My three top tips for research using the Library are:
- Don’t take notes to start with. See what literature is out there and get to know the subject first. This will give your writing more confidence and inform your assignment structure.
- As an advocate of slow reading, I recommend that you find one or two decent articles and slowly read what they say. Skim reading is effective at finding the right sort of information, but less effective when trying to know a subject inside and out. Don’t accumulate hundreds of references that you haven’t properly read simply because it looks good. There’s a temptation at the university to retrieve lots of articles because it’s easy to do, but do they accurately respond to the assignment question?
- After getting to know the subject well enough, design a mind map to consider each bubble as a paragraph or theme you want to explore. Writing the assignment will be easier because you’ll have a ready-made structure. No doubt this will evolve, but it will be starting point for your work.
