How to Become a Better Researcher

As with writing, professors often assume students will find a way to figure out how to conduct a quality
research when writing their papers. The research skills are rarely clearly taught at schools, so it’s no wonder that students often more rely on sources like Wikipedia which seems to be their first and last stop in the research itinerary. But quality research involves lots of different information that needs to be efficiently managed under tight deadlines to provide the needed foundation on which students will base their writing. Here’s how you can become a better researcher using different tools available on the Internet for free:

Set deadlines for your research projects. We all agree that deadlines aren’t fun, but if you are working on a research project you must accept them as your friends and not as your enemies. In fact, if you use them wisely you’ll notice even during your first project that they truly are your friends because they can help you define and respect your limits, identify the strengths you have, stay focused on your work and pace yourself. This is crucial for doing a quality research when writing an essay, term paper or any other writing assignment.

There are other tools you’ll also find very useful when doing your school papers. For example, to make sure that your work won’t be marked as plagiarized by your professor and this way avoid the extreme penalties for such deeds you can use plagiarism checker that checks your writings for plagiarized content against all web pages and a huge database with millions of academic works.

Use a bookmarking tool. Bookmarks are great for organizing your research work, no matter if it is about an
essay or school paper you need to write, a simple research draft, or maybe you are composing a journal article. It is a great relief when after days and weeks of research you can easily find all the selected links, texts, images and collected information in your bookmarking library of resources. Not only this, you can easily import bookmarks with the help of bookmark apps.

Turn your bookmarks into a mind map. The linear thinking pattern is certainly useful, but a mind map that
helps you visualize all your bookmarked resources in a non-linear format is much better. You can make the
most out of your research efforts if you create a mind map and organize your bookmarks that naturally belong to certain topics important for your research project.

Categorize your bookmarks. The resources you’ve gathered on your mind map can also be categorized
according to your research purposes, goals and structure. At the beginning you may only have one category,
but as you conduct your research the topics will pile up and you’ll be able to create new categories to ease your project. By classifying your bookmarks your sources are becoming logically organized, more efficiently managed and really fun to work with.

Provide a visual structure for your research summary. Researching takes lots of time, energy and resources.That’s why it can be very helpful for you to visually structure your research summary so you can define the main areas you must start working on. There’s no default layout that’s applicable to all research projects. This leaves space for you to employ your creativity and find and establish a layout that perfectly fits your research summary structure. You can use mind mapping applications and add new branches that include the relevant information you need for your researched topics.

Sandra Miller is a freelance writer from Brooklyn, loves writing edtech tips and creating funny stories for students.