Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Manage Your Resources

Planning and Writing a Research Paper

Manage Your Resources

To manage your resources, you must understand why and how you will use them in your paper. You will have to keep accurate records of what you use from your resources and how you think these resources will contribute to your developing paper. Click on the tabs below for information.

Keep Records
Refer Back to Them

Good management of your research paper starts with keeping accurate and complete records from the beginning. To keep good records, you must first understand the documentation standards you are using or what your style guide requires. Then, you devise a system for recording and keeping essential information. Your resources are your notes, summaries of articles, and any articles or pages you’ve compiled while researching. At this stage, you may even want to consider starting to write citations for the sources that you plan to use.

The advantage of having these notes is that you can go back and find the exact quote or passage you want to reference. The disadvantage is that you might fail to read and evaluate the material in light of your research question and thus lose your sense of what was originally important in the material. Summarizing your sources when you first discover them helps to keep your research task fresh and foremost in your thinking.

Chapter 5, “Academic Integrity and Documentation,” offers specific suggestions for keeping records, as do many of the writing texts listed in appendix A, “Books to Help You Improve Your Writing.”

Key Takeaways

Good management of your research paper starts with keeping accurate and complete records from the beginning.
To keep good records, you must first understand the documentation standards you are using or what your style guide requires.

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