Research skills are a vital part of the writing process because they enable writers to find information and create an outline for their writing project—whether it’s creative or academic writing. Therefore, how to improve our research skills is very important for our writing. Here are some of my personal suggestions and thoughts on doing the survey, I hope it will be helpful to you.
When we do a research, we inevitably think of a question：How do I get started on my research? My answer is to look for overview articles to gain a better understanding of your topic. If an overview article has a bibliography section, you can find other sources there.Overview articles also give you an idea of what keywords you should use to search for other sources.
In addition to this, we also need to learn to take notes during the research.We can track down the source of information by taking notes.**Using index cards to take notes and record citation information for each source.**On one side of each index card, write down all the information you would put into your bibliography or Works Cited for the source. On the other side, write down information about the source that will be useful in your paper. One thing we need to pay attention to when taking notes is:**Trying to put ideas in your own words rather than copying from the source.**Putting the ideas into your own words from the outset helps you avoid plagiarism. You still want to write the page number where the idea came from.
After all of the above is done,**start making a rough outline of your paper while you're researching.**Your research paper will have an introduction, a conclusion, and 3 or 4 specific points that you use to answer your research question. Even with a little research, you'll be able to identify these main points and start organizing your sources under each of those points.
The above are some of my personal thoughts and inspiration on how to do great research,You are very welcome to come to my blog and discuss with me.