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5: Research Skills

  • Page ID
    20287
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    Learning Objectives

    Students will be able to achieve the following:

    • Use all the steps of the research process to write an informed essay or report.
    • Generate a suitable area of focus for research-based academic writing.
    • Distinguish which sources are credible and appropriate for a college paper.
    • Cite quoted, paraphrased, or summarized material in order to appropriately give others credit for their original words, ideas, and overall content.
    • Cite resources ethically (without plagiarism).
    • Use a style guide to create an academic, properly formatted essay or report.

    • 5.1: Introduction
      The skills needed for good research-based writing involve reading the work of experts, assimilating that information with one’s own brilliant (and evolving) ideas, possibly mirroring some of the writing that suits each individual student, and becoming a clear, creative, and confident writer in his or her own right.
    • 5.2: The Research Process
      To succeed in college, students need to develop solid research skills that will benefit them throughout and beyond their academic career. They must focus, in and out of class, on doing the following: (1) Identifying an area of focus, (2) Identifying the audience, (3) Using campus library resources to find information, (4) Determining if information is scholarly and credible, and (5) Citing sources accurately, avoiding plagiarism, and creating a final written composition using the appropriate sty
    • 5.3: Citing Sources
      Every publisher, profession, and academic discipline has its own style guide, which provides standards, expectations, and guidelines for formatting written work, for documenting research, whether read or conducted, and for citing outside sources that help inform readers and other potential writers. Publishers and professors expect written work (i.e., essays and reports) to meet the standards set in these style guides.

    Thumbnail: Photo by Davide Cantelli on Unsplash

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    This page titled 5: Research Skills is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Ann Inoshita, Karyl Garland, Kate Sims, Jeanne K. Tsutsui Keuma, and Tasha Williams (University of Hawaiʻi OER) .

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