College Student's Guide To: How to Organize Before Writing a Research Paper

College students often procrastinate until the week before a major research paper is due before collecting source material. Although one could argue endlessly about the work habits of college students, the reality is that everyone has put off a paper until the last minute at some point in their life.

Often the hardest part about writing a research paper is not the actual writing of it, but the gathering of source material and organization of it. This is tedious and often boring, but with a few simple tips, you can streamline your process and still turn in your paper on time. Maybe even finish it early!

Once you know your topic or thesis and what you will be writing about, there are two overall objectives to gathering source material for a research paper.

1. Find source material from a variety of sources. This includes books, academic journals, other published articles, essays, papers, and of course, web sources.
2. Organizing the material you find into helpful sound bites, statistics or bits of supporting evidence that you can implement into the overall body of your paper as you write.

First, I will explain some helpful ways to find good, quality source material.

- Check out your school library. Beware of falling into the trap of believing that your library will only have archaic source material. Many libraries are part of consortiums with other local or school libraries, and you may be able to search and select source material from an entirely different school to be sent to you for use. If you're at a loss as to where to start searching for books or other sources from the library, do a quick search using Amazon.com or Alibris.com first. If your paper is on John F. Kennedy, for example, search major bookstore websites like Amazon for reference materials on Kennedy's life. Then, search your library for the same titles and borrow them.