Research Strategies

The best and worst thing about writing a research paper is the amount of information available to students today. Best thing: because it's all at your fingertips. Worst things: sorting through it, and how to tell if what you find is worth using. Some ways to target your search:

Organize your search terms. Before you begin your research, make a list of 3-5 specific terms related to your topic. This will help you find specific information, plus allow you some flexibility if your first couple of tries don't turn up what you'd hoped.

Infotrac. This is a collection of databases that collates and organizes articles from newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. Search in the "General Reference Center" for articles from nationally recognized publications (Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone), or specific databases dealing with health or biographies for more specific search criteria.

EBSCO. Similar to Infotrac, this online database offers 4000 magazines and journals ­worth of information. In order to access this site, you must have a library card from Montserrat or the Beverly public library.

Google is great. This search engine (www.google.com) will pull hundreds—even thousands of listings on a topic. Click on the tabs at the top to search for images, if you're writing a paper for an Art History class.

Google isn't that great. Hundreds of listings mean lots of pages to search through. Be as specific as possible with your search criteria, and that will both limit the amount of info you receive as well as bring you to specifically what you're looking for.

Avoid the tilde (~). If you pull up a page, and see a ~ in the URL, 99.9% of the time it's a personal web page. Check out the person's qualifications and see if he or she REALLY knows what they're talking about before using this as a source. (note: colleges and universities sometimes give professors online space to post their own sites. Just because someone works in Northwestern's engineering department doesn't mean they're an expert on Picasso).

Old-fashioned books. Still a great source of information, and the Montserrat library can get materials sent here from other libraries—just ask. Takes about a week, though, so plan accordingly!

Cite your sources. No matter where your material comes from, you must document your sources appropriately. See the reverse of this sheet for how to avoid plagiarism.