Have a paper to research and not sure where to start? Use this guide!
Above all, ask for help! Your professor, your subject librarian, the Writing Centre - all are people available to help you!
1. Your topic
Spending 15 minutes thinking about and getting advice about your topic will save you many hours of frustration later!
Ask a librarian, your professor, or someone from the Writing Centre for help choosing a good topic.
Watch this 3-minute video, Picking Your Topic IS Research, to learn how choosing your topic is part of the research process.
Browse one of our "In Context" databases to help you start to come up with a good topic idea, especially for assignments where your topic can be almost anything; these will all help you identify a topic and find a few starting sources:
- College (Gale In Context) browse among broad topic ideas
- Global Issues in Context browse international issues specifically
- Opposing Viewpoints in Context if you need to find a topic where you take a "for" or "against" side of a hot issue
- Science in Context find a topic that is science-related, for non-science majors
- World History in Context and US History in Context find a topic that is history-related, for non-history majors
Learn more about: Choosing Your Topic
2. Convert your topic into a structured search
Whether you plan to use a library database like OneSearch, or even Google, converting your topic into a structured search will get you the best results.
Learn more about: Converting your topic into a structured search
3. Finding books and articles using OneSearch Lite
OneSearch Lite is a huge search engine of books and articles available to you at UPEI.
You can limit your search to only scholarly (peer-reviewed) articles, to just books, to only materials published recently, etc.
Watch this 7 minute OneSearch Tutorial video to learn the basics.
Some other basic concepts that will help you in this step are:
- Types of Sources - explore the different types, from books to websites (link to another library's tutorial)
- Popular and Scholarly Journals (link to another library's tutorial)
4. Citing the sources you find
OneSearch has a basic "cite" feature that will help you format the citations in MLA or APA format. Look for the "cite" button at the far right inside each individual full record display.
See a short interactive video on getting the citations from OneSearch
RefWorks is a more advanced tool to help you save and then format your citations in any style format.
Citing Sources provides links to other sites and tutorials to help you with APA, MLA, and Chicago formats.
More Help
Some additional helpful links for writing your paper:
Academic Essentials videos - a series of short videos made by UPEI students about the whole process of writing a paper
Research Basics: an open academic research skills course - tutorial from JSTOR, includes both videos and text transcripts for searching, understanding scholarly sources, and citing sources
Writing an Essay (link to another library's tutorial)
Note-taking (link to another library's tutorial)
What color is the sky? Examples of how to, and not to, use sources effectively to write a good paper
Other library guides that give help for each of these steps:
- University of Michigan's Getting Started Essentials guide - watch for contents on the left
- University of British Columbia's Getting Started on Your Research
- MIT's Selecting a Research Topic breaks down the steps very well - watch for contents on the left
