The college research paper often starts in the library among stacks of books.
Writing a college research paper often requires considerable planning. One reason that students sometimes have difficulty with papers at the college level is that they do not do the proper research or know how to, for that matter. Conducting thorough research is essential to any good collegiate paper and becoming proficient at it requires some practice. Many students find research difficult because they simply do not know look for quality sources.
Instructions
1. Brainstorm and narrow down your topic. You need to hone your topic and make it as specific as possible when you write a paper at the college level. There is, however, a fine line between papers that are too broad or too narrow, so it is in your best interest to always double-check your topic with your professor before delving too deeply into your research. This will also give you a chance to ask him if he has any suggestions regarding source material that you may not be aware of.
2. Conduct a general search for books through your library's electronic card catalog. Most colleges have an electronic search function by which you can search for your research topic by subject and keyword. Enter as many keywords or ideas related to your topic as possible and write down or print the list of search results. If your library participates in an inter-library loan service with other schools, you may need to order the books using this service if they are not located in your own library.
3. Gather your books and sort through them, finding the ones that have the most recent publication date. More recent books will have newer bibliographies that you can use to hunt down recent publications in the field you are researching. Write down the titles of additional works listed in these bibliographies and try to locate them through your library or its loan service.
4. Scour the Internet for any potential academically credible resources. You have to be cautious when conducting Internet searches for college papers. The problem with many Internet sources is that they are simply not credible. You can, however, find credible research if you stick to websites associated with academic institutions or government sources. These websites will end with a ".edu" and a ".gov" suffix in the URL, respectively.
5. Search for recent articles on your topic by using electronic databases provided by your school. Colleges and libraries tend to have access to journal databases like EBSCO and JSTOR, which can provide you with direct links to articles published on your topic. Books tend to be three or more years behind the current state of research in most fields, but journal articles from peer-reviewed academic journals typically provide the most up-to-date research in most fields.
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