BEST Online Researching Tips & Strategies for Academic Writing

hi guys my name is chelsea seabird welcome to the smart student today i want to talk about the other side of academic writing which is researching because believe it or not but how strategic you are in your research directly translates into how successful you are in your writing you see researching is what i like to call an open-ended task it's an open-ended task because it doesn't necessarily come with any guidelines that tells you how to research and more importantly how much research is enough therefore i find it's one of the biggest pitfalls in time traps that students fall into when they don't have a plan and that's where i come in today because i want to start by talking about some of the preliminary research you should always do before choosing a topic i'm then going to get into what i like to call smart researching tips that's gonna help you maximize your efforts i'm gonna talk about some of my favorite think outside the box researching strategies and then lastly i'm gonna give you my best tips for when you're researching a topic that's hard to understand now this is one of those videos where the tips build on each other so make sure you stick with me until the end and i promise you i'll do my best to make sure you have a good time but in the meantime let's go ahead and get started okay so let's start with preliminary research and preliminary research is simply the little bit of research you do at the beginning such as vetting your topic before you decide on it and i'm going to start by saying that i'm a little unconventional when it comes to the advice that i give to students on choosing your topic you see much of the advice there is out there right now is centered around choosing a topic that's interesting to you now i'll say for the record i think that's important to a very small extent because in my i'm not an expert i've just written a million college papers before opinion i suggest choosing your topic based off two factors one the amount of information there is available to you on that topic and two how closely it aligns with your project rubric the reason being is simple it's that i find it's far more effective to write about a topic that i have no interest level in but there's a lot of information available about it and it's a slam dunk for my assignment one of the biggest most common traps that i've worked with students through is that they have a paper to write they have a lot of research to do and so they choose a topic that's really really interesting to them but there's just not a lot of information available to them about that topic the problem is is that oftentimes when you choose a topic that's interesting to you you already have a lot of pre-learned bias knowledge to work through and not only that but usually it's a super niche topic because you know a lot about it already in other words it ends up being too specific for example let's say that i have to write a psychology paper about solutions to help alleviate depression symptoms cool i would be personally interested in writing a paper about pembroke welsh corgis as emotional support animals for people who struggle with depression why well i adore corgis i have a corgi and i absolutely love that dog breed so that is a super interesting topic for me to write about the problem is is that i would already have that pre-learned bias knowledge coming into this topic which might cause me to overlook details that aren't in my favor also notice how niche down that topic is i would probably be much better off writing about dogs in general as emotional support animals for people who struggle with depression but now let's say that i did want to write about a specific dog breed because i want to research what the best dog breed is for people who struggle with depression that's fine in this case that's where that preliminary research comes in handy because what i recommend is letting google choose your topic for you if i had to go online and google what the best dog breed is for emotional support animals i'm gonna wager that google's gonna tell me either a lab or maybe a golden retriever if that's the case whichever one has the most information available on it i'm gonna choose that topic because it's just gonna make my life a lot easier now i can already hear a few of you shuffling in your seat thinking well if i choose a topic that's not interesting to me that's going to be boring and that's going to make my assignment harder we're talking about academic writing here if you're looking for enjoyment find enjoyment by completing your assignments quickly and with ease just trust me on that one but let's go ahead and move on to my next tip which is i recommend writing your paper as you research so after coaching loads of students i found that it doesn't always occur to students that the writing process and the researching process are two things that are best done simultaneously so for example let's say this is my paper right here i already have the apa formatting set up i've created a good strong effective outline for it which by the way if you need help with outlining be sure to check out this video right here but anyways this is my paper it's now time to research and write the way i recommend doing this is to research based off your section headings so start with section one research for section one write section one and then move on to section two repeat so on and so forth the reason being is that when you research more than one section at a time or heaven forbid you do the research for your entire paper first this makes you less effective when you're writing because there is so much information in your mind that you have to digest and comprehend in order to translate it down onto your paper for example i want you to take note on how you write a literature review now a literature review is an assignment that is fully based off of research but before you write the actual literature review you usually create an annotated bibliography in an annotated bibliography is based on writing summaries about your sources as you research them why so you don't forget what was in them later on this is the same logic you should take with you when you write for a paper by the way let me know if you'd like a full video on how you would do the writing process and the researching process together but let's go ahead and move on to the next tip this is where we're going to get into those smart researching tips which you can apply to anything you research which is why i'm putting it here but the leading question of this section is should you read your articles from front to back and the answer is no heck no never actually because you want to be effective with your research and reading a full document all the way through is simply not effective so in order to correct this you need to do the opposite which is to be very targeted about what you spend your precious brain power reading so think of it like this your brain power is a currency like a bunch of dollar bills and every time you go read something it costs you some of those dollars so when you go read a lot of information that's not actually useful to you you might as well be throwing fistfuls of dollar bills in the trash so how can you be targeted because you don't like throwing away those precious brain powered dollar bills am i right well my first tip is that you should pay very close attention to the titles of your article and what i mean by this is that you should pay attention to all of the keywords in the article title because that's going to be your first window into what the article is about so if you find any keywords that negate what you're looking for don't waste your time reading that article and by negate i don't mean disagree with your research topic it's very important to have diversified research by negate i mean it doesn't fit your topic let me show you what i mean okay so let's say the topic for my research paper is the effect social media has on adolescent girls great from this topic there are a few keywords that i want to pay attention to when i search for articles for example social media and adolescent girls are the two most important keywords that i want to find which will usually be included in the titles so let's say the first source i find is this one right here body image body change adolescent boys this is what i mean by this keyword negates my topic so because of this keyword i would disregard this article in search for another one so let's say i pull up a second article and right here i have social media great now i'm looking for adolescent girls young women unfortunately this article says women in business again women in business would completely negate the adolescent girl keyword of my topic that was close but no cigar i recommend searching for a different article now let's say you do find an article where the title looks good great the next thing you want to do is read the abstract first because this is going to give you that bird's eye view of exactly what's in the article if there is no abstract go ahead and read the introduction you can pull pretty much the same information from it but most scholarly scholarly scholarly sources have an abstract so go ahead and start with that more specifically what you want to look for is the purpose of the research methods that were used and conclusions that were drawn why because this is extremely important information to have because this is going to tell you if there is useful information in this article that you want to read more on in other words is this an article that you want to spend your precious brainpower money on the next thing i recommend is skipping down to the bottom and reading the conclusion because once you read the abstract and the conclusion you'll have the full scope of exactly what's in the article and at this point you can then get very specific and very targeted on what you read next because you can use the appendix table of contents or maybe the section headings of the article to find the parts that you want to research further are you with me so far those smart researching tips are what you can take with you no matter what the sources that you're reading now i want to talk about some actual strategies you can use to find good relevant resources so the first researching strategy we're going to talk about is what i like to call networking now there are a few different ways you can network but basically what you're going to do is piggyback off other sources to create a relevant network of resources for your research the first way you can do this is by using the reference list of other sources that fit your research so for example let's take the article we were just looking at let's say this is a slam dunk for my research topic what i would do next is go down to their reference list and find other good articles the nice thing is that the url or doi link is usually live so you can click on it and it will automatically take you there something else you can do is use their in-text citations for example let's say the entire article doesn't fit your research but a section of it really does when you're reading that section and you find a specific part that you want to research further grab that in-text citation go down to the reference list and find that specific article quick disclaimer when you're using other reference lists for your research you want to be mindful of the timeliness of the information just because one source fit this article the information may be outdated by the time you need to use it so you want to check for dates now what i want to talk about next is what you can do when a journal article is protected by a paywall i'm sure we're all familiar with this but we go on to google scholar or another academic database and we search for an article and we find one but it's protected by that paywall and you don't actually have access to it did you know that you can take down that journal article title you want to make sure it's verbatim and search for it in your university's library and there's a good chance that you'll gain access to it and now let's say it's not available in your university library pro tip for you is that you can email your professor and there's a good chance that they can gain access to it for you now the next form of networking you can do is with other students work you see there are tons of dissertations and thesis papers available to you and the nice thing about them is that they're usually offered for free the top two places that i like to search for these papers is either through ebscohost or open access but what you would do is go to one of these databases type in some relevant keywords and as you can see here tons of papers pop up that you have immediate access to now my one disclaimer for this strategy is that when you're using another student's work such as a dissertation or a master thesis is to remember that it's another student's work you don't know what they scored you just know that they passed so you should always be somewhat skeptical of the information that you're reading and that brings me to another point can you cite another student's work in your own research paper and the short answer is i don't recommend it i mean technically you can but if you do you want to be very clear what type of sources comes from in other words you want to state that this is another student's work now let's say it's a phd dissertation or thesis that's relatively okay to cite in your paper because they go through a review process but for safety purposes i recommend taking the extra step and finding the original sources where they found their information but moving on to my next tip which is what to do when the topic you're researching is hard to understand oftentimes this is because the concept is either new to you or the concept doesn't come naturally to you for me this was when i took finance for the first time you see i had no prior experience to finance accounting basically anything mathematical and because i was in online schooling i did not have that line of access to my professor to break things down for me so while that was really tough to do i learned quite a few strategies on the way on how to make this process easy which is what i'm going to share right now i have three strategies in particular starting with my first strategy which is to break down the hard concept by definition you see oftentimes when you don't understand something it's because you're missing the foundational level of understanding which is oftentimes the definitions of the different moving parts in that concept it would be like trying to write out a word without learning the alphabet first so for example let me show you what i mean let's talk about compound interest so let's say compound interest is the tough concept that you're trying to understand it's the first time you've heard this phrase you have no prior experience with finance so you're completely lost the first thing you're gonna do is bring this word up into google and let's search for the definition and so as you can see here it pulls up a basic definition of what compound interest means great so i'm going to go ahead and read through this and see if there's any other words that i need help understanding so we have compound interest is interest calculated on the initial principle oh i don't necessarily know what initial principle means so again i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to bring this word up into google search for the definition and then i'm going to do a little inquiry about what that word means once i have that basic understanding i'm going to come back to compound interest and continue this and so i'm going to continue reading which also includes all of the accumulated interest oh here we are again another word that i've heard for the first time so again let's type this word into google and let's search for the definition of accumulated interest so here we go we have cumulated interest right here i'm going to read through this until i have a good understanding of what it means and with that i'm going to go back to compound interest and as you can see i'm piecing together what the concept of compound interest is by a bunch of definitions of the different phrases that are associated with it did you see what i mean how when you take the concept of compound interest as a whole and you break it down by definition you start to build that basic understanding of what it means once you do that the next thing i recommend is reading about your concept in some tertiary sources like wikipedia tertiary sources are simply encyclopedias which are made for breaking down concepts in lamex terms in other words they put it in simple terms that are easy to understand so in this example i might research compound interest in a tertiary source like investopedia which is a wikipedia for financial content as you can see here it breaks down compound interest by giving me simple summaries to understand some background information there's a few examples i can look through but overall after reading this source i'm gonna leave with a pretty good understanding of what compound interest means and once you have that you can move on to reading articles that are more complex and that brings me to my third tip for understanding hard concepts and that is to read three articles that pertain to your topic because this is gonna give you a full accurate picture of what your concept means and the reason for this is is that when you only read two articles one of those articles may be biased it may have false information that will skew your understanding of the concept so the third article acts as a tiebreaker and believe it or not but this also helps you avoid plagiarism because when you have the information from three different sources take on your topic in your mind this helps you formulate it into your own words because again if you only read two articles and this concept is very fresh to you and you don't have a good understanding of it there's a good chance that you're gonna resonate with one of the articles over the other so when you go to write your paraphrase it's really hard to get that source's words out of your head and lastly reading three sources about a topic goes the other way it helps you avoid reading too much information and confusing yourself you see again research is an open-ended topic so especially when you don't fully understand a concept it's easy to go down the rabbit hole and read too much information on it so my best advice is to read three articles on it and my pro tip for you is that if you still don't understand the concept readjust your strategy try looking at it from a different angle for example let's say i read three articles on compound interest and i still don't really understand it i might go to youtube and find a video that can explain it to me better once i go elsewhere and gain that solid basic understanding of the concept then i would go back to the articles and read them with fresh eyes and there's a good chance i'm gonna understand them a lot better and that leads me right into my last tip for this video which i kind of just touched on but this is an umbrella researching tip not just for understanding hard concepts and that is to put a time limit on your researching one of the biggest mistakes that students make is not knowing when to step away you see researching is very subjective it's very open-ended so it's very important that you have a plan before you research and the easiest plan here is to set a timer so you know when it's time to walk away and move on to the next step because believe it or not but researching can turn into a weird form of procrastination because it's fairly simple to keep reading more articles and if you read more articles it feels like you're doing something productive but it's actually keeping you from the writing process so my best advice is not to fall into this trap and it's actually something that i do in my business now i set a timer when i'm researching for youtube videos every single time because i used to fall into the same trap and waste precious hours and some of that precious brain power currency on reading more information that i needed because the truth is there's a fine line between researching just enough in self-sabotaging because you read too much anyways friends those are just some of the basic researching tips to get you started i'm going to go into some more technical topics such as how to do boolean searches and how to use google scholar later on so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on those videos but in the meantime thank you so much for being here i appreciate all of you watching this video all the way through if you're interested in supporting the smart student channel in a bigger way be sure to come check out my patreon account it's a great place for early access to my content and it gives you priority responses to questions you may have but as always be sure to give this video a big thumbs up share it with your friends and subscribe for more videos like this every week thanks guys

Channel: Smart Student

Views: 24,288

Keywords: researching tips for college students, researching tips for online college students, effective researching tips for online college students, how to research for academic writing, how to research any topic: academic writing advice, Research tips: finding academic research online, How to do research on the internet effectively, Internet research for academic writing, research skills for college students, tips for online research, online research tips for effective search strategies

Id: QjI6rYTc5YM

Length: 21min 36sec (1296 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021