Steps for locating information for a research paper/project:
- Select a topic of interest and then state your topic as a question
- PICO question: Patient, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome
- Identify the key concepts and words that describe your question
- Locate and retrieve information sources that support the topic question; this includes using library catalogs to locate reference books, encyclopedias, bibliographies, handbooks, statistics, videos, and other media
- Use online databases to find journal articles, newspapers, statistics, and other kinds of supporting materials
- Find Internet resources; this may include government documents, images, graphs, data, maps and more
- Evaluate what you find; take detailed notes; summarize and quote source material accurately
- Cite your sources of information accurately
- Use a bibliographic management program such as EndNote to organize materials and write your paper with properly formatted citations
