by Francis Jock

Created on: December 04, 2008   Last Updated: December 18, 2008

College students are faced with two problems when conducting research: having enough time to research a topic and figuring out how to approach it. As with any task at hand, it's best to have a plan. Here are some time saving research techniques that will help you with both. The key successful research is to have a research plan and sticking to it as you learn.

A research plan begins to take shape once the subject of your research has been clearly identified. Generally, research is a preliminary process that occurs before writing a paper, but the process presented here can be applied anywhere. However, before tackling the plan, a few words about resources are in order.

College students will quickly discover that there are ample, if not overwhelming, resources available from the library, the Internet, periodicals, and from personal collections that may not be available to everyone. A good paper will include as many resources as possible, but they should be both recent and relevant in order to justify using them as an authoritative source that supports your conclusions. Use them wisely, but don't allow these resources to dictate your thinking. Whatever you are writing about should be from your point of view, not which of someone else, even if they are recognized experts in their field.

Your research strategy can take the form of asking four questions and then providing explanatory answers. In this approach, Question 1 requires a constructing a problem statement that presents a real world assessment or a reality check, if you prefer. You can structure by writing a problem statement as follows:

Problem Statement: What's wrong about this subject in the real world? In other words, why are you writing about it? Then go on to describe the current symptoms of the problem, what are the facts surrounding the problem, and what is the preferred situation. Once you understand the problem and the facts about it, you can begin to focus on what are the underlying causes and the events that may have led to it.

Problem Analysis: The next step in our research plan is to conduct an analysis of the problem, from a theoretical point of view. You know what the problem is, but what factor or factors caused it? Your objective here is to diagnose the problem by identifying its symptoms and sorting them into categories. Then suggest what some causes of the symptoms might be, note what is absent from the real world situation, and identify the barriers to resolving the problem. These are important

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