Choosing Sources

When it comes to choosing sources for my research paper, a lot of time and effort goes into the process. I begin by searching through numerous online WSU library resources and then look for relevant titles. After I find something that looks somewhat useful I'll save the URL for later. Numerous hours and URL's later, I go back through all of the sources I deemed worthy and chose the ones that are most useful or informative.

After picking the few that are most helpful, I begin to scan the articles looking for information that pertains directly to my research topic. This is also time consuming. I pull many quotes out of the source and save them into a word document for later use. After I have a sufficient quantity of useful quotes and facts, I began to integrate the quotes and facts into my paper outline.

Now I am ready to start writing my paper. Equipped with ideas, facts and my outline I begin to piece together my paper. Because my thoughts are so organized, this part of the process generally doesn't take very long and isn't as painful as actually finding the sources. In order to improve the process I use for finding sources and writing papers I could procrastinate less. It seems to be my main problem, I wait until the last minute to actually find sources which may make the sources I find not as good as some others if I continued to search.