 10 sources by September 20, finish preliminary research by October 15)
• Start, don’t end, with Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great place to start your research
• get a good overview of the subject you’re writing about,
• Mine bibliographies. Once you’ve found a good, solid academic book or essay on your topic, you’re golden — at the end there will be a list of dozens or hundreds of sources for you to look up. You can usually skim through the bibliography and note down anything whose title sounds relevant to your research. Academic authors aren’t very creative with their titles, so it is usually pretty easy to tell what their work is about from just the title or subtitle. Go back through and see if you recognize any of the authors’ names — these too might be worth following up. once you start finding the work the first book referenced, do the same thing with their bibliographies — soon you’ll have a list of far more sources than you need (but you need them, because your library may not have all the books and journals referred to, and inter-library loan is so slow as to be useless for students who need to finish by the end of the semester).
• Mine bibliographies
• kim through the bibliography and note down anything whose title sounds relevant
• Have a research question in mind.
• keep focused by working towards an answer to your research question
• Deal with one piece at a time.
• Use a system. Start your research with an idea of how you plan to collect and organize your notes and data.
• one-subject notebook. At the top of a fresh page, I write the full bibliographic reference for a book or paper, then copy quotes and write notes — both tagged with the page numbers they came from — interspersed with thoughts and ideas that occur to me as I’m reading.
• make sure that every quote, fact, and thought is tied in some way to its source
• Know your resources. Spend some time getting to know what resources, both online and offline, your library to offer.
• get to know the research material you can access from home.
• Ask for help. Use the human resources available to you as well as the material resources.
• Most librarians will be happy to help you find relevant material
• Carry an idea book
• Keep a small notebook and a pen with you everywhere
• Bring it up to date.

• on 2007-08-06 Jutecht
  Lifehack.org has been my site today catching up on my own RSS reading. Here are two more great posting on Better Research for students...might be able to pick something from here for the start of your school year.
  
• on 2007-08-09 Annabay21
  Cool....most of the stuff will really help me to enhance my writing skills:)