Effective Research

Effective Research Methods:
1) Make sure you have a specific topic. Turn your topic into a question to form an internet search.
If your search doesn’t produce anything, expand your topic and make it more general or change the question. Don’t limit yourself to just scholarly articles and news sources – use blogs (those by organizations and those which are personal blogs), youtube, facebook pages, etc.
2) Read the articles and websites and take notes. Write down quotations, summaries, things that you can use in your piece, but also write down web addresses and authors. You may need to come back, and you will need to acknowledge sources for your project.
3) Evaluate what you read. Don’t accept everything at face values. Writers have bias and not every thing on the internet is true. Think about the web source. If it has an dot -edu (.edu) it is from a university and probably can be trusted. A dot- com (.com) is selling something. Just don’t quote something written as satire as fact, and if it looks wrong, do further research.
4) Make sure you are using a good search engine and if you want to use scholarly research try a library database or Google Scholar. If you need help come see Martie or Kent.