Researching Quickly

Like learning, there are a lot of different ways of approaching research. These are just some things that I've realize work best for me. For these next videos, they're going to outline how I usually go about researching a topic for a paper or project.

Start with Wikipedia

I'm using a ridiculous example in this video, but Wikipedia is a treasure trove of information and resources without having to get bogged down by search terms or anything complicated. Start here and look for primary or secondary research that you're interested in.

We'll go over reading research papers next week (right before Halloween), but assuming you've found your research paper and need to decipher it quickly here's my next big tip.

Reading Data and Figures

When you're a full-time researcher or just trying to get an assignment done, this is the "quick and dirty" approach that I was taught.

This probably isn't the best way of approaching an academic paper, but if you're in a crunch, look at the paper's figures and captions underneath. Any bars or data that looks "off" or different from other data/graphs is usually a good indication that you have an interesting result to talk about in your paper/project. From there, look at your discussion to see how the authors of the paper are interpreting their results.