By now, you probably have many ideas and some sense of direction. The next part is probably one of my favorites: gathering research. If you do not take any other advice, take this: stick to the topic. While doing your research, you are going to find so many articles and read so much information you may want to keep it all. Unfortunately, you cannot. I would not start discarding your research at this point, however. It is at this stage I highly recommend starting a bibliography. I know the topic here is research, but I discovered after writing probably hundreds of papers and essays that putting together a bibliography as the resources are found, will seriously save hours of time later on when its time to do the references section. The reason for this is that all your references will already be formatted correctly and in alphabetical order; it will simply be a matter of copying and pasting later.
Now, back to my advice about sticking to the topic. When I say this, it does not mean do not go back and scrap part of your paper because you discovered the idea you are writing about is boring, unimportant, or that you do not have enough information to support it. It means you can not write about everything. Depending upon the purpose and length of your paper, you are probably going to have only a handful of ideas. Stick with those ideas and limit your research to those ideas. If your assignment is to write a paper about bipolar disorder amongst teenage girls, researching the affects of parenting styles on adolescent boys is not going to cut it. It may be interesting and may contain a blurb about your topic, but it has nothing to do with your topic. Look at your outline. Focus your reasearch on the contents of your outline. After all, it is the ideas on your outline you need to support.
One other thing, and this is very important. Use quality resources. The following is a list of some examples of APA acceptable resources:
- Peer reviewed journals
- Interviews you conduct yourself
- Government websites (.gov)
- Educational institution websites (.edu)
- Organizational websites (.org)
- Original transcripts
- Books but ONLY if they are non-fictional original works. For example, I wrote a paper about veterans and used a book about someone’s personal experience in Iraq.
Bottom line: use as much PRIMARY research as possible.
By now you should know that encyclopedias and dictionaries are not acceptable sources: Neither are magazines or newspapers. Do not discard them, though, because they all contain something very valuable; they include resources to journals, websites, books, names of doctors, names of people, etc. They are what I call leads. I often start out reading a Wikipedia page to familiarize myself with a subject or something I do not understand. At the end of Wikipedia pages there are usually references listed. I cannot tell you how many times I have found some of those references invaluable to my papers!
To keep things organized, I number my resources and write down the date I located them along with the website address or DOI number. I put my articles together according to subject matter and keep them in a manila folder. Of course it is important to stay organized; do what works best for you.
For more information, go to “The Library” and click on the video link titled “Why Peer Reviewed Academic Journal Articles Not Magazines?”