Improve Your Searching and Researching Skills

In every college students’ life, academic papers that are assigned by our professors are not rare. However, not everyone can write a good academic paper easily and quickly. In order to have a well-organized academic writing, students need to improve the searching and researching skills.

To enrich the paper, students often do the searching and add some information from other sources. Well, the credibility of the sources are very important. There are three essential aspects that students must pay attention on, namely, reliability, quality, and utility. The source must be reliable, which means that the contact information is available, the author is credential, and the publisher is reputable. Also, the good quality of  information includes broad generalizations, up-to-date, consistent, well written, and having citations. Moreover, utility implies the relation to the topic, appropriate audience, and enough details. The Wikipedia is a good place to do the searching for students, but do not use it as a reference.

According to Marc Prensky, search and research are totally different. Search helps us find enormous but not well-indicated information. However, research, an important step, helps us determine the quality of the information. There are three methods that search engines work. The first one is keyword search, a good example is Google.com; second, category search, students can see it on Yahoo.com; the last one is called metasearch which compiles results from many different searching engines. In order to retrieve more accurate information, students are suggested to apply Boolean logic, scholarly searches, and advanced searching. After searching, students can use bibliographic manager to keep track of the information.