(Module 6) The Importance of Research

Last spring semester I really had to crack down and do a lot of research. I was enrolled in higher level history and political science classes that both required a thorough research paper about respectively post world war 2 Japan and gun violence. The importance of these papers was echoed throughout the entire semester, making me really fear how hard these tasks were gonna be. Yet, by starting research early I learned that the tasks weren’t so bad even though this was my first time writing multiple papers that had to be ten pages or more. When doing research, you have to use academic, peer reviewed sources so using a universities library system is very helpful. Also, you have to realize that you won’t end up using every source that you initially found and thought was helpful when writing the paper. This is why doing research early is so good. You can consistently gain good information relating to your topic, mixing the contents of these sources into answering a thesis for your paper. A paper needs to have a reason to contain research so when doing research you should always think about how these sources can add to a thesis or to the paper as a whole. I learned that primary sources can be in multiple forms besides from academic journals as well. Interviews, archives, government publications and more can all be used to make a paper both fresh and well written academically. In the module I liked the slide referring to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is very dangerous to use but it contains a great list of sources that can compliment a paper. Wikipedia is useful in just finding more great sources to me and I definitely used the website for this aspect in my papers. This https://library.educause.edu/resources/2007/6/7-things-you-should-know-about-wikipedia website was very nice in recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia. For future students, it’s necessary to do research early so that the paper isn’t a pain to do and so that you can really obtain a lot of good information that can benefit a thesis question or research question.

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