Starting Your Research

Step One: Know your topic.

Find the focus of your paper. What's your essential question and what's your thesis? Consider your paper's Cornerstones and how that can help you find information. Your thesis is there to help guide your paper; use that sentence for all your work. If it doesn't fit in your thesis, don't worry about it and move on!

Step Two: Be prepared and organized.

You're going to have a ton of stuff to look at: books, websites, databases, videos. So much! So start knowing that you have to be organized. Something like Noodletools will provide you with a space to keep track of all your URLs, notes, and more. There are other ways, of course. Find the organization that works for you.

Remember to keep track of all the sources you look at. A serious paper will contain not only a Works Cited (sources that are used directly in your paper) but also a Works Consulted (all the sources you looked at, whether you used them in your paper or not). So keep track of them as you go!

Step Three: Think about the resources that you need.

Websites, databases, books, periodicals, academic journals, videos, interviews--all of these and more can help you in your research. But which will be the most helpful?

If you don't know much about your topic, start broad, like an encyclopedia entry. Sure, use Wikipedia. It's not a great resource, but it's a good place to start. Plus you can always use the bibliography at the bottom of the entry. In fact, most good resources will provide links to where they get their information--use these links to your advantage!

From the basic, move up. Eventually, you may find yourself at an academic journal; these are pretty intense at times, but they're direct studies and research. Most periodicals use these, distil and simplify them. The academic journal is a great resource from the experts. EBSCO Discovery is a great place to find a good academic journal. And remember, like a book, you don't need to read the whole thing. Start with the introduction, jump to the conclusion, and see if the rest is worth reading.

All about the Different Types of Periodicals

Periodical: Any sort of published material that is published on some sort of schedule (daily, monthly, weekly, yearly). Typically, these publications won't be as big as a book or be hardbound. Examples include newspapers, magazines, journals.

Newspapers: I bet you know what these are. They're usually large, are published daily, and have a wide range of immediate and recent news and information. Examples: The Concord Monitor, The Union Leader, The Bow Times, The Wall Street Journal.

Magazines: In the Library World, these are often called "popular magazines" because they are the flashy magazines you see on the shelves as you check out at the grocery store. They're usually always glossy and have flashy covers and color pictures and grab-ya titles. Examples: Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, Cosmopolitan, Outdoor Photographer, Car and Driver, Seventeen.

Journals: Often called "Academic Journals" or "Scholarly Journals," these too are published like magazines, though not all of them are as glossy and shiny as your typical magazine. Even though Outdoor Photographer has a specific audience, journals have even narrower audiences. They're for experts in a certain field. Let's say you're a potato farmer, and you want to keep up on the latest and greatest information on potatoes. You'd want to subscribe to The American Journal of Potato Research. Yup. It's a thing. Maybe you need Flavor and Fragrance Journal because you work with flavors and fragrances. How about Waste Management for, you know, people that work in that line. They've got to stay on top of contemporary research so they don't end up neck deep in... Um... Well, now you know about academic journals!

Also, you'll notice that academic journal focus mostly on new research. It's the most up-to-date with what's going in a field. So you'll see a lot of studies. A lot of data. Many of the "popular magazines" will essentially be condensations and summations of one or several research studies found in academic journals. When you see something in a newspaper or magazine that says, "According to studies..." you now know where these journalists got their information. And you can go straight to the original source--the academic journal. That's a much better resource!