INSTRUCTOR: This video is a quick review of the research process. When you first start your research, you're going to need to identify a topic. But remember, you're writing a paper on this. So you'll need to be specific. For example, writing a paper on African Americans would take up several thousand pages. But a more precise topic, like the African American press between 1877 and 1977, is specific and, therefore, realistic for an essay. 

So, in short, you want to try and figure out what about a topic is particularly interesting to you. After you've decided on your topic, this is when you do a preliminary search for information. You'll want to keep in mind what sorts of sources your professor wants you to use. But you also need to determine, is there enough information out there to write your paper? 

So, for example, if you're writing a paper on a topic that's fairly new, there may not be any books yet. But there might be plenty of articles. Or if your topic is somewhat older, people may not have written extensively about your topic for several years. So the sources that are out there might be a little old. So what you want to do is use the library's various databases and the library catalog, as well as authoritative websites to find a variety of information sources, including books, journal articles, and reliable websites. 

Once you've scouted the information landscape and determined that there is enough information to write your paper, this is when you want to start picking out the sources that are going to be most helpful to write your paper. One of the pitfalls that some people may encounter is picking the first three or four sources that show up in a list of results and say, I'm going to use these. 

It actually takes a little bit more work than that. Some resources are definitely more useful than others, depending on what your topic is. So you want to take the time to read the abstracts of articles, read a description of the book, find out a little about that source before you commit to using it. If you are using something that you find online, be sure that you either print or save that resource, so you'll have it immediately available to make notes on, highlight, or underline. A general rule of thumb is that you want to plan on having one to two sources per page. So for example, if you were writing a 10-page paper, you'd want to plan on having 10 to 20 sources. 

After you have a list of sources that you'd like to use, this is when you want to evaluate them. You want to pay attention specifically to things like the age of the publication, whether your sources are published by a nonpartisan or partisan publisher, the credentials of the author, things of that nature. And if you're using a website, you probably would do well to run that website through something called the CRAAP test. If you're unfamiliar with the CRAAP test, let me show it to you really quick. 

This is the Tri-C Library website. Again, you can get to this by googling Tri-C Library. And the CRAAP test is always going to be available under at least our English subject guide. So if you click on Subject Guides, select English, and go to the Websites and Multimedia tab, you'll notice that there's a link for the CRAAP test on the bottom right-hand corner. 

The CRAAP test asks you to look at things like the currency, reliability, authority, and point of view of the website. And the currency is quite literally just how old is the resource I'm looking at. Reliability asks, does this website say where they're getting their information from? The authority is linked to the reliability of the author itself. And the point of view is asking, why does this website exist? Is it informing me? Is it convincing me? Is it trying to sell me something? The CRAAP test is just a way for you to run a website through an evaluation process and come up with some sort of a score that will give you an idea of the quality of the website overall. 

After you've evaluated your sources and determined what you're going to use, this is when you want to begin to take notes. And believe me, taking notes really can help. For one thing, notes serve as a transition point between someone else's writing and your own. Notes give you an opportunity to write down the information that's going to be the most useful part of a source for your paper. 

And after you've taken notes, this is when you begin to write your paper. Those notes are going to allow you to put the paper in your own words. And it's also going to help you decide how you'll structure your paper. As you're writing your paper, you also want to make sure that you're citing your sources as you write. 

For one thing, citing your sources is the ethical thing to do. When you're writing at a college level, citing your sources is just part of the conversation of scholarship that occurs within the academic environment. But more immediately for you, citing your sources gives your paper street cred. You're basically saying, this is why I'm taking this position. This is where I got this information. You're essentially backing up what you've written with the writings of established authors in your field. 

And after you've written your paper, the last step that I'd suggest is proofread. If you give yourself enough time that you can read your paper through in its entirety at least once, you might find things like a missing citation. You may find that a point that you thought you had covered well needs a little more elaboration. You may uncover a spelling error that spell check might not have caught. Or it could be something as simple as want to quote something and you're missing one half of the quotation marks. 

And it could be that, as you're doing these processes, you find that you might end up stopping at one for a little bit to revise your strategy. For example, you may begin doing your preliminary research and discover that there aren't enough materials out there to write your paper, in which case may need to do a little bit of revision for your topic. It could be that you've located your materials. But when you begin evaluating your sources, you find that a couple of them don't pass muster As. Far as things that you'd want to use in your paper. 

So again, you might need to go a step back and find a couple of new sources that will pass things like the CRAAP test. But the key is that, as long as you can find your way from the first step to the end step, you're looking at a very good possibility of writing a quality paper. So if you have questions or if you need any assistance, you can always reach out to the library for help.