Beginners Guide to Academic Research
- ramohame
- Apr 3, 2019
- 2 min read
Wanna know how to navigate going about conducting academic research? Click here to learn about my own experience! #research
Part 1: What you already know
It’s best to attempt to get rid of any preconceived notions you may have about academic research. I found that in my own experience, I had a much more difficult time when I had a very fixed view on what I wanted to find, what topic I wanted to explore, and what I thought it should be like. When looking opening your mind to the endless possibilities, you may be on a different track than you initially planned to with your research, but you will learn something new and it will be significantly more manageable than when you were limited by your mindset. Let your mind run wild!
Part 2: Personal expectations
The first time I attempted to conduct research, I thought that there were endless voids of knowledge and research out there and that the academic world had every single answer to every question I ever had. This was obviously debunked, because there is a lot that goes into research that I did not understand at the time. Even though there is not unlimited research to explore, there is still much to explore in terms of research that is available and it is very interesting!
Part 3: How to get through the struggles so you can succeed in finding what you need
Like I mentioned previously, when you go into looking at research with a very specific question in mind, it is harder to find research that supports what you are looking for. It is a lot more challenging if you have a narrow question, which is where I personally used to struggle. The best approach for me has been creating a question, identifying the key topics, then looking for research that aligns with the key topics and changing my question as needed. In english class, this was the approach I took when starting the search for articles for the annotated bibliography we have recently started, and I found success from this. Trust your imagination to come up with great research questions if your original doesn't quite fit what you've found/what you would like to study.
Part 4: To finish us off
These tips should help you out! But if you’re ever having trouble navigating portals, there are plenty of tutorials and resources online. Take things slow, and start broad before you narrow things down. Let the research and your mind take you in any direction it wants!
Thanks for reading!
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