It's a Working Process...
- lkibrahi
- Apr 3, 2019
- 2 min read
When it comes to academic research, I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s anything new to me personally and that’s largely because I took IB in high school. Being in the IB programme meant that we were going to be producing a good amount of academic-like papers throughout our junior and senior year. For every IB class that we took, we had to submit an IA essay by the end of the year. Though we do work on them throughout the year and our teachers would guide us with the research and our experiments if the class required one.
Now, because research played such a huge role in all of this, we were required to attend a few presentations in which our librarian helped explain the whole concept behind plagiarism, how to properly cite and different styles of citation, finding peer-reviewed scholarly research journals, and academic research as a whole.
Because I’ve been doing this for about two years prior to coming into university, I feel like I almost have an upper hand when conducting academic research. And so, for me, it hasn’t really been anything new and therefore it wasn’t something I really struggled with. So far, it’s been pretty easy going.
My expectations, if any, were that the process was going to be very similar to what I’d done previously. And to be honest, it was fairly similar. Nothing was really new except for my research topic itself of course. The websites I used for research were also different. When I was at Grimsley Senior High, we used http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/search/selectdb?vid=0&sid=4eb14216-12f9-4961-8d12-d8b5448cde77%40pdc-v-sessmgr06, last semester at Appalachian State, I used https://library.appstate.edu/ which was the library’s scholarly data base, and finally I used https://www.pnas.org/ for my most recent paper.
In general, what works best for me when researching, especially academically is to start by looking up very generic phrases and see what pops up. If nothing relevant to my topic of interest comes up, I like to either be more specific or try and find another topic all together.
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