Write An Essay With Me - #3 Research

Learning how to research for an assignment is a key skill and starting the research for any assignment is probably the hardest thing that you're going to be doing, or at least for me it was. Over the years I developed these methods for researching any topic that cut down the time I was spending on this down so that I had more time for writing (and relaxing!).

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Where to start?

When you're researching anything it can be hard to know where to start, and this certainly took up most of my time when I was first trying to write essays. I'm going to be going into more detail about each of these further along in the post, but to start off with here are some places to look and questions to be asking:

• Have you got any sources listed in your class notes?

• Did your lecturer ever mention any books or articles for that topic?

• Google is always your friend - eg. "Humanity in Frankenstein criticism"

• Next look at Google Scholar

• Jstor is always good to look at

• Wikipedia! Don't just copy and paste from the articles, but they do have sources and links that you can use

Wikipedia

So you've been told by teachers countless times to never use Wikipedia as a source, and this isn't me saying to go against that rule. However, it's one of the best places to start for researching any topic because you have a wealth of information for free (that you will need to fact check and cross reference) but more importantly you have a list of sources.

This is the strength of Wikipedia and one of the reasons I would recommend any and every student to start there. Take the article on JSTOR for example, if you scroll down to near the bottom of the page you see the "References" heading and a list of 43 sources.

You have citations in the text of the Wikipedia article (the little numbers in blue in square brackets) which will bring you to the number of the citation in the references list. You can narrow down which sources to use this way.

Almost every essay I did at university started out this way. I would have my rough plan in mind so I didn't just spend hours looking at any sources that I found interesting. I'd spend about half an hour looking at the sources from Wikipedia and evaluating if they would be useful. Then it would be a case of either going to the library or using ....

Jstor

This is a site I spent hours looking through even after I finished my degree because there's so much information on here that it would be silly to not try to read some of it.

If you've not heard of it before, JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books and other great primary sources. It was founded in 1995, originally for digitized back issues of academic journals but it's grown since then and there are now more than 8,000 institutions in more than 160 countries that have access to it.

How do you access JSTOR?

Through your academic institution, so your college, sixth form or university. You simply select which institution you're a part of and use your log in for that to access JSTOR articles and journals.

Now there are some limitations and not everything will be available through your institution depending on what sort of access to JSTOR they have. This is why I'll be recommending other websites and avenues to go down for research. But I would highly recommend starting with JSTOR after you've been through Wikipedia.

You can sometimes read the articles on the site itself but some are download only and you have access for a limited amount of time. When using JSTOR articles always make a note of the citation you're going to be using for your quotes and other proof.

Include:

• Author of Journal/ Collection

• Author of Article / Chapter

• Date of Publication

• Journal Name

• Journal / Volume Number

• Article / Chapter Name

• Date of Access

• URL

This will mean you can not only find it again but in the worst case scenario you still have a record of where your information came from. If it was taken offline or changed in some way you have your date of access to back you up.

Google and Google scholar

This is something I found out about later but became so useful to me.

Go to https://scholar.google.com/ to and then simply type in the subject you're looking for articles about.

This will bring up a whole host of articles and criticism that you can then use for your assignment. Make sure you note down the citation, same as JSTOR.

Some of these will be paid articles, but there should be enough that you can find for free by using Google Scholar. I didn't learn about this trick until I was in my final year of my undergraduate degree but I would recommend it as one of the first few places you check for criticism.

Now To Write The Essay...

I hope you found these tips and resources for doing the research on your essays useful! Tune in next week where I start talking about the actual writing of the essay.

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Hey! Tara here and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.