Speaker 1: Have you ever found yourself facing a blank word document, feeling so overwhelmed with the amount of research around you that you're petrified to the point of total resignation? You know, completely terrified of wasting your time reading unrelated and pointless secondary source materials, and you're so drained by stress and panic that you don't even know where to start. If that sounds like you, then congratulations. You're completely normal. I bet it's never felt so good to be such a conformist. I met a lot of students like this during my time at university. Largely, you know, in my undergrad, but being totally honest with you, I really took my research skills for granted. You know, I was lucky in that I developed, you know, a proficient and successful research habit at the start of my university because of how I prepared myself during my gap year. You know, it wasn't until I started being frequently asked on YouTube, how do I research at university, that I realised that this was a problem. So in this video, I'm going to give you a detailed and in-depth guide into developing your research skills, you know, such as knowing when and where to start, you know, how to use the library to your advantage, and the ability to distinguish between efficiency and effectiveness. So first up, if you're someone who feels ashamed or unintelligent because of their poor research skills, don't. One of the biggest ways a lot of universities fail their students is in their insufficient or lack of research training. You know, what universities seem to forget is that research skills aren't something we're taught off in school. You know, in fact, most of us get through school exams memorising the answers to particular questions. I know that I passed all my biology exams without ever writing a complete sentence. I merely bullet pointed all the key words associated with certain questions in order to score the points. That being said, failing to fully prepare and coach students in research skills is a major oversight by universities, particularly considering our university is 95% dependent on individual research. A single one hour workshop in your freshest week is hardly enough to set students up for three or four year ventures. If you haven't been taught something proficiently, you can't beat yourself up for not doing it well, but you're making a positive change by being here. So kudos. As a former humanities student, the research skills I'll be talking about primarily revolve around written material rather than research consisting of consensus studies or experiments on like artefacts. I'll therefore be focusing the research skills tailored to students who are working on particular essay assignments who either need to find a topic to write about or need help supporting and defending an argument that they've constructed. So here you are, ready to write your essay. After hopefully having read your primary texts and some secondary sources during your term, you'll likely have at least three or five essay ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, which means it's time to start implementing a research strategy. For those of you who don't know how to pick an essay topic, I'll have another video on this channel called how to write an essay in which I will give you more detailed guide into how you identify potential essay topics. I'll either link this video above in the iCard, but if I haven't uploaded it yet, make sure you subscribe to my channel and hit the notification bell to make sure you don't miss it when it's uploaded. Back to implementing a search strategy. On a piece of paper, bullet point each topic of interest and spend 15 to 20 minutes identifying and locating resources for each of these by searching keywords in your library catalogue, any journal archive database, or Google Scholar. I spend much longer doing this process, usually around 30 to 40 minutes, but looking back on this now as an older woman who is more interested in time management and efficiency, I would recommend sticking to 15 minutes in this process. See how many relative academic papers come up and locate and take note of the ones that catch your eye. Don't read the essays, use the essay synopsis to read what the paper is about and determine whether it's valuable for your argument. Remember, this includes papers that go against your argument, not just those that agree with it. If you're conducting research in the library, make sure to ask a librarian beforehand so you don't waste too much time aimlessly wandering around the shelves. The aim of this task is to identify which topics have the most varied and accessible resources available. If a fruitful abundance of secondary resource material isn't found within the first 15 minutes of searching, scrap that topic off your list, even if it was one that you were really excited to write about. If you have a tie between certain topics, go and ask your lecturer for their advice. P.S. If your lecturer is interested in a particular topic from the list, it may be in your favour to write about it if they're the ones marking your paper. Just saying. Researching and writing an essay isn't about trying to be the most original, indie academic who is about to take the department by storm with their totally genius and never-before-seen argument. It's about demonstrating a deep, insightful understanding of your primary text, not your way into becoming the next Alberto Mangel. So now that you've picked your essay topic, it's time to get stuck in without getting sticky. Start gathering together books and essay PDFs online that will help you form a compelling argument. Formulating an argument is a whole other video in itself, but if you'd like me to cover that in one of my videos in more detail, do let me know in the comments down below. However, for now, the key traits of a compelling argument are its specificity, its somewhat originality, usually an argument that is constructed outside of the box, demonstrating a student with independent thought, its defensibility, and its contestability. With all these points in mind, read through the essays you've collated for yourself, and evaluate your resources, determining which ones will become your core resources. Don't limit these down too far, as a variety of resources will only serve you in demonstrating the significance of your topic. But if you're reading a book on the essay topic, don't read the whole book. Identify which chapters in the book are specific to your topic and the angle that you're going to take on it, and only focus on those chapters. One of the biggest mistakes students make is only picking essays which support their argument, so make sure that you include some counter-arguments in your essay, to which you then construct counter-arguments to said counter-arguments. I used to find it manageable to engage with 5 or 6 secondary resources intimately, but I would say 4-5 is a good number for standard undergraduate assignments. I will be making another video on how to read research papers and essays, which will either be linked up above or uploaded, so please make sure to subscribe so you don't miss it when it's uploaded. However, something I would like to mention briefly now, which will be covered in more detail in that video, is write your essay as you research. This may sound really confusing and scary at first, but trust me, writing and researching simultaneously is a major lifesaver. I won't go into how to do that in this video, I'll do it in the next one, but it's a fact I really wanted to highlight here, just in case people watch this video without knowing that research is symbiotic with essay writing. Aside from writing as you're researching, it's important to hold yourself accountable for researching effectively and efficiently. Once you get into the swing of research, it's really easy to fall down rabbit holes and waste a lot of time focusing on the wrong details. While spending a lot of time gathering research may sound like it falls into the productivity category, I'm afraid it's just a veiled, fancy way of procrastinating. Other common mistakes many students make are over-archiving. Most students use online academic journals to access research papers on their subject, but once they've found a couple, they may spend hours or even days trying to find every single paper on the same topic available to them online. This is basically the academic version of over-googling. You know when you have certain symptoms of an illness, and even though you're convinced it's condition X, you spend the next three hours cross-checking your symptoms across all the medical sites available to you? Just in case. Stop. This doesn't make you mentally or physically any better, it just wastes time and it doesn't utilise the knowledge that you have now. Same with essay searching. Only employing one kind of source to support their research. Many never consider that sources such as periodicals, newspapers, government documents, biographical resources, videos, experts, special collections or other internet sources are available. Make sure you do. Start researching too late. No matter how effectively you strategise and conduct your research, starting your research too late will always produce an inefficient wealth of resources. Researching takes a pretty decent amount of time, even if your strategies are in place. It's not about rushing through and hoping that you can get through it quicker to get to your writing process, it's about productively managing your time to produce the best results. Reading every footnote in the essay, and using every footnote to propel their research further. Footnotes and appendices are really awesome and useful to find related material to your subject if you're stuck, but please don't overdo it. You really don't have the time. Not knowing when it's time to step away. This was the mistake I always made as a student, even up until the end of my postgrad. As a bookworm, I love reading, I love researching, I still adore researching to this day, but over-researching is self-sabotage. The only way I counteracted my inability to know when enough is enough was to write my essay as I went along, so the word limit was my barrier. Or, conversely, limiting their research to one or two secondary resources. Don't do that. Once you've decided which four or five secondary resource materials you're going to use in your essay, lock them down, end your research, and carry on writing. You'll only know after your first or second draft of your essay whether or not there are gaps in your research. Every time you come across a gap, make a comment note in your document which you can come back to later. Unless the gap in your research is glaringly obvious and actually totally shatters your argument, only go back and research to fill in the gaps once you've drafted a submittable essay. You're not going to lose major marks over minor gaps, but you will lose excessive marks for an unpolished and totally rushed final essay. As you could probably tell from the length of this video and the total diversion of secondary videos within this video, researching for an essay isn't straightforward as we'd like it to be, but taking the time to really manage your time and prioritise your energy and focus can really transform the levels of your anxiety and stress towards your essay writing, as well as your relationship with studying and the final result. If you'd like more videos on personal development and effective time management and organisation, you should subscribe to my second channel, which is called 80% Effective, entirely dedicated to personal development advice and life hacks. If you're a student and you just want to know more advice on studying and researching, and also really like to learn more about literature, you should subscribe to this channel, where I focus on everything bookish and academic. You can also follow me over on Instagram and Twitter. All the links are in the bio and at the end of the video. Also, special thanks to my patrons on Patreon, which are all listed here, the wonderful people. They are supporting both of my channels and I could not be more grateful. I hope you found this helpful and remember, until next time, books save lives, so keep reading. Bye-bye.