how to do research effectively

15 Steps to Good Research

• Define and articulate a research question (formulate a research hypothesis). How to Write a Thesis Statement (Indiana University)
• Identify possible sources of information in many types and formats. Georgetown University Library's Research & Course Guides
• Judge the scope of the project.
• Reevaluate the research question based on the nature and extent of information available and the parameters of the research project.
• Select the most appropriate investigative methods (surveys, interviews, experiments) and research tools (periodical indexes, databases, websites).
• Plan the research project. Writing Anxiety (UNC-Chapel Hill) Strategies for Academic Writing (SUNY Empire State College)
• Retrieve information using a variety of methods (draw on a repertoire of skills).
• Refine the search strategy as necessary.
• Write and organize useful notes and keep track of sources. Taking Notes from Research Reading (University of Toronto) Use a citation manager: Zotero or Refworks
• Evaluate sources using appropriate criteria. Evaluating Internet Sources
• Synthesize, analyze and integrate information sources and prior knowledge. Georgetown University Writing Center
• Revise hypothesis as necessary.
• Use information effectively for a specific purpose.
• Understand such issues as plagiarism, ownership of information (implications of copyright to some extent), and costs of information. Georgetown University Honor Council Copyright Basics (Purdue University) How to Recognize Plagiarism: Tutorials and Tests from Indiana University
• Cite properly and give credit for sources of ideas. MLA Bibliographic Form (7th edition, 2009) MLA Bibliographic Form (8th edition, 2016) Turabian Bibliographic Form: Footnote/Endnote Turabian Bibliographic Form: Parenthetical Reference Use a citation manager: Zotero or Refworks

Adapted from the Association of Colleges and Research Libraries "Objectives for Information Literacy Instruction" , which are more complete and include outcomes. See also the broader "Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education."

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How to Research Effectively

Last Updated: April 27, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was reviewed by Gerald Posner and by wikiHow staff writer, Jennifer Mueller, JD . Gerald Posner is an Author & Journalist based in Miami, Florida. With over 35 years of experience, he specializes in investigative journalism, nonfiction books, and editorials. He holds a law degree from UC College of the Law, San Francisco, and a BA in Political Science from the University of California-Berkeley. He’s the author of thirteen books, including several New York Times bestsellers, the winner of the Florida Book Award for General Nonfiction, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. He was also shortlisted for the Best Business Book of 2020 by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. There are 14 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 76,825 times.

Whether you're working on a research paper for school, a fact page for a website, or an article for a magazine, your final product will rise or fall based on the quality of your research. To research effectively, you must plan your project in advance so you can make the most efficient use of your time and resources. Effective research is as much about planning as it is about the research itself. Analyze your sources carefully and cite them properly in your final report. [1] X Research source

Organizing Your Project

• If you're working on a research paper for school, you can use the page requirements (or limits) as a guide to narrow your topic.
• Use the same approach if you're writing an article for a website or print publication, and have been given a word limit.
• For example, "butterflies" probably is too broad for a 20-page research paper. If you know you want to write about butterflies, narrow your topic to a particular species of butterflies, or butterflies found in a particular geographic area.
• You may have to do some basic preliminary research to appropriately narrow your topic. This gives you a sense of how much information is available. If it's more than you could possibly dig through, consider narrowing your topic again.

• Typically, you'll want to create a basic thesis statement for your final report. This is what you ultimately want your research to prove.
• Creating a thesis statement before you've even begun your research might seem backwards, but to research effectively, you need to know what you're looking for.
• For example, maybe you have narrowed your butterfly topic to focus on why butterflies are attracted to a particular park in your hometown. Your thesis statement at this stage might be "Butterflies are attracted to Panorama Park because of the flowers planted there."
• Keep in mind that you can adjust your thesis statement later if your research shows that it's inaccurate or inappropriate.
• To return to the butterfly example, your thesis statement means you are focusing your research on the park you named and the flowers that are planted in that park. If you find out through your research that the butterflies are not particularly fond of those flowers, you may have to adjust your thesis.

• Essentially, the scope of your project is how far you're going to go. For example, if you're writing a research paper on the role of the Germans in the American Revolutionary War, the role of the French in the same war would be outside the scope of your project.
• The scope of your project may be dictated to you, for example through an assignment sheet from your teacher or professor.
• Keep your scope in mind as you're planning your research strategy. You don't want to get bogged down in your research or spend too much time chasing after information that turns out to be irrelevant.
• If you find something that doesn't fall within the scope of your project, you can quickly discard it and move on to something else.

• For example, if you're doing research on the butterflies in a local park, surveys of local residents on how they feel about the butterflies probably isn't going to be helpful for you. However, research conducted by students at a nearby university might be beneficial.
• Focus on the type of source you need. If you're working on a political science or sociology research paper, polls and statistics may be relevant.
• However, if you're writing a paper in the hard sciences, you want to focus on scientific experiments and journal articles.
• If your teacher or professor has given you a reading list or identified good sources, start there. Consider it a jumping-off point rather than something to hit as a last resort.

• You may want to do basic internet searches just so you can get an idea of how effective your key words will be.
• For example, if you're writing a research paper on butterflies in a local park, the key word "butterfly" will bring up entirely too much information to be useful for you.
• Try to make your key words as specific as possible. Once you have your basic key words, look for synonyms of those words, or other related words or phrases.
• Write all the words you brainstorm on a sheet of paper so you don't forget them or lose track of them.
• Leave plenty of space around each word so you can take notes or make comments on the effectiveness of each word search as you research.

• One of the easiest methods to organize your research notes is to buy a stack of index cards. At the top of each card, you'll write the name of the source you're taking notes about.
• If you're required to use a particular citation format, you might want to create a formatted citation for the source at the top of the card. It will save you time later on when you're working on your final paper.
• Beyond index cards, you'll also want to gather highlighters, tabs or flags, and adhesive notes. These will help you keep track of information you find in print sources and organize your thoughts as you research.

Finding Good Sources

• Whether a source is considered primary depends on its relation to the topic. Some sources can be primary for one topic but not for another.
• For example, if you're doing research on D-Day, newspaper articles from June 6, 1944 or a few days afterward would be considered primary sources. However, newspaper articles from 2014 would not.
• Primary sources are the heart of research, and what differentiates an actual research project from a book report. If you're reading what someone else wrote about your topic and then summarizing what you read, that's a book report – not research.
• Focusing on primary sources means you may have to get off the internet and go to a library. Some primary sources, such as historic documents and newspapers, have been digitized and are available online. However, many have not.
• Additionally, databases and digital archives of primary sources often are only accessible by subscription. Public and university libraries often maintain subscriptions to these digital resources, but you'll have to use a library computer to get to them.

• If you're using the index-card method, jot down a few words to indicate the idea or fact you found in that source. Include a page number if available so you can cite to it directly or quickly find it again.
• If you see something in a source you want to quote, put it on your notecard. However, do something to make it stand out from the rest of your notes so you don't inadvertently include it in your report as your own words.
• For example, you may want to highlight a quote so it stands out at a glance as a quote, and not your own notes. You also could write it in a different color.
• Likewise, as you read a source you may have thoughts of your own, or additional questions you want to explore. Highlight those or write them in a different color so you can instantly recognize them as your own thoughts, not something that should be attributed to your source.

• The authors of secondary sources are not involved directly in the subject they're discussing – otherwise they would be primary sources.
• Rather, they are using their own knowledge and expertise to interpret, comment, analyze, investigate, or contextualize something.
• Secondary sources can be extremely valuable to you in making sense of the primary sources you've found, but it's important to avoid over-using them.
• With secondary sources, the most important thing to keep in mind when taking notes are ideas. If an author you read has an idea or theory about the topic you're researching that resonates with you, take out a note card and write that idea down. Then if you bring it up in your report you can credit them with having the idea.
• Taking a theory or idea you read somewhere else and acting like you came up with it is plagiarism. The most effective research builds on ideas and theories introduced by others, rather than stealing them.

• When something was published can be a strong indicator of whether you should rely on it. Ideally, you should check the date of publication before you even read the material.
• Whether dates matter depends on the subject you're researching. If you're researching a historical event, you'll likely be making use of material dated any time from the date of the event to the present.
• However, in other areas of research older sources are likely to be outdated and unusable. For example, if you were researching how schoolchildren use the internet, you wouldn't want to use an article written in the early 2000s as a source. Use of the internet has changed significantly since then.
• If an author is biased, it can undermine their authority, even if they have tremendous expertise on the subject you're researching.
• For example, suppose you're researching the butterflies in a local park. You find a lengthy, detailed, and informative article in a reputable science journal that discusses the very butterflies you're researching.
• However, the article is written by a scientist who is infamous for their denial of climate change. This position means they aren't well-respected by most of the scientific community.
• If their bias has little to nothing to do with the subject at hand, or if they wrote the butterfly article before they spoke out against climate change, you might still be able to use that source.
• If you do plan to use a source with a potentially biased or compromised author, use caution. If you're working on a project for school, ask your teacher or professor about it.

• These sources can be helpful for you in finding new articles and sources to use, but you typically don't want to cite them directly in your research.
• Newspaper and magazine articles also can be tertiary sources. Pay attention to what you're reading. If the writer is talking about, for example, a series of studies conducted at different universities that came to opposing conclusions, seek out the studies themselves rather than citing to that article.
• At the same time, tertiary sources can be a quick way to find new sources, and to understand more about a potentially dense article or book before you dive into it yourself.

Citing Your Research

• To understand plagiarism, put yourself in the author's shoes. They put a lot of work into their own project to come up with those words. Properly citing them acknowledges that work and shows that you appreciate it.
• Moreover, you are showing your teachers, editors, or colleagues that you are an upstanding and respectful member of the academic or journalistic community – and that you're making a productive contribution to the field of research.
• Be aware that many high schools, universities, and other publications use plagiarism checkers that will find words you have copied.
• Even if you think you won't get caught because you're using a relatively obscure source, the proliferation of plagiarism checkers makes it more likely that you will.

• Always provide a citation for facts – things that can be proven true or false. This is so your reader can confirm the fact that you've presented in your report. The best source for a fact is always a primary source.
• You also should cite opinions, analysis, speculation, or interpretation that is not your own. For example, suppose you have a source for your butterfly research that believes the butterflies are attracted to the park because people walk their dogs there and butterflies love dogs.
• If you want to use this opinion in your report, credit it to the specific person that said it. Using phrases like "studies show" or "some scientists believe" won't tell your reader anything.
• Instead, you might write "Meredith Monarch, butterfly expert at the University of Lepidoptera, speculated that butterflies frequent the park because they enjoy frolicking with the dogs there."

• Citation styles or formats may seem arbitrary to you, but for those in the field, the punctuation and formatting serve as short-hand. Someone familiar with a particular style can look at a citation and instantly know what each thing means.
• Different fields use different citation methods, which can be confusing if you've done research in several areas of study.
• For example, if you're writing a science paper, you typically will use APA (American Psychological Association) style.
• However, for a research paper in history or political science, you'll more likely use the Turabian style.

• Generally, you only want to have a direct quote from a source when the words themselves are of particular importance, or if the language is so original and succinct it would be nearly impossible to phrase it better.
• For example, if you're writing a research paper on the Gettysburg Address, you likely will include direct quotes from the speech itself, since those words would hold particular importance.
• A source's original words can provide color or enhance the meaning of your own thoughts, or can be quoted as an example of a particular line of thought.
• When you paraphrase, you're putting the information from a source into your own words, rather than quoting the source directly.
• Keep in mind that paraphrasing doesn't mean simply changing a few words to synonymous words, or altering the word order.
• For example, "Quick brown foxes jump over lazy dogs" would not be an acceptable paraphrase of "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."

Expert Q&A

You might also like.

• ↑ https://library.georgetown.edu/tutorials/research-guides/15-steps
• ↑ https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/narrowtopic
• ↑ https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/introduction
• ↑ https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/citingsources
• ↑ https://umassglobal.libguides.com/keywords
• ↑ https://umb.libguides.com/PrimarySources/secondary
• ↑ https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/researching/notes-from-research/
• ↑ https://open.lib.umn.edu/writingforsuccess/chapter/11-4-strategies-for-gathering-reliable-information/
• ↑ https://libguides.mit.edu/citing
• ↑ https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/choosingsources/chapter/primary-secondary-tertiary-sources/
• ↑ https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/useinformationcorrectly/avoiding-plagiarism/1/
• ↑ https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/wrd/chapter/crediting-your-sources/
• ↑ https://pitt.libguides.com/citationhelp
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/using_research/quoting_paraphrasing_and_summarizing/index.html

About This Article

To research effectively, look through library databases and digital archives to find helpful, reliable sources related to your topic. For example, if you’re researching something in the science field, you can visit your university library to look at articles in their scientific journals. While going through your sources, take notes by jotting down useful ideas on a notecard along with the page numbers you found them on. You may also want to highlight information in order to easily refer to what's important later on. For more tips from our co-author, including how to quote and cite a source responsibly, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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How to Conduct Effective Research: Tips and Tricks for Beginners

• 11 July 2023

Introduction

Research serves as the foundation for advances in every conceivable subject and is the cornerstone of progress. Starting a research journey can be intimidating for novices. But if you have the correct tools and approaches, it may be a worthwhile endeavor. This blog article seeks to instruct new researchers on how to conduct fruitful research by offering helpful advice and strategies to help them become productive researchers.

1. Define Your Research Question

Determining your research question is the first stage in conducting successful research. A well-crafted question gives you direction and helps you focus your efforts on a certain objective. Ask a question that is as specific as you can. A better inquiry may be, “How is climate change affecting crop production in California?” rather than, “What are the effects of climate change?”

2. Develop a Research Plan

A roadmap is essential for effective research. Describe your strategy while considering the type of information you require, potential sources, and a rough time frame. You can effectively manage your time by taking this step, which will also give your research structure and keep you on track.

3. Understand the Types of Research

There are two basic categories of research: primary and secondary. Primary research is when you collect your own first-hand information, such as through surveys or experiments. Using information gathered by another person, such as data from books, papers, or scholarly articles, is known as secondary research. Knowing the difference can help you choose the approach that best fits your research issue and available resources.

4. Use a Variety of Sources

Your research’s scope and depth are constrained if you rely solely on one type of source. Utilize a variety of credible websites, books, scholarly articles, podcasts, and even multimedia sources like documentaries. Remember that the trustworthiness of your study is influenced by the caliber of your sources.

5. Learn How to Use Databases Effectively

Your time will be much reduced if you learn how to use databases. Scholarly articles can be found in abundance in databases like JSTOR, PubMed, and Google Scholar, among others. Recall that various databases have various advantages; thus, investigate a few to determine which ones best meet your requirements.

6. Master Effective Search Techniques

The research process can be significantly sped up by using excellent search techniques. Learn how to broaden or narrow your search using Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), phrase searching using quotation marks, and truncation symbols. You can quickly uncover additional pertinent sources using these methods.

7. Evaluate Your Sources

Information is not all created equal. Always assess the trustworthiness and veracity of your sources. Verify the author’s credentials, the publishing date, and the veracity of the information. Websites with the.edu,.gov, or.org extensions are usually more trustworthy than those with the.com extension.

8. Keep Track of Your Sources

To properly reference your sources and prevent plagiarism, keeping track of them is crucial. Making a system (such as a spreadsheet) where you enter all the relevant citation data as you go is an excellent practice. Also very beneficial are reference management programs like EndNote, Mendeley, or Zotero..

9. Take Effective Notes

Making thorough notes can help you remember knowledge and draw connections across sources. To improve understanding, try to summarise the main ideas in your own words. To show the data and connections, you can also utilize charts, mind maps, or colors.

10. Analyze and Synthesize Your Findings

Making meaning of the information you have gathered involves analysis and synthesis. You must comprehend the situation, evaluate many points of view, spot trends, and reach conclusions. The development of your arguments or the development of your hypotheses depends on this step.

11. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

Finally, if you are stuck, don’t be afraid to seek for assistance. Teachers, classmates with more expertise, and librarians can all offer helpful advice. Keep in mind that even experienced researchers occasionally require help.

One size does not fit all when it comes to research. Different projects call for various approaches and plans. However, you can become a successful researcher by defining your question, creating a plan, utilizing a variety of sources, learning efficient search strategies, evaluating your sources, keeping track of references, taking good notes, analyzing and synthesizing data, and asking for assistance when necessary. The most crucial advice is to always be curious and to keep learning. Enjoy your research!

It’s important to keep in mind that understanding how to perform excellent research is a journey that requires constant practice, learning, and development. Research can be a fulfilling and enlightening experience as you gain experience and get more familiar with the procedure. Wishing you well as you pursue your research!

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College Info Geek

How to Do Research in 7 Simple Steps

C.I.G. is supported in part by its readers. If you buy through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Read more here.

It’s 2 am, and you’re on your fifth cup of coffee (or was it your sixth?). You’re crouched at a table in some dark corner of the library surrounded by fifteen open books. Equally as many tabs are open on your laptop, and you still haven’t written a word of the paper that’s due in 7 hours.

Many things can explain how you got to this point, including procrastination , poor organization , and a messy schedule .

Very often, however, the problem is a lack of research skills .

And it’s not your fault. High school does a poor job of teaching you how to do research, and most college classes do little better. It feels like you’re expected to figure it out through trial and error.

I think we can do better than that, however. In this guide, I’m going to show you the 7-step process for researching everything from a 10-page term paper to a final presentation. Not only will you learn how to do better research; you’ll also learn how to research more efficiently.

What Is Research?

Before we go any further, what  is  research?

At its core, research is an attempt to answer a question. This could be anything from “How can we reduce infant mortality rates?” to “Why does salt make food taste good?”

To answer your question, you consult books, academic papers, newspaper articles, historical records, or anything else that could be helpful. The broad term for these things is “sources.”

And, usually, once you’ve done the research, you present or summarize it in some way. In many cases, this means writing an essay or another type of scholarly paper, but it could also mean giving a presentation or even creating a YouTube video.

Even if you have no interest in academia, research is an extremely useful skill to learn. When you know how to do research, it’s much easier to improve your life and work more effectively . Instead of having to ask someone every time you have a question, research will help you solve problems yourself (and help others in turn).

Note:  Research can also mean conducting surveys, performing experiments, or going on archaeological digs. While these activities are crucial for advancing human knowledge, I won’t be discussing them here. This article focuses on the research you can do with only a library and an internet connection.

The 7 Steps of the Research Process

Research can feel overwhelming, but it’s more manageable when you break it down into steps. In my experience, the research process has seven main steps:

• Find a topic
• Refine your topic
• Find key sources
• Take notes on your sources
• Create your paper or presentation
• Do additional research as necessary
• Cite your sources

Let’s look at each of these steps in more detail.

1. Find a Topic

If you don’t have a topic, your research will be undirected and inefficient. You’ll spend hours reading dozens of sources, all because you didn’t take a few minutes to develop a topic.

How do you come up with a topic? My number one suggestion is to create a mind map.

A mind map is a visual way to generate ideas. Here’s how it works:

• Get a piece of paper and a pen. Make sure the paper isn’t too small — you want lots of room for your ideas.
• Draw an oval in the center of the paper.
• Inside that oval, write a super vague topic. Start with whatever your professor has assigned you.
• Draw lines from the oval towards the edges of the paper.
• Draw smaller ovals connected to each of these lines.
• Inside the smaller ovals, write more specific ideas/topics related to the central one.
• Repeat until you’ve found 3-5 topic ideas.

When I write it out step by step, it sounds kind of strange. But trust me, it works . Anytime I’m stuck on a writing assignment, this method is my go-to. It’s basically magic.

To see what mind mapping looks like in practice, check out this clip:

Want to create a digital mind map like the one Thomas uses in the video? Check out Coggle .

2. Refine Your Topic

Okay, so now you have a list of 3-5 topics. They’re all still pretty general, and you need to narrow them down to one topic that you can research in depth.

To do this, spend 15 minutes doing some general research on each topic. Specifically, take each topic and plug it into your library’s catalog and database search tools.

The details of this process will vary from library to library. This is where consulting a librarian can be super helpful. They can show you how to use the tools I mentioned, as well as point you to some you probably don’t know about.

Furthermore, I suggest you ask your professor for recommendations. In some cases, they may even have created a resource page specifically for your assignment.

Once you’ve found out where to search, type in your topic. I like to use a mixture of the library catalog, a general academic database like EBSCO Host , and a search on Google Scholar .

What exactly are you trying to find? Basically, you’re trying to find a topic with a sufficient quantity and variety of sources.

Ideally, you want something with both journal articles and books, as this demonstrates that lots of scholars are seriously engaging with the topic.

Of course, in some cases (if the topic is very cutting edge, for example), you may be only able to find journal articles. That’s fine, so long as there are enough perspectives available.

Using this technique, you’ll be able to quickly eliminate some topics. Be ruthless. If you’re not finding anything after 15 minutes, move on. And don’t get attached to a topic.

Tip: If you find two topics with equal numbers of sources available, ask your professor to help you break the tie. They can give you insight into which topic is super common (and thus difficult to write about originally), as well as which they find more interesting.

Now that you have your topic, it’s time to narrow down your sources.

3. Find Key Sources

If you’ve picked a good topic, then you probably have lots of sources to work with. This is both a blessing and a curse. A variety of sources shows that there’s something worth saying about your topic, and it also gives you plenty of material to cite.

But this abundance can quickly turn into a nightmare in which you spend hours reading dense, mind-numbing material without getting any closer to actually producing a paper.

How do you keep this from happening? Choose 3–5  key sources and focus on them intently. Sure, you may end up needing more sources, especially if this is a long paper or if the professor requires it. But if you start out trying to read 15 sources, you’re likely to get overwhelmed and frustrated.

Focusing on a few key sources is powerful because it:

• Lets you engage deeply with each source.
• Gives you a variety of perspectives.
• Points you to further resources.
• Keeps you focused.

4. Read and Take Notes

But what do you do with these sources, exactly? You need to read them the right way . Follow these steps to effectively read academic books and articles:

Go through the article and look at the section headings. If any words or terms jump out at you, make note of them. Also, glance at the beginning sentences of each section and paragraph to get an overall idea of the author’s argument.

The goal here isn’t to comprehend deeply, but to prime your mind for effective reading .

Write down any questions you have after skimming the article, as well as any general questions you hope the article can answer. Always keep your topic in mind.

Read Actively

Now, start reading. But don’t just passively go through the information like you’re scrolling through Tumblr. Read with a pen or pencil in hand , underlining any unfamiliar terms or interesting ideas.

Make notes in the margins about other sources or concepts that come to mind. If you’re reading a library book, you can make notes on a separate piece of paper.

Once you’ve finished reading, take a short break. Have a cup of tea or coffee. Go for a walk around the library. Stretch. Just get your mind away from the research for a moment without resorting to distracting, low-density fun .

Now come back to the article and look at the things you underlined or noted. Gather these notes and transfer them to a program like Evernote .

If you need to look up a term, do that, and then add that definition to your notes. Also, make note of any sources the author cites that look helpful.

But what if I’m reading a book?   Won’t this take forever?  No, because you’re not going to read the entire book.

For most research you’ll do in college, reading a whole academic book is overkill . Just skim the table of contents and the book itself to find chapters or sections that look relevant.

Then, read each of those in the same way you would read an article. Also, be sure to glance at the book’s bibliography, which is a goldmine for finding additional sources.

Note: The above method is a variation on the classic SQ3R method , adapted slightly since we’re not interested in taking notes from textbooks .

5. Create Your Paper or Presentation

“You can’t turn in raw research.”

Research is crucial to crafting a great paper or presentation, but it’s also a great way to procrastinate. I had classmates in college who would spend 8 hours researching a 5-page paper. That’s way too much!

At some point, you need to stop researching and start writing (or whatever method you’re using to present your research).

How do you decide when to stop researching? There’s no strict rule, but in general I wouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes per page of the final paper.

So if the final paper is supposed to be 10 pages, don’t spend more than 5 hours researching it.

6. Do Additional Research (As Necessary)

Once you’ve started writing the draft of your paper, you’ll probably find a few gaps. Maybe you realize that one scholar’s argument isn’t relevant to your paper, or that you need more information for a particular section. In this case, you are free to return to researching as necessary.

But again, beware the trap of procrastination masquerading as productivity! Only do as much additional research as you need to answer your question. Don’t get pulled into rabbit holes or dragged off on tangents. Get in there, do your research, and get back to writing .

To keep yourself focused, I suggest keeping a separate document or piece of paper nearby to note points that need additional research.

Every time you encounter such a point, make note of it in the document and then keep writing. Only stop when you can’t get any further without additional research.

It’s much better to get a full draft done first. Otherwise, you risk suffering a cognitive switching penalty , making it harder to regain your focus.

7. Cite Your Sources

Whether you’re creating an oral presentation, essay, or video, you’ll need to cite your sources. Plagiarism is a serious offense, so don’t take any chances.

How to cite your sources depends on the subject and the professor’s expectations. Chicago, MLA, and APA are the most common citation formats to use in college, but there are thousands more.

Luckily, you don’t need to painstakingly type each of your citations by hand or slog through a style manual. Instead, you can use a tool like Zotero to track and generate your citations. To make things even easier, install the Zotero Connector browser extension. It can automatically pull citation information from entries in an online library catalog.

Once you’ve collected all of your sources, Zotero can generate a properly formatted works cited page or bibliography at just the click of a button.

For help setting up and using Zotero, read this guide . If you need further assistance, ask a librarian.

Go Research With Confidence

I hope you now understand how to do research with more confidence. If you follow the procedures I’ve covered in this article, you’ll waste less time, perform more effective research, and ultimately have the material for a winning essay.

Curious about how to use your research to write a great research paper? Check out this guide .

Image Credits: picking book from shelf

Basic Steps in the Research Process

The following steps outline a simple and effective strategy for writing a research paper. Depending on your familiarity with the topic and the challenges you encounter along the way, you may need to rearrange these steps.

Step 1: Identify and develop your topic

Selecting a topic can be the most challenging part of a research assignment. Since this is the very first step in writing a paper, it is vital that it be done correctly. Here are some tips for selecting a topic:

• Select a topic within the parameters set by the assignment. Many times your instructor will give you clear guidelines as to what you can and cannot write about. Failure to work within these guidelines may result in your proposed paper being deemed unacceptable by your instructor.
• Select a topic of personal interest to you and learn more about it. The research for and writing of a paper will be more enjoyable if you are writing about something that you find interesting.
• Select a topic for which you can find a manageable amount of information. Do a preliminary search of information sources to determine whether existing sources will meet your needs. If you find too much information, you may need to narrow your topic; if you find too little, you may need to broaden your topic.
• Be original. Your instructor reads hundreds of research papers every year, and many of them are on the same topics (topics in the news at the time, controversial issues, subjects for which there is ample and easily accessed information). Stand out from your classmates by selecting an interesting and off-the-beaten-path topic.
• Still can't come up with a topic to write about? See your instructor for advice.

Once you have identified your topic, it may help to state it as a question. For example, if you are interested in finding out about the epidemic of obesity in the American population, you might pose the question "What are the causes of obesity in America ?" By posing your subject as a question you can more easily identify the main concepts or keywords to be used in your research.

Step 2 : Do a preliminary search for information

Before beginning your research in earnest, do a preliminary search to determine whether there is enough information out there for your needs and to set the context of your research. Look up your keywords in the appropriate titles in the library's Reference collection (such as encyclopedias and dictionaries) and in other sources such as our catalog of books, periodical databases, and Internet search engines. Additional background information may be found in your lecture notes, textbooks, and reserve readings. You may find it necessary to adjust the focus of your topic in light of the resources available to you.

Step 3: Locate materials

With the direction of your research now clear to you, you can begin locating material on your topic. There are a number of places you can look for information:

If you are looking for books, do a subject search in One Search . A Keyword search can be performed if the subject search doesn't yield enough information. Print or write down the citation information (author, title,etc.) and the location (call number and collection) of the item(s). Note the circulation status. When you locate the book on the shelf, look at the books located nearby; similar items are always shelved in the same area. The Aleph catalog also indexes the library's audio-visual holdings.

Use the library's  electronic periodical databases  to find magazine and newspaper articles. Choose the databases and formats best suited to your particular topic; ask at the librarian at the Reference Desk if you need help figuring out which database best meets your needs. Many of the articles in the databases are available in full-text format.

Use search engines ( Google ,  Yahoo , etc.) and subject directories to locate materials on the Internet. Check the  Internet Resources  section of the NHCC Library web site for helpful subject links.

Step 4: Evaluate your sources

See the  CARS Checklist for Information Quality   for tips on evaluating the authority and quality of the information you have located. Your instructor expects that you will provide credible, truthful, and reliable information and you have every right to expect that the sources you use are providing the same. This step is especially important when using Internet resources, many of which are regarded as less than reliable.

Step 5: Make notes

Consult the resources you have chosen and note the information that will be useful in your paper. Be sure to document all the sources you consult, even if you there is a chance you may not use that particular source. The author, title, publisher, URL, and other information will be needed later when creating a bibliography.

Step 6: Write your paper

Begin by organizing the information you have collected. The next step is the rough draft, wherein you get your ideas on paper in an unfinished fashion. This step will help you organize your ideas and determine the form your final paper will take. After this, you will revise the draft as many times as you think necessary to create a final product to turn in to your instructor.

Step 7: Cite your sources properly

Give credit where credit is due; cite your sources.

Citing or documenting the sources used in your research serves two purposes: it gives proper credit to the authors of the materials used, and it allows those who are reading your work to duplicate your research and locate the sources that you have listed as references. The  MLA  and the  APA  Styles are two popular citation formats.

Failure to cite your sources properly is plagiarism. Plagiarism is avoidable!

Step 8: Proofread

The final step in the process is to proofread the paper you have created. Read through the text and check for any errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Make sure the sources you used are cited properly. Make sure the message that you want to get across to the reader has been thoroughly stated.

Additional research tips:

• Work from the general to the specific -- find background information first, then use more specific sources.
• Don't forget print sources -- many times print materials are more easily accessed and every bit as helpful as online resources.
• The library has books on the topic of writing research papers at call number area LB 2369.
• If you have questions about the assignment, ask your instructor.
• If you have any questions about finding information in the library, ask the librarian.

Contact Information

Craig larson.

Librarian 763-424-0733 [email protected] Zoom:  myzoom   Available by appointment

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How to Conduct Responsible Research: A Guide for Graduate Students

Alison l. antes.

1 Department of Medicine, Division of General Medical Sciences, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, 314-362-6006

Leonard B. Maggi, Jr.

2 Department of Medicine, Division of Molecular Oncology, Siteman Cancer Center, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, 314-362-4102

Researchers must conduct research responsibly for it to have an impact and to safeguard trust in science. Essential responsibilities of researchers include using rigorous, reproducible research methods, reporting findings in a trustworthy manner, and giving the researchers who contributed appropriate authorship credit. This “how-to” guide covers strategies and practices for doing reproducible research and being a responsible author. The article also covers how to utilize decision-making strategies when uncertain about the best way to proceed in a challenging situation. The advice focuses especially on graduate students but is appropriate for undergraduates and experienced researchers. The article begins with an overview of the responsible conduct of research, research misconduct, and ethical behavior in the scientific workplace. The takeaway message is that responsible conduct of research requires a thoughtful approach to doing research to ensure trustworthy results and conclusions and that researchers receive fair credit.

INTRODUCTION

Doing research is stimulating and fulfilling work. Scientists make discoveries to build knowledge and solve problems, and they work with other dedicated researchers. Research is a highly complex activity, so it takes years for beginning researchers to learn everything they need to know to do science well. Part of this large body of knowledge is learning how to do research responsibly. Our purpose in this article is to provide graduate students a guide for how to perform responsible research. Our advice is also relevant to undergraduate researchers and for principal investigators (PIs), postdocs, or other researchers who mentor beginning researchers and wish to share our advice.

We begin by introducing some fundamentals about the responsible conduct of research (RCR), research misconduct, and ethical behavior. We focus on how to do reproducible science and be a responsible author. We provide practical advice for these topics and present scenarios to practice thinking through challenges in research. Our article concludes with decision-making strategies for addressing complex problems.

What is the responsible conduct of research?

To be committed to RCR means upholding the highest standards of honesty, accuracy, efficiency, and objectivity ( Steneck, 2007 ). Each day, RCR requires engaging in research in a conscientious, intentional fashion that yields the best science possible ( “Research Integrity is Much More Than Misconduct,” 2019 ). We adopt a practical, “how-to” approach, discussing the behaviors and habits that yield responsible research. However, some background knowledge about RCR is helpful to frame our discussion.

The scientific community uses many terms to refer to ethical and responsible behavior in research: responsible conduct of research, research integrity, scientific integrity, and research ethics ( National Academies of Science, 2009 ; National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine, 2017 ; Steneck, 2007 ). A helpful way to think about these concepts is “doing good science in a good manner” ( DuBois & Antes, 2018 ). This means that the way researchers do their work, from experimental procedures to data analysis and interpretation, research reporting, and so on, leads to trustworthy research findings and conclusions. It also includes respectful interactions among researchers both within research teams (e.g., between peers, mentors and trainees, and collaborators) and with researchers external to the team (e.g., peer reviewers). We expand on trainee-mentor relationships and interpersonal dynamics with labmates in a companion article ( Antes & Maggi, 2021 ). When research involves human or animal research subjects, RCR includes protecting the well-being of research subjects.

We do not cover all potential RCR topics but focus on what we consider fundamentals for graduate students. Common topics covered in texts and courses on RCR include the following: authorship and publication; collaboration; conflicts of interest; data management, sharing, and ownership; intellectual property; mentor and trainee responsibilities; peer review; protecting human subjects; protecting animal subjects; research misconduct; the role of researchers in society; and laboratory safety. A number of topics prominently discussed among the scientific community in recent years are also relevant to RCR. These include the reproducibility of research ( Baker, 2016 ; Barba, 2016 ; Winchester, 2018 ), diversity and inclusion in science ( Asplund & Welle, 2018 ; Hofstra et al., 2020 ; Meyers, Brown, Moneta-Koehler, & Chalkley, 2018 ; National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine, 2018a ; Roper, 2019 ), harassment and bullying ( Else, 2018 ; National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine, 2018b ; “ No Place for Bullies in Science,” 2018 ), healthy research work environments ( Norris, Dirnagl, Zigmond, Thompson-Peer, & Chow, 2018 ; “ Research Institutions Must Put the Health of Labs First,” 2018 ), and the mental health of graduate students ( Evans, Bira, Gastelum, Weiss, & Vanderford, 2018 ).

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) ( National Institutes of Health, 2009 ) and the National Science Foundation ( National Science Foundation, 2017 ) have formal policies indicating research trainees must receive education in RCR. Researchers are accountable to these funding agencies and the public which supports research through billions in tax dollars annually. The public stands to benefit from, or be harmed by, research. For example, the public may be harmed if medical treatments or social policies are based on untrustworthy research findings. Funding for research, participation in research, and utilization of the fruits of research all rely on public trust ( Resnik, 2011 ). Trustworthy findings are also essential for good stewardship of scarce resources ( Emanuel, Wendler, & Grady, 2000 ). Researchers are further accountable to their peers, colleagues, and scientists more broadly. Trust in the work of other researchers is essential for science to advance. Finally, researchers are accountable for complying with the rules and policies of their universities or research institutions, such as rules about laboratory safety, bullying and harassment, and the treatment of animal research subjects.

What is research misconduct?

When researchers intentionally misrepresent or manipulate their results, these cases of scientific fraud often make the news headlines ( Chappell, 2019 ; O’Connor, 2018 ; Park, 2012 ), and they can seriously undermine public trust in research. These cases also harm trust within the scientific community.

The U.S. defines research misconduct as fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism (FFP) ( Department of Health and Human Services, 2005 ). FFP violate the fundamental ethical principle of honesty. Fabrication is making up data, and falsification is manipulating or changing data or results so they are no longer truthful. Plagiarism is a form of dishonesty because it includes using someone’s words or ideas and portraying them as your own. When brought to light, misconduct involves lengthy investigations and serious consequences, such as ineligibility to receive federal research funding, loss of employment, paper retractions, and, for students, withdrawal of graduate degrees.

One aspect of responsible behavior includes addressing misconduct if you observe it. We suggest a guide titled “Responding to Research Wrongdoing: A User-Friendly Guide” that provides advice for thinking about your options if you think you have observed misconduct ( Keith-Spiegel, Sieber, & Koocher, 2010 ). Your university will have written policies and procedures for investigating allegations of misconduct. Making an allegation is very serious. As Keith-Spiegel et al.’s guide indicates, it is important to know the evidence that supports your claim, and what to expect in the process. We encourage, if possible, talking to the persons involved first. For example, one of us knew of a graduate student who reported to a journal editor their suspicion of falsified data in a manuscript. It turned out that the student was incorrect. Going above the PI directly to the editor ultimately led to the PI leaving the university, and the student had a difficult time finding a new lab to complete their degree. If the student had first spoken to the PI and lab members, they could have learned that their assumptions about the data in the paper were wrong. In turn, they could have avoided accusing the PI of a serious form of scientific misconduct—making up data—and harming everyone’s scientific career.

What shapes ethical behavior in the scientific workplace?

Responsible conduct of research and research misconduct are two sides of a continuum of behavior—RCR upholds the ideals of research and research misconduct violates them. Problematic practices that fall in the middle but are not defined formally as research misconduct have been labeled as detrimental research practices ( National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine, 2017 ). Researchers conducting misleading statistical analyses or PIs providing inadequate supervision are examples of the latter. Research suggests that characteristics of individual researchers and research environments explain (un)ethical behavior in the scientific workplace ( Antes et al., 2007 ; Antes, English, Baldwin, & DuBois, 2018 ; Davis, Riske-Morris, & Diaz, 2007 ; DuBois et al., 2013 ).

These two influences on ethical behavior are helpful to keep in mind when thinking about your behavior. When people think about their ethical behavior, they think about their personal values and integrity and tend to overlook the influence of their environment. While “being a good person” and having the right intentions are essential to ethical behavior, the environment also has an influence. In addition, knowledge of standards for ethical research is important for ethical behavior, and graduate students new to research do not yet know everything they need to. They also have not fully refined their ethical decision-making skills for solving professional problems. We discuss strategies for ethical decision-making in the final section of this article ( McIntosh, Antes, & DuBois, 2020 ).

The research environment influences ethical behavior in a number of ways. For example, if a research group explicitly discusses high standards for research, people will be more likely to prioritize these ideals in their behavior ( Plemmons et al., 2020 ). A mentor who sets a good example is another important factor ( Anderson et al., 2007 ). Research labs must also provide individuals with adequate training, supervision and feedback, opportunities to discuss data, and the psychological safety to feel comfortable communicating about problems, including mistakes ( Antes, Kuykendall, & DuBois, 2019a , 2019b ). On the other hand, unfair research environments, inadequate supervision, poor communication, and severe stress and anxiety may undermine ethical decision-making and behavior; particularly when many of these factors exist together. Thus, (un)ethical behavior is a complex interplay of individual factors (e.g., personality, stress, decision-making skills) and the environment.

For graduate students, it is important to attend to what you are learning and how the environment around you might influence your behavior. You do not know what you do not know, and you necessarily rely on others to teach you responsible practices. So, it is important to be aware. Ultimately, you are accountable for your behavior. You cannot just say “I didn’t know.” Rather, just like you are curious about your scientific questions, maintain a curiosity about responsible behavior as a researcher. If you feel uncomfortable with something, pay attention to that feeling, speak to someone you trust, and seek out information about how to handle the situation. In what follows, we cover key tips for responsible behavior in the areas of reproducibility and authorship that we hope will help you as you begin.

HOW TO DO REPRODUCIBLE SCIENCE

The foremost responsibility of scientists is to ensure they conduct research in such a manner that the findings are trustworthy. Reproducibility is the ability to duplicate results ( Goodman, Fanelli, & Ioannidis, 2016 ). The scientific community has called for greater openness, transparency, and rigor as key remedies for lack of reproducibility ( Munafò et al., 2017 ). As a graduate student, essential to fostering reproducibility is the rigor of your approach to doing experiments and handling data. We discuss how to utilize research protocols, document experiments in a lab notebook, and handle data responsibly.

Utilize research protocols

1. learn and utilize the lab’s protocols.

Research protocols describe the step-by-step procedures for doing an experiment. They are critical for the quality and reproducibility of experiments. Lab members must learn and follow the lab’s protocols with the understanding that they may need to make adjustments based on the requirements of a specific experiment.

Also, it is important to distinguish between the experiment you are performing and analyzing the data from that experiment. For example, the experiment you want to perform might be to determine if loss of a gene blocks cell growth. Several protocols, each with pros and cons, will allow you to examine “cell growth.” Using the wrong experimental protocol can produce data that leads to muddled conclusions. In this example, the gene does block cell growth, but the experiment used to produce the data that you analyze to understand cell growth is wrong, thus giving a result that is a false negative.

When first joining a lab, it is essential to commit to learning the protocols necessary for your assigned research project. Researchers must ensure they are proficient in executing a protocol and can perform their experiments reliably. If you do not feel confident with a protocol, you should do practice runs if possible. Repetition is the best way to work through difficulties with protocols. Often it takes several attempts to work through the steps of a protocol before you will be comfortable performing it. Asking to watch another lab member perform the protocol is also helpful. Be sure to watch closely how steps are performed, as often there are minor steps taken that are not written down. Also, experienced lab members may do things as second nature and not think to explicitly mention them when working through the protocol. Ask questions of other lab members so that you can improve your knowledge and gain confidence with a protocol. It is better to ask a question than potentially ruin a valuable or hard-to-get sample.

Be cautious of differences in the standing protocols in the lab and how you actually perform the experiment. Even the most minor deviations can seriously impact the results and reproducibility of an experiment. As mentioned above, often there are minor things that are done that might not be listed in the protocol. Paying attention and asking questions are the best ways to learn, in addition to adding notes to the protocol if you find minor details are missing.

2. Develop your own protocols

Often you will find that a project requires a protocol that has not been performed in the lab. If performing a new experiment in the lab and no protocol exists, find a protocol and try it. Protocols can be obtained from many different sources. A great source is other labs on campus, as you can speak directly to the person who performs the experiment. There are many journal sources as well, such as Current Protocols, Nature Protocols, Nature Methods, and Cell STAR Methods . These methods journals provide the most detailed protocols for experiments often with troubleshooting tips. Scientific papers are the most common source of protocols. However, keep in mind that due to the common brevity of methods sections, they often omit crucial details or reference other papers that may not contain a complete description of the protocol.

3. Handle mistakes or problems promptly

At some point, everyone encounters problems with a protocol, or realizes they made a mistake. You should be prepared to handle this situation by being able to detail exactly how you performed the experiment. Did you skip a step? Shorten or lengthen a time point? Did you have to make a new buffer or borrow a labmate’s buffer? There are too many ways an experiment can go wrong to list here but being able to recount all the steps you performed in detail will help you work through the problem. Keep in mind that often the best way to understand how to perform an experiment is learning from when something goes wrong. This situation requires you to critically think through what was done and understand the steps taken. When everything works perfectly, it is easy to pay less attention to the details, which can lead to problems down the line.

It is up to you to be attentive and meticulous in the lab. Paying attention to the details may feel like a pain at first, or even seem overwhelming. Practice and repetition will help this focus on details become a natural part of your lab work. Ultimately, this skill will be essential to being a responsible scientist.

Document experiments in a lab notebook

1. recognize the importance of a lab notebook.

Maintaining detailed documentation in a lab notebook allows researchers to keep track of their experiments and generation of data. This detailed documentation helps you communicate about your research with others in the lab, and serves as a basis for preparing publications. It also provides a lasting record for the lab that exists beyond your time in the lab. After graduate students leave the lab, sometimes it is necessary to go back to the results of older experiments. A complete and detailed notebook is essential, or all of the time, effort, and resources are lost.

2. Learn the note-keeping practices in your lab

When you enter a new lab, it is important to understand how the lab keeps notebooks and the expectations for documentation. Being conscientious about documentation will make you a better scientist. In some labs, the PI might routinely examine your notebook, while in other labs you may be expected to maintain a notebook, but it may not be regularly viewed by others. It is tempting to become relaxed in documentation if you think your notebook may not be reviewed. Avoid this temptation; documentation of your ideas and process will improve your ability to think critically about research. Further, even if the PI or lab members do not physically view your notebook, you will need to communicate with them about your experiments. This documentation is necessary to communicate effectively about your work.

3. Organize your lab notebook

Different labs use different formats; some use electronic notebooks while others handwritten notebooks. The contents of a good notebook include the purpose of the experiment, the details of the experimental procedure, the data, and thoughts about the results. To effectively document your experiment, there are 5 critical questions that the information you record should be able to answer.

• Why I am doing this experiment? (purpose)
• What did I do to perform the experiment? (protocol)
• What are the results of what I did? (data, graphs)
• What do I think about the results?
• What do I think are the next steps?

We also recommend a table of contents. It will make the information more useful to you and the lab in the future. The table of contents should list the title of the experiment, the date(s) it was performed, and the page numbers on which it is recorded. Also, make sure that you write clearly and provide a legend or explanation of any shorthand or non-standard abbreviation you use. Often labs will have a combination of written lab notebooks and electronic data. It is important to reference where electronic data are located that go with each experiment. The idea is to make it as easy as possible to understand what you did and where to find all the data (electronic and hard copy) that accompanies your experiment.

Keeping a lab notebook becomes easier with practice. It can be thought of almost like journaling about your experiment. Sometimes people think of it as just a place to paste their protocol and a graph or data. We strongly encourage you to include your thoughts about why you made the decisions you made when conducting the experiment and to document your thoughts about next steps.

4. Commit to doing it the right way

A common reason to become lax in documentation is feeling rushed for time. Although documentation takes time, it saves time in the long-run and fosters good science. Without good notes, you will waste time trying to recall precisely what you did, reproduce your findings, and remember what you thought would be important next steps. The lab notebook helps you think about your research critically and keep your thoughts together. It can also save you time later when writing up results for publication. Further, well-documented data will help you draft a cogent and rigorous dissertation.

Handle data responsibly

1. keep all data.

Data are the product of research. Data include raw data, processed data, analyzed data, figures, and tables. Many data today are electronic, but not all. Generating data requires a lot of time and resources and researchers must treat data with care. The first essential tip is to keep all data. Do not discard data just because the experiment did not turn out as expected. A lot of experiments do not turn out to yield publishable data, but the results are still important for informing next steps.

Always keep the original, raw data. That is, as you process and analyze data, always maintain an unprocessed version of the original data.

Universities and funding agencies have data retention policies. These policies specify the number of years beyond a grant that data must be kept. Some policies also indicate researchers need to retain original data that served as the basis for a publication for a certain number of years. Therefore, your data will be important well beyond your time in graduate school. Most labs require you to keep samples for reanalysis until a paper is published, then the analyzed data are enough. If you leave a lab before a paper is accepted for publication, you are responsible for ensuring your data and original samples are well documented for others to find and use.

2. Document all data

In addition to keeping all data, data must be well-organized and documented. This means that no matter the way you keep your data (e.g., electronic or in written lab notebooks), there is a clear guide—in your lab notebook, a binder, or on a lab hard drive—to finding the data for a particular experiment. For example, it must be clear which data produced a particular graph. Version control of data is also critical. Your documentation should include “metadata” (data about your data) that tracks versions of the data. For example, as you edit data for a table, you should save separate versions of the tables, name the files sequentially, and note the changes that were made to each version.

3. Backup your data

You should backup electronic data regularly. Ideally, your lab has a shared server or cloud storage to backup data. If you are supposed to put your data there, make sure you do it! When you leave the lab, it must be possible to find your data.

4. Perform data analysis honestly and competently

Inappropriate use of statistics is a major concern in the scientific community, as the results and conclusions will be misleading if done incorrectly ( DeMets, 1999 ). Some practices are clearly an abuse of statistics, while other inappropriate practices stem from lack of knowledge. For example, a practice called “p-hacking” describes when researchers “collect or select data or statistical analyses until nonsignificant results become significant” ( Head, Holman, Lanfear, Kahn, & Jennions, 2015 ). In addition to avoiding such misbehavior, it is essential to be proficient with statistics to ensure you do statistical procedures appropriately. Learning statistical procedures and analyzing data takes many years of practice, and your statistics courses may only cover the basics. You will need to know when to consult others for help. In addition to consulting members in your lab or your PI, your university may have statistical experts who can provide consultations.

5. Master pressure to obtain favored results

When you conduct an experiment, the results are the results. As a beginning researcher, it is important to be prepared to manage the frustration of experiments not turning out as expected. It is also important to manage the real or perceived pressure to produce favored results. Investigators can become wedded to a hypothesis, and they can have a difficult time accepting the results. Sometimes you may feel this pressure coming from yourself; for example, if you want to please your PI, or if you want to get results for a certain publication. It is important to always follow the data no matter where it leads.

If you do feel pressure, this situation can be uncomfortable and stressful. If you have been meticulous and followed the above recommendations, this can be one great safeguard. You will be better able to confidently communicate your results to the PI because of your detailed documentation, and you will be more confident in your procedures if the possibility of error is suggested. Typically, with enough evidence that the unexpected results are real, the PI will concede. We recommend seeking the support of friends or colleagues to vent and cope with stress. In the rare case that the PI does not relent, you could turn to an advisor outside the lab if you need advice about how to proceed. They can help you look at the data objectively and also help you think about the interpersonal aspects of navigating this situation.

6. Communicate about your data in the lab

A critical element of reproducible research is communication in the lab. Ideally, there are weekly or bi-weekly meetings to discuss data. You need to develop your communication skills for writing and speaking about data. Often you and your labmates will discuss experimental issues and results informally during the course of daily work. This is an excellent way to hone critical thinking and communication skills about data.

Scenario 1 – The Protocol is Not Working

At the beginning of a rotation during their first year, a graduate student is handed a lab notebook and a pen and is told to keep track of their work. There does not appear to be a specific format to follow. There are standard lab protocols that everyone follows, but minor tweaks to the protocols do not seem to be tracked from experiment to experiment in the standard lab protocol nor in other lab notebooks. After two weeks of trying to follow one of the standard lab protocols, the student still cannot get the experiment to work. The student has included the appropriate positive and negative controls which are failing, making the experiment uninterpretable. After asking others in the lab for help, the graduate student learns that no one currently in the lab has performed this particular experiment. The former lab member who had performed the experiment only lists the standard protocol in their lab notebook.

How should the graduate student start to solve the problem?

Speaking to the PI would be the next logical step. As a first-year student in a lab rotation, the PI should expect this type of situation and provide additional troubleshooting guidance. It is possible that the PI may want to see how the new graduate student thinks critically and handles adversity in the lab. Rather than giving an answer, the PI might ask the student to work through the problem. The PI should give guidance, but it may not be an immediate fix for the problem. If the PI’s suggestions fail to correct the problem, asking a labmate or the PI for the contact information of the former lab member who most recently performed the experiment would be a reasonable next step. The graduate student’s conversations with the PI and labmates in this situation will help them learn a lot about how the people in the lab interact.

Most of the answers for these types of problems will require you as a graduate student to take the initiative to answer. They will require your effort and ingenuity to talk to other lab members, other labs at the university, and even scour the literature for alternatives. While labs have standard protocols, there are multiple ways to do many experiments, and working out an alternative will teach you more than when everything works. Having to troubleshoot problems will result in better standard protocols in the lab and better science.

HOW TO BE A RESPONSIBLE AUTHOR

Researchers communicate their findings via peer-reviewed publications, and publications are important for advancing in a research career. Many graduate students will first author or co-author publications in graduate school. For good advice on how to write a research manuscript, consult the Current Protocols article “How to write a research manuscript” ( Frank, 2018 ). We focus on the issues of assigning authors and reporting your findings responsibly. First, we describe some important basics: journal impact factors, predatory journals, and peer review.

What are journal impact factors?

It is helpful to understand journal impact factors. There is criticism about an overemphasis on impact factors for evaluating the quality or importance of researchers’ work ( DePellegrin & Johnston, 2015 ), but they remain common for this purpose. Journal impact factors reflect the average number of times articles in a journal were cited in the last two years. Higher impact factors place journals at a higher rank. Approximately 2% of journals have an impact factor of 10 or higher. For example, Cell, Science, and Nature have impact factors of approximately 39, 42, and 43, respectively. Journals can be great journals but have lower impact factors; often this is because they focus on a smaller specialty field. For example, Journal of Immunology and Oncogene are respected journals, but their impact factors are about 4 and 7, respectively.

Research trainees often want to publish in journals with the highest possible impact factor because they expect this to be viewed favorably when applying to future positions. We encourage you to bear in mind that many different journals publish excellent science and focus on publishing where your work will reach the desired audience. Also, keep in mind that while a high impact factor can direct you to respectable, high-impact science, it does not guarantee that the science in the paper is good or even correct. You must critically evaluate all papers you read no matter the impact factor.

What are predatory journals?

Predatory journals have flourished over the past few years as publishing science has moved online. An international panel defined predatory journals as follows ( Grudniewicz et al., 2019 ):

Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices. (p. 211)

Often young researchers receive emails soliciting them to submit their work to a journal. There are typically small fees (around $99 US) requested but these fees will be much lower than open access fees of reputable journals (often around $2000 US). A warning sign of a predatory journal is outlandish promises, such as 24-hour peer review or immediate publication. You can find a list of predatory journals created by a postdoc in Europe at BeallsList.net ( “Beall’s List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers,” 2020 ).

What is peer review?

Peer reviewers are other scientists who have the expertise to evaluate a manuscript. Typically 2 or 3 reviewers evaluate a manuscript. First, an editor performs an initial screen of the manuscript to ensure its appropriateness for the journal and that it meets basic quality standards. At this stage, an editor can decide to reject the manuscript and not send it to review. Not sending a paper for peer review is common in the highest impact journals that receive more submissions per year than can be reviewed and published. For average-impact journals and specialty journals, typically your paper will be sent for peer review.

In general, peer review focuses on three aspects of a manuscript: research design and methods, validity of the data and conclusions, and significance. Peer reviewers assess the merit and rigor of the research design and methodology, and they evaluate the overall validity of the results, interpretations, and conclusions. Essentially, reviewers want to ensure that the data support the claims. Additionally, reviewers evaluate the overall significance, or contribution, of the findings, which involves the novelty of the research and the likelihood that the findings will advance the field. Significance standards vary between journals. Some journals are open to publishing findings that are incremental advancements in a field, while others want to publish only what they deem as major advancements. This feature can distinguish the highest impact journals which seek the most significant advancements and other journals that tend to consider a broader range of work as long as it is scientifically sound. It is important to keep in mind that determining at the stage of review and publication whether a paper is “high impact” is quite subjective. In reality, this can only really be determined in retrospect.

The key ethical issues in peer review are fairness, objectivity, and confidentiality ( Shamoo & Resnik, 2015 ). Peer reviewers are to evaluate the manuscript on its merits and not based on biases related to the authors or the science itself. If reviewers have a conflict of interest, this should be disclosed to the editor. Confidentiality of peer review means that the reviewers should keep private the information; they should not share the information with others or use it to their benefit. Reviewers can ultimately recommend that the manuscript is rejected, revised, and resubmitted (major or minor revisions), or accepted. The editor evaluates the reviewers’ feedback and makes a judgment about rejecting, accepting, or requesting a revision. Sometimes PIs will ask experienced graduate students to assist with peer reviewing a manuscript. This is a good learning opportunity. The PI should disclose to the editor that they included a trainee in preparing the review.

Assign authorship fairly

Authorship gives credit to the people who contributed to the research. This includes thinking of the ideas, designing and performing experiments, interpreting the results, and writing the paper. Two key questions regarding authorship include: 1 - Who will be an author? 2 - What will be the order in which authors are listed? These seem simple on the surface but can get quite complex.

1. Know authorship guidelines

Authorship guidelines published by journals, professional societies, and universities communicate key principles of authorship and standards for earning authorship. The core ethical principle of assigning authorship is fairness in who receives credit for the work. The people who contributed to the work should get credit for it. This seems simply enough, but determining authorship can (and often does) create conflict.

Many universities have authorship guidelines, and you should know the policies at your university. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) provides four criteria for determining who should be an author ( International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, 2020 ). These criteria indicate that an author should do all of the following: 1) make “substantial contributions” to the development of the idea or research design, or to acquiring, analyzing, or interpreting the data, 2) write the manuscript or revise it a substantive way, 3) give approval of the final manuscript (i.e., before it is submitted for review, and after it is revised, if necessary), and 4) agree to be responsible for any questions about the accuracy or integrity of the research.

Several types of authorship violate these guidelines and should be avoided. Guest authorship is when respected researchers are added out of appreciation, or to have the manuscript be perceived more favorably to get it published or increase its impact. Gift authorship is giving authorship to reward an individual, or as a favor. Ghost authorship is when someone made significant contributions to the paper but is not listed as an author. To increase transparency, some journals require authors to indicate how each individual contributed to the research and manuscript.

2. Apply the guidelines

Conflicts often arise from disagreements about how much people contributed to the research and whether those contributions merit authorship. The best approach is an open, honest, and ongoing discussion about authorship, which we discuss in #3 below. To have effective, informed conversations about authorship, you must understand how to apply the guidelines to your specific situation. The following is a simple rule of thumb that indicates there are three components of authorship. We do not list giving final approval of the manuscript and agreeing to be accountable, but we do consider these essentials of authorship.

• Thinking – this means contributing to the ideas leading to the hypothesis of the work, designing experiments to address the hypothesis, and/or analyzing the results in the larger context of the literature in the field.
• Doing – this means performing and analyzing the experiments.
• Writing – this means editing a draft, or writing the entire paper. The first author often writes the entire first draft.

In our experience, a first author would typically do all three. They also usually coordinate the writing and editing process. Co-authors are typically very involved in at least two of the three, and are somewhat involved in the other. The PI, who oversees and contributes to all three, is often the last, or “senior author.” The “senior author” is typically the “corresponding author”—the person listed as the individual to contact about the paper. The other co-authors are listed between the first and senior author either alphabetically, or more commonly, in order from the largest to smallest contribution.

Problems in assigning authorship typically arise due to people’s interpretations of #1 (thinking) and #2 (doing)—what and how much each individual contributed to a project’s design, execution, and analysis. Different fields or PIs may have their own slight variations on these guidelines. The potential conflicts associated with assigning authorship lead to the most common recommendation for responsibly assigning authorship: discuss authorship expectations early and revisit them during the project.

3. Discuss authorship with your collaborators

Publications are important for career advancement, so you can see why people might be worried about fairness in assigning authorship. If the problem arises from a lack of a shared understanding about contributions to the research, the only way to clarify this is an open discussion. This discussion should ideally take place very early at the beginning of a project, and should be ongoing. Hopefully you work in a laboratory that makes these discussions a natural part of the research process; this makes it much easier to understand the expectations upfront.

We encourage you to speak up about your interest in making a contribution that would merit authorship, especially if you want to earn first authorship. Sometimes norms about authoring papers in a lab make it clear you are expected to first and co-author publications, but it is best to communicate your interest in earning authorship. If the project is not yours, but you wish to collaborate, you can inquire what you may be able to contribute that would merit authorship.

If it is not a norm in your lab to discuss authorship throughout the life of projects, then as a graduate student you may feel reluctant to speak up. You could initiate a conversation with a more senior graduate student, a postdoc, or your PI, depending on the dynamics in the group. You could ask generally about how the lab approaches assignment of authorship, but discussing a specific project and paper may be best. It may feel awkward to ask, but asking early is less uncomfortable than waiting until the end of the project. If the group is already drafting a manuscript and you are told that your contribution is insufficient for authorship, this situation is much more discouraging than if you had asked earlier about what is expected to earn authorship.

How to report findings responsibly

The most significant responsibility of authors is to present their research accurately and honestly. Deliberately presenting misleading information is clearly unethical, but there are significant judgment calls about how to present your research findings. For example, an author can mislead by overstating the conclusions given what the data support.

1. Commit to presenting your findings honestly

Any good scientific manuscript writer will tell you that you need to “tell a good story.” This means that your paper is organized and framed to draw the reader into the research and convince them of the importance of the findings. But, this story must be sound and justified by the data. Other authors are presenting their findings in the best, most “publishable” light, so it is a balancing act to be persuasive but also responsible in presenting your findings in a trustworthy manner. To present your findings honestly, you must be conscious of how you interpret your data and present your conclusions so that they are accurate and not overstated.

One misbehavior known as “HARKing,” Hypothesis After the Results are Known, occurs when hypotheses are created after seeing the results of an experiment, but they are presented as if they were defined prior to collecting the data ( Munafò et al., 2017 ). This practice should be avoided. HARKing may be driven, in part, by a concern in scientific publishing known as publication bias. This bias is a preference that reviewers, editors, and researchers have for papers describing positive findings instead of negative findings ( Carroll, Toumpakari, Johnson, & Betts, 2017 ). This preference can lead to manipulating one’s practices, such as by HARKing, so that positive findings can be reported.

It is important to note that in addition to avoiding misbehaviors such as HARKing, all researchers are susceptible to a number of more subtle traps in judgment. Even the most well-intentioned researcher may jump to conclusions, discount alternative explanations, or accept results that seem correct without further scrutiny ( Nuzzo, 2015 ). Therefore, researchers must not only commit to presenting their findings honestly but consider how they can counteract such traps by slowing down and increasing their skepticism towards their findings.

2. Provide an appropriate amount of detail

Providing enough detail in a manuscript can be a challenge with the word limits imposed by most journals. Therefore, you will need to determine what details to include and which to exclude, or potentially include in the supplemental materials. Methods sections can be long and are often the first to be shortened, but complete methods are important for others to evaluate the research and to repeat the methods in other studies. Even more significant is making decisions about what experimental data to include and potentially exclude from the manuscript. Researchers must determine what data is required to create a complete scientific story that supports the central hypothesis of the paper. On the other hand, it is not necessary or helpful to include so much data in the manuscript, or in supplemental material, that the central point of the paper is difficult to discern. It is a tricky balance.

3. Follow proper citation practices

Of course, responsible authorship requires avoiding plagiarism. Many researchers think that plagiarism is not a concern for them because they assume it is always done intentionally by “copying and pasting” someone else’s words and claiming them as your own. Sometimes poor writing practices, such as taking notes from references without distinguishing between direct quotes and paraphrased material, can lead to including material that is not quoted properly. More broadly, proper citation practices include accurately and completely referencing prior studies to provide appropriate context for your manuscript.

4. Attend to the other important details

The journal will require several pieces of additional information, such as disclosure of sources of funding and potential conflicts of interest. Typically, graduate students do not have relationships that constitute conflicts of interest, but a PI who is a co-author may. In submitting a manuscript, also make sure to acknowledge individuals not listed as authors but who contributed to the work.

5. Share data and promote transparency

Data sharing is a key facet of promoting transparency in science ( Nosek et al., 2015 ). It will be important to know the expectations of the journals in which you wish to publish. Many top journals now require data sharing; for example, sharing your data files in an online repository so others have access to the data for secondary use. Funding agencies like NIH also increasingly require data sharing. To further foster transparency and public trust in research, researchers must deposit their final peer-reviewed manuscripts that report on research funded by NIH to PubMed Central. PubMed makes biomedical and life science research publicly accessible in a free, online database.

Scenario 2 – Authors In Conflict

To prepare a manuscript for publication, a postdoc’s data is added to a graduate student’s thesis project. After working together to combine the data and write the paper, the postdoc requests co-first authorship on the paper. The graduate student balks at this request on the basis that it is their thesis project. In a weekly meeting with the lab’s PI to discuss the status of the paper, the graduate student states that they should divide the data between the authors as a way to prove that the graduate student should be the sole first author. The PI agrees to this attempt to quantify how much data each person contributed to the manuscript. All parties agree the writing and thinking were equally shared between them. After this assessment, the graduate student sees that the postdoc actually contributed more than half of the data presented in the paper. The graduate student and a second graduate student contributed the remaining data; this means the graduate student contributed much less than half of the data in the paper. However, the graduate student is still adamant that they must be the sole first author of the paper because it is their thesis project.

Is the graduate student correct in insisting that it is their project, so they are entitled to be the sole first author?

Co-first authorship became popular about 10 years ago as a way to acknowledge shared contributions to a paper in which authors worked together and contributed equally. If the postdoc contributed half of the data and worked with the graduate student to combine their interpretations and write the first draft of the paper, then the postdoc did make a substantial contribution. If the graduate student wrote much of the first draft of the paper, contributed significantly to the second half of data, and played a major role in the thesis concept and design, this is also a major contribution. We summarized authorship requirements as contributing to thinking, doing, and writing, and we noted that a first author usually contributes to all of these. The graduate student has met all 3 elements to claim first authorship. However, it appears that the postdoc has also met these 3 requirements. Thus, it is at least reasonable for the postdoc to ask about co-first authorship.

The best way to move forward is to discuss their perspectives openly. Both the graduate student and postdoc want first authorship on papers to advance their careers. The postdoc feels they contributed more to the overall concept and design than the graduate student is recognizing, and the postdoc did contribute half of the data. This is likely frustrating and upsetting for the postdoc. On the other hand, perhaps the postdoc is forgetting how much a thesis becomes like “your baby,” so to speak. The work is the graduate student’s thesis, so it is easy to see why the graduate student would feel a sense of ownership of it. Given this fact, it may be hard for the graduate student to accept the idea that they would share first-author recognition for the work. Yet, the graduate student should consider that the manuscript would not be possible without the postdoc’s contribution. Further, if the postdoc was truly being unreasonable, then the postdoc could make the case for sole first authorship based on contributing the most data to the paper, in addition to contributing ideas and writing the paper. The graduate student should consider that the postdoc may be suggesting co-first authorship in good faith.

As with any interpersonal conflict, clear communication is key. While it might be temporarily uncomfortable to voice their views and address this disagreement, it is critical to avoiding permanent damage to their working relationship. The pair should consider each other’s perspectives and potential alternatives. For example, if the graduate student is first author and the postdoc second, at a minimum they could include an author note in the manuscript that describes the contribution of each author. This would make it clear the scope of the postdoc’s contribution, if they decided not to go with co-first authorship. Also, the graduate student should consider their assumptions about co-first authorship. Maybe they assume it makes it appear they contributed less, but instead, perhaps co-first authorship highlights their collaborative approach to science. Collaboration is a desirable quality many (although arguably not all) research organizations look for when they are hiring.

They will also need to speak with others for advice. The pair should definitely speak with the PI who could provide input about how these cases have been handled in the past. Ultimately, if they cannot reach an agreement, the PI, who is likely to be the last or “senior” author, may make the final decision. They should also speak to the other graduate student who is an author.

If either individual is upset with the situation, they will want to discuss it when they have had time to cool down. This might mean taking a day before discussing, or speaking with someone outside of the lab for support. Ideally, all authors on this paper would have initiated this conversation earlier, and the standards in the lab for first authorship would be discussed routinely. Clear communication may have avoided the conflict.

HOW TO USE DECISION-MAKING STRATEGIES TO NAVIGATE CHALLENGES

We have provided advice on some specific challenges you might encounter in research. This final section covers our overarching recommendation that you adopt a set of ethical decision-making strategies. These strategies help researchers address challenges by helping them think through a problem and possible alternatives ( McIntosh et al., 2020 ). The strategies encourage you to gather information, examine possible outcomes, consider your assumptions, and address emotional reactions before acting. They are especially helpful when you are uncertain how to proceed, face a new problem, or when the consequences of a decision could negatively impact you or others. The strategies also help people be honest with themselves, such as when they are discounting important factors or have competing goals, by encouraging them to identify outside perspectives and test their motivations. You can remember the strategies using the acronym SMART .

1. S eek Help

Obtain input from others who can be objective and that you trust. They can assist you with assessing the situation, predicting possible outcomes, and identifying potential options. They can also provide you with support. Individuals to consult may be peers, other faculty, or people in your personal life. It is important that you trust the people you talk with, but it is also good when they challenge your perspective, or encourage you to think in a new way about a problem. Keep in mind that people such as program directors and university ombudsmen are often available for confidential, objective advice.

2. M anage Emotions

Consider your emotional reaction to the situation and how it might influence your assessment of the situation, and your potential decisions and actions. In particular, identify negative emotions, like frustration, anxiety, fear, and anger, as they particularly tend to diminish decision-making and the quality of interactions with others. Take time to address these emotions before acting, for example, by exercising, listening to music, or simply taking a day before responding.

3. A nticipate Consequences

Think about how the situation could turn out. This includes for you, for the research team, and anyone else involved. Consider the short, middle-term, and longer-term impacts of the problem and your potential approach to addressing the situation. Ideally, it is possible to identify win-win outcomes. Often, however, in tough professional situations, you may need to select the best option from among several that are not ideal.

4. R ecognize Rules and Context

Determine if any ethical principles, professional policies, or rules apply that might help guide your choices. For instance, if the problem involves an authorship dispute, consider the authorship guidelines that apply. Recognizing the context means considering the situational factors that could impact your options and how you proceed. For example, factors such as the reality that ultimately the PI may have the final decision about authorship.

5. T est Assumptions and Motives

Examine your beliefs about the situation and whether any of your thoughts may not be justified. This includes critically examining the personal motivations and goals that are driving your interpretation of the problem and thoughts about how to resolve it.

These strategies do not have to be engaged in order, and they are interrelated. For example, seeking help can help you manage emotions, test assumptions, and anticipate consequences. Go back to the scenarios and our advice throughout this article, and you will see many of our suggestions align with these strategies. Practice applying SMART strategies when you encounter a problem and they will become more natural.

Learning practices for responsible research will be the foundation for your success in graduate school and your career. We encourage you to be reflective and intentional as you learn and hope that our advice helps you along the way.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute (Antes, K01HG008990) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (UL1 TR002345).

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• Winchester C (2018). Give Every Paper a Read for Reproducibility . Nature , 557 , 281. doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-05140-x [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]

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Expert Commentary

Research strategy guide for finding quality, credible sources

Strategies for finding academic studies and other information you need to give your stories authority and depth

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Keely Wilczek, The Journalist's Resource May 20, 2011

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/home/research-strategy-guide/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Knowing how to conduct deeper research efficiently and effectively is a critical skill for journalists — especially in the information age. It is, like other facets of the profession such as interviewing, a matter of practice and establishing good habits. And once you find a successful routine for information-gathering, it will pay dividends time and again.

Journalists need to be able to do many kinds of research. This article focuses on creating a research strategy that will help you find academic studies and related scholarly information. These sources can, among other things, give your stories extra authority and depth — and thereby distinguish your work. You can see examples of such studies — and find many relevant ones for your stories — by searching the Journalist’s Resource database . But that is just a representative sample of what exists in the research world.

The first step is to create a plan for seeking the information you need. This requires you to take time initially and to proceed with care, but it will ultimately pay off in better results. The research strategy covered in this article involves the following steps:

Get organized

Articulate your topic, locate background information.

• Identify your information needs

List keywords and concepts for search engines and databases

Consider the scope of your topic, conduct your searches, evaluate the information sources you found, analyze and adjust your research strategy.

Being organized is an essential part of effective research strategy. You should create a record of your strategy and your searches. This will prevent you from repeating searches in the same resources and from continuing to use ineffective terms. It will also help you assess the success or failure of your research strategy as you go through the process. You also may want to consider tracking and organizing citations and links in bibliographic software such as Zotero . (See this helpful resource guide about using Zotero.)

Next, write out your topic in a clear and concise manner. Good research starts with a specific focus.

For example, let’s say you are writing a story about the long-range health effects of the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant based on a study published in Environmental Health Perspectives titled, “The Chernobyl Accident 20 Years On: An Assessment of the Health Consequences and the International Response.” (The study is summarized in Journalist’s Resource here .)

A statement of your topic might be, “Twenty years after the Chernobyl disaster, scientists are still learning the affects of the accident on the health of those who lived in the surrounding area and their descendants.”

If you have a good understanding of the Chernobyl disaster, proceed to the next step, “Identify the information you need.” If not, it’s time to gather background information. This will supply you with the whos and the whens of the topic. It will also provide you with a broader context as well as the important terminology.

Excellent sources of background information are subject-specific encyclopedias and dictionaries, books, and scholarly articles, and organizations’ websites. You should always consult more than one source so you can compare for accuracy and bias.

For your story about Chernobyl, you might want to consult some of the following sources:

• Frequently Asked Chernobyl Questions , International Atomic Agency
• Chernobyl Accident 1986 , World Nuclear Association
• Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment , New York Academy of Sciences, 2009.
• “Chernobyl Disaster,” Encyclopedia Britannica, last updated 2013.

Identify the information you need

What information do you need to write your story? One way to determine this is to turn your overall topic into a list of questions to be answered. This will help you identify the type and level of information you need. Some possible questions on consequences of the Chernobyl accident are:

• What are the proven health effects?
• What are some theorized health effects?
• Is there controversy about any of these studies?
• What geographic area is being studied?
• What are the demographic characteristics of the population being studied?
• Was there anything that could have been done at the time to mitigate these effects?

Looking at these questions, it appears that scientific studies and scholarly articles about those studies, demographic data, disaster response analysis, and government documents and publications from the Soviet Union and Ukraine would be needed.

Now you need to determine what words you will use to enter in the search boxes within resources. One way to begin is to extract the most important words and phrases from the questions produced in the previous step. Next, think about alternative words and phrases that you might use. Always keep in mind that different people may write or talk about the same topic in different ways. Important concepts can referred to differently or be spelled differently depending on country of origin or field of study.

For the Chernobyl health story, some search keyword options are: “Chernobyl,” “Chornobyl”; “disaster,” “catastrophe,” “explosion”; “health,” “disease,” “illness,” “medical conditions”; “genetic mutation,” “gene mutation,” “germ-line mutation,” “hereditary disease.” Used in different combinations, these can unearth a wide variety of resources.

Next you should identify the scope of your topic and any limitations it puts on your searches. Some examples of limitations are language, publication date, and publication type. Every database and search engine will have its own rules so you may need to click on an advanced search option in order to input these limitations.

It is finally time to start looking for information but identifying which resources to use is not always easy to do. First, if you are part of an organization, find out what, if any, resources you have access to through a subscription. Examples of subscription resources are LexisNexis and JSTOR. If your organization does not provide subscription resources, find out if you can get access to these sources through your local library. Should you not have access to any subscription resources appropriate for your topic, look at some of the many useful free resources on the internet.

Here are some examples of sources for free information:

• PLoS , Public Library of Science
• Google Scholar
• SSRN , Social Science Research Network
• FDsys , U.S. Government documents and publications
• World Development Indicators , World Bank
• Pubmed , service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine

More quality sites, and search tips, are here among the other research articles at Journalist’s Resource.

As you only want information from the most reliable and suitable sources, you should always evaluate your results. In doing this, you can apply journalism’s Five W’s (and One H):

• Who : Who is the author and what are his/her credentials in this topic?
• What: Is the material primary or secondary in nature?
• Where: Is the publisher or organization behind the source considered reputable? Does the website appear legitimate?
• When: Is the source current or does it cover the right time period for your topic?
• Why: Is the opinion or bias of the author apparent and can it be taken into account?
• How: Is the source written at the right level for your needs? Is the research well-documented?

Were you able to locate the information you needed? If not, now it is time to analyze why that happened. Perhaps there are better resources or different keywords and concepts you could have tried. Additional background information might supply you with other terminology to use. It is also possible that the information you need is just not available in the way you need it and it may be necessary to consult others for assistance like an expert in the topic or a professional librarian.

Keely Wilczek is a research librarian at the Harvard Kennedy School. Tags: training

About The Author

Keely Wilczek

How to Do Research: A Step-By-Step Guide: Get Started

• Get Started
• 1a. Select a Topic
• 1b. Develop Research Questions
• 1c. Identify Keywords
• 1d. Find Background Information
• 1e. Refine a Topic
• 2a. Search Strategies
• 2d. Articles
• 2e. Videos & Images
• 2f. Databases
• 2g. Websites
• 2h. Grey Literature
• 2i. Open Access Materials
• 3a. Evaluate Sources
• 3b. Primary vs. Secondary
• 3c. Types of Periodicals
• 4a. Take Notes
• 4b. Outline the Paper
• 4c. Incorporate Source Material
• 5a. Avoid Plagiarism
• 5b. Zotero & MyBib
• 5c. MLA Formatting
• 5d. MLA Citation Examples
• 5e. APA Formatting
• 5f. APA Citation Examples
• 5g. Annotated Bibliographies

Research Essentials Video Tutorials

Related guides.

• Elmira College Writing Center Get one-on-one assistance for all types of writing.

Recommended Websites

• Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL)

Research Process Overview

Step 1.  Develop a topic Select a Topic | Develop Research Questions | Identify Keywords | Find Background Information | Refine a Topic

Step 2. Locate information Search Strategies | Books | eBooks | Articles  | Videos & Images | Databases | Websites | Grey Literature

Step 3. Evaluate and analyze information Evaluate Sources | Primary vs Secondary | Types of Periodicals

Step 4. Write, organize, and communicate information Take Notes | Outline the Paper | Incorporate Source Material

Step 5. Cite sources Avoid Plagiarism | Zotero & MyBib | MLA | APA | Chicago Style | Annotated Bibliographies

For research help,  use one of the following options:

Ask the GTL

• Next: Step 1: Develop a Topic >>
• Last Updated: Feb 21, 2024 11:01 AM
• URL: https://libguides.elmira.edu/research

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• How to Do Research for an Excellent Essay: The Complete Guide

One of the biggest secrets to writing a good essay is the Boy Scouts’ motto: ‘be prepared’. Preparing for an essay – by conducting effective research – lays the foundations for a brilliant piece of writing, and it’s every bit as important as the actual writing part. Many students skimp on this crucial stage, or sit in the library not really sure where to start; and it shows in the quality of their essays. This just makes it easier for you to get ahead of your peers, and we’re going to show you how. In this article, we take you through what you need to do in order to conduct effective research and use your research time to best effect.

Allow enough time

First and foremost, it’s vital to allow enough time for your research. For this reason, don’t leave your essay until the last minute . If you start writing without having done adequate research, it will almost certainly show in your essay’s lack of quality. The amount of research time needed will vary according to whether you’re at Sixth Form or university, and according to how well you know the topic and what teaching you’ve had on it, but make sure you factor in more time than you think you’ll need. You may come across a concept that takes you longer to understand than you’d expected, so it’s better to allow too much time than too little.

Read the essay question and thoroughly understand it

If you don’t have a thorough understanding of what the essay question is asking you to do, you put yourself at risk of going in the wrong direction with your research. So take the question, read it several times and pull out the key things it’s asking you to do. The instructions in the question are likely to have some bearing on the nature of your research. If the question says “Compare”, for example, this will set you up for a particular kind of research, during which you’ll be looking specifically for points of comparison; if the question asks you to “Discuss”, your research focus may be more on finding different points of view and formulating your own.

Begin with a brainstorm

Start your research time by brainstorming what you already know. Doing this means that you can be clear about exactly what you’re already aware of, and you can identify the gaps in your knowledge so that you don’t end up wasting time by reading books that will tell you what you already know. This gives your research more of a direction and allows you to be more specific in your efforts to find out certain things. It’s also a gentle way of introducing yourself to the task and putting yourself in the right frame of mind for learning about the topic at hand.

Achieve a basic understanding before delving deeper

If the topic is new to you and your brainstorm has yielded few ideas, you’ll need to acquire a basic understanding of the topic before you begin delving deeper into your research. If you don’t, and you start by your research by jumping straight in at the deep end, as it were, you’ll struggle to grasp the topic. This also means that you may end up being too swayed by a certain source, as you haven’t the knowledge to question it properly. You need sufficient background knowledge to be able to take a critical approach to each of the sources you read. So, start from the very beginning. It’s ok to use Wikipedia or other online resources to give you an introduction to a topic, though bear in mind that these can’t be wholly relied upon. If you’ve covered the topic in class already, re-read the notes you made so that you can refresh your mind before you start further investigation.

Working through your reading list

If you’ve been given a reading list to work from, be organised in how you work through each of the items on it. Try to get hold of as many of the books on it as you can before you start, so that you have them all easily to hand, and can refer back to things you’ve read and compare them with other perspectives. Plan the order in which you’re going to work through them and try to allocate a specific amount of time to each of them; this ensures that you allow enough time to do each of them justice and that focus yourself on making the most of your time with each one. It’s a good idea to go for the more general resources before honing in on the finer points mentioned in more specialised literature. Think of an upside-down pyramid and how it starts off wide at the top and becomes gradually narrower; this is the sort of framework you should apply to your research.

Ask a librarian

Library computer databases can be confusing things, and can add an extra layer of stress and complexity to your research if you’re not used to using them. The librarian is there for a reason, so don’t be afraid to go and ask if you’re not sure where to find a particular book on your reading list. If you’re in need of somewhere to start, they should be able to point you in the direction of the relevant section of the library so that you can also browse for books that may yield useful information.

Use the index

If you haven’t been given specific pages to read in the books on your reading list, make use of the index (and/or table of contents) of each book to help you find relevant material. It sounds obvious, but some students don’t think to do this and battle their way through heaps of irrelevant chapters before finding something that will be useful for their essay.

Taking notes

As you work through your reading, take notes as you go along rather than hoping you’ll remember everything you’ve read. Don’t indiscriminately write down everything – only the bits that will be useful in answering the essay question you’ve been set. If you write down too much, you risk writing an essay that’s full of irrelevant material and getting lower grades as a result. Be concise, and summarise arguments in your own words when you make notes (this helps you learn it better, too, because you actually have to think about how best to summarise it). You may want to make use of small index cards to force you to be brief with what you write about each point or topic. We’ve covered effective note-taking extensively in another article, which you can read here . Note-taking is a major part of the research process, so don’t neglect it. Your notes don’t just come in useful in the short-term, for completing your essay, but they should also be helpful when it comes to revision time, so try to keep them organised.

Research every side of the argument

Never rely too heavily on one resource without referring to other possible opinions; it’s bad academic practice. You need to be able to give a balanced argument in an essay, and that means researching a range of perspectives on whatever problem you’re tackling. Keep a note of the different arguments, along with the evidence in support of or against each one, ready to be deployed into an essay structure that works logically through each one. If you see a scholar’s name cropping up again and again in what you read, it’s worth investigating more about them even if you haven’t specifically been told to do so. Context is vital in academia at any level, so influential figures are always worth knowing about.

Keep a dictionary by your side

You could completely misunderstand a point you read if you don’t know what one important word in the sentence means. For that reason, it’s a good idea to keep a dictionary by your side at all times as you conduct your research. Not only does this help you fully understand what you’re reading, but you also learn new words that you might be able to use in your forthcoming essay or a future one . Growing your vocabulary is never a waste of time!

Start formulating your own opinion

As you work through reading these different points of view, think carefully about what you’ve read and note your own response to different opinions. Get into the habit of questioning sources and make sure you’re not just repeating someone else’s opinion without challenging it. Does an opinion make sense? Does it have plenty of evidence to back it up? What are the counter-arguments, and on balance, which sways you more? Demonstrating your own intelligent thinking will set your essay apart from those of your peers, so think about these things as you conduct your research.

Be careful with web-based research

Although, as we’ve said already, it’s fine to use Wikipedia and other online resources to give you a bit of an introduction to a topic you haven’t covered before, be very careful when using the internet for researching an essay. Don’t take Wikipedia as gospel; don’t forget, anybody can edit it! We wouldn’t advise using the internet as the basis of your essay research – it’s simply not academically rigorous enough, and you don’t know how out of date a particular resource might be. Even if your Sixth Form teachers may not question where you picked up an idea you’ve discussed in your essays, it’s still not a good habit to get into and you’re unlikely to get away with it at a good university. That said, there are still reliable academic resources available via the internet; these can be found in dedicated sites that are essentially online libraries, such as JSTOR. These are likely to be a little too advanced if you’re still in Sixth Form, but you’ll almost certainly come across them once you get to university.

Look out for footnotes

In an academic publication, whether that’s a book or a journal article, footnotes are a great place to look for further ideas for publications that might yield useful information. Plenty can be hidden away in footnotes, and if a writer is disparaging or supporting the ideas of another academic, you could look up the text in question so that you can include their opinion too, and whether or not you agree with them, for extra brownie points.

Don’t save doing all your own references until last

If you’re still in Sixth Form, you might not yet be required to include academic references in your essays, but for the sake of a thorough guide to essay research that will be useful to you in the future, we’re going to include this point anyway (it will definitely come in useful when you get to university, so you may as well start thinking about it now!). As you read through various books and find points you think you’re going to want to make in your essays, make sure you note down where you found these points as you go along (author’s first and last name, the publication title, publisher, publication date and page number). When you get to university you will be expected to identify your sources very precisely, so it’s a good habit to get into. Unfortunately, many students forget to do this and then have a difficult time of going back through their essay adding footnotes and trying to remember where they found a particular point. You’ll save yourself a great deal of time and effort if you simply note down your academic references as you go along. If you are including footnotes, don’t forget to add each publication to a main bibliography, to be included at the end of your essay, at the same time.

Putting in the background work required to write a good essay can seem an arduous task at times, but it’s a fundamental step that can’t simply be skipped. The more effort you put in at this stage, the better your essay will be and the easier it will be to write. Use the tips in this article and you’ll be well on your way to an essay that impresses!

To get even more prepared for essay writing you might also want to consider attending an Oxford Summer School .

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Researching

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Critical thinking for reading and research

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The research you need to do will be different for each assessment. The steps on this page will help you focus your research and make it more effective.

1. Understand what you need to do

Before you start your research make sure you understand what the assessment is asking you to do.

Check the assessment type

Check what type of assessment you need to do. Is it an essay, report, presentation, or case study? Knowing this will help you understand what sort of information you need to include and how to write the assessment.

More about types of assessments

Understand the task

Next, analyse the assessment task to make sure you understand what you are being asked. Look at the task and identify:

• Instruction words – These words tell you what to do. Do you need to analyse, discuss, evaluate, summarise or something else?
• Topic words – Topic words tell you what to write about. What you need to analyse, argue, discuss, and so on
• Limiting words – These narrow down and focus your topic. This might be a certain time, place, or part of a topic.

More about understanding your assessment task

Example instruction words and what they mean

2. Gather information

Research is something we do all the time. Whether it’s researching a recipe for dinner, where to go on holiday, or what phone to buy, it’s all research. The steps below will help you focus your research.

Start with what you know

Once you are clear about what you need to do, think about what you already know to help you figure out what to focus on:

• What is the assessment topic?
• What information do you already have?
• What extra information do you need to find out?
• What questions do you have that will help you respond to the assessment task?

You could try using a mind map to brainstorm this information.

How to mind map

Develop your search strategy

Decide where to look. This will depend on the type of information you are looking for, e.g. definitions, examples & explanations, visuals, statistics, in depth analysis, research etc.

Sources might include:

• course materials – check to see what information you can use for your assessment. Your course might also direct you to other information sources such as key websites, guides and articles
• recommended readings or set texts (if your course has any)
• Open Polytechnic Library – Your library has many great resources for you to access including:
• e-books – accessible anywhere/anytime, including recommended texts for your course
• print books – can be posted to you free of charge
• research databases for access to articles – journals, newspapers, magazines and more
• recommended websites .

For some courses you may need to cite peer-reviewed, academic articles and books. Get in touch with the Te Whare Pukapuka Wāhanga Whakapakari, The Library and Learning Centre, if you need help locating these.

• 0508 650 200, option 3
• [email protected] .

Search tips

• Use keywords from your assessment topic, to generate search results (don’t just type in your assessment question).
• Expand on this list by thinking of related terms and synonyms. Your topic may be described in more than one way.
• Check the limiting words in the assessment task to help refine your searches.
• If you need help with your research, contact the Library and Learning Centre.

Learn more about identifying keywords by watching the video below:

3. Evaluate information

The next step is to decide what information is best for your assessment. You need to evaluate it carefully to check its quality and that it is relevant and useful. See the pages below to help with this step:

4. Keep track of what you find

Keep a list of everything you read, including information that you decide not to use. That way you’ll remember what you’ve looked at and won’t waste time going back to resources that weren't useful.

Tip – When you find something you want to use in your assessment record the information needed for your references list.

When to stop

There is no rule for how much research to do for an assessment. But you can probably stop if you:

• have backed up all of your key points with relevant, credible sources
• aren’t getting new ideas
• aren’t finding information that will help strengthen your topic
• are running out of time to write the assessment.

You’ll then be ready to plan your assessment and start writing.

Got a question?

If you want to talk with someone about researching for your assessments, contact The Library and Learning Centre | Te Whare Pukapuka Wāhanga Whakapakari Ako. 

Contact the Library and Learning Centre

Conducting effective academic research: 9 research methods to know

Choose the research methodology best suited to your situation

Academic research is a process of collecting and analysing scientific or social data in order to answer a question. It is also called basic research or scientific research. It is used by researchers and academics to produce quality work and reliable results . Literature research is the most familiar method for students, but there are many more. This article helps you to explore the different research methods and find the most relevant one for your work.

What is the importance of research methodology? What are the academic research methods? Quantitative research Qualitative research Empirical research  Historical research Documentary research Experimental research Conceptual research  Comparative research  Analytical research  How to choose the right research method? What are the academic research tools? What are the steps of a good research methodology?

What is the importance of research methodology?

Research methodology is an essential process to ensure that the results obtained are valid and reliable . It sets the framework for the research and ensures that the data collected is relevant and complete. Research methodology also determines the methods and tools to be used to analyse the data and to ensure that the conclusions are logical and consistent .

What are the academic research methods?

There are several study methodologies for conducting academic research:

• Quantitative research : research that relies on numerical data to test hypotheses.
• Qualitative research : research based on the analysis of behaviour to understand human actions.
• Empirical research : research based on observations, interviews and experiments.
• Historical research : research based on historical documents to understand the past.
• Documentary research : research in databases, libraries, archives and specialised collections to find relevant information.
• Experimental research : research based on experiments and tests to understand phenomena.
• Conceptual research : research that uses concepts and theories to understand phenomena.
• Comparative research : research that compares different elements to understand phenomena.
• Analytical research : research based on the analysis of data and information to understand complex phenomena.

Quantitative research

Quantitative research or quantitative study is a research methodology that focuses on researching data and statistics to determine trends and relationships between variables . It focuses on the use of tools such as statistical tests, surveys, questionnaires (open-ended and closed-ended), surveys and mathematical models to analyse data on a sample of individuals. Quantitative analysis is generally used to test hypotheses and theories and to predict future outcomes .

Qualitative research

Qualitative research or qualitative study is a research methodology that focuses on understanding the opinions and attitudes of individuals . It is used to examine people's thoughts, feelings and motivations . It can include the use of techniques such as interviews, focus groups, observations and document analysis. The qualitative approach is generally used to understand human behaviour and to develop deeper insights into a subject.

The main techniques of qualitative research are:

• Semi-structured interview : a qualitative data collection method that combines structure and flexibility, using a pre-established interview guide while allowing for open-ended questions and in-depth explorations of participants' responses.
• The directive interview : a qualitative data collection method based on a structured and predefined questionnaire, where the interviewer asks precise and targeted questions, thus limiting the freedom of answers and discussions to obtain specific information.
• Non-directive interview : a qualitative data collection method characterised by an open and flexible approach, where the interviewer encourages the participant to speak freely and spontaneously about their experiences, opinions and feelings, without asking specific questions or following a predefined interview guide.
• Observation : A qualitative research method that collects data by carefully and systematically examining behaviours, interactions and situations in their natural context, without direct intervention by the researcher.
• Focus group : a qualitative research method that involves a small group of participants brought together to discuss a specific topic, under the guidance of a moderator, in order to obtain a variety of opinions, perceptions and ideas on the topic being studied.

Empirical research 

Empirical research or empirical study is a research method that focuses on observation and experimentation to understand and explain phenomena . It is generally used to study scientific or social issues and is often considered one of the most reliable methods of obtaining information. Empirical research can include field studies, case studies, surveys, experiments and statistical analysis. It can also include qualitative methods, such as interviews and observations. Researchers can use these methods to collect data and analyse it to draw conclusions.

Historical research 

Historical research is a method of research that focuses on the study of past events and their impact on the present . It can be used to understand the past and better understand the present. Historical research is an important method for understanding the world we live in and for understanding how past events have shaped the present . Historical research can be conducted using archives, documents, eyewitness accounts and other sources. It can also include interviews, surveys and case studies.

Desk research

Desk research is a method of investigation that involves gathering information by consulting documentary sources . Documentary sources can be books, scientific articles, reports, archival documents, databases, websites, social media, etc. Desk research is an important step in understanding a topic and obtaining accurate and up-to-date information. It can be used to study a variety of subjects, such as history, politics, science, technology, sociology, economics, etc. Desk research is a valuable tool for researchers, journalists, students and professionals .

Experimental research 

Experimental research involves manipulating variables and observing the effect of these manipulations on measurable results . It is used to test hypotheses and to study the causes and effects of phenomena. For example, experimental research is useful for studying the effects of drugs, psychological treatments and educational interventions. It is also used to study the effects of environmental variables on human and animal behaviour.

Conceptual research 

Conceptual research focuses on identifying and analysing the key concepts underlying a problem or issue . It can be used to explore ideas, theories and hypotheses, and to understand the relationships between concepts and their implications. Conceptual research is often used to help solve complex problems and make strategic decisions.

Comparative research 

Comparative research is a research method that compares groups or individuals to determine their differences and similarities . It is used to explore issues such as cultural differences, similarities between groups, the effects of interventions and the effects of policies. Comparative research can be used to study groups or individuals across time or across different contexts.

Analytical research 

Analytical research is a research method that focuses on the analysis of data and information to understand and explain phenomena. It is often used to investigate complex issues and find solutions to problems . It can also be used to explore trends and patterns in data and information . Analytical research is an important method for understanding the world and making informed decisions.

How to choose the right research method?

The research method you choose depends on the purpose of the research and the resources available . For example, if you want to collect qualitative data on consumer opinions, you might consider interviews or focus groups. To collect quantitative data on consumer habits, you might consider surveys or product testing. To increase your knowledge of a topic, you might consider doing a literature search on the net or in specialist journals. In all cases, it is important to take the time to think about the most appropriate research method to achieve your objectives .

What are the academic research tools?

1. Search engines: Google , Bing , Yahoo , DuckDuckGo , etc.

2. Monitoring tools: Google Alerts , Talkwalker , Mention , etc.

3. Social networks: Twitter , Facebook , LinkedIn , etc.

4. Databases: PubMed , Google Scholar , Web of Science , Archimag , CAIRN , etc.

5. Online forums and communities: Reddit , Quora , Stack Overflow , etc.

What are the steps of a good research methodology?

How to do scientific and academic research.

• Step 1: Define a research topic that motivates you
• Step 2: Choose an available and supportive supervisor
• Step 3: Formulate your problem and the limits of your subject
• Step 4: Construct a detailed plan
• Step 5: Search for relevant information
• Step 6: Write and structure your dissertation
• Step 7: Proofread and adjust your brief
• Step 8: Prepare the oral presentation

In conclusion, academic research methodology is a complex and demanding process that requires careful planning and attention to detail . It is essential to understand the different steps and to develop research, writing and presentation skills. By following these steps, student researchers can produce quality research that will contribute to the advancement of knowledge and improved decision making.

To go further: " Méthodologie de la recherche documentaire ", Université Aix Marseille. " La recherche en sciences de l'éducation. État des lieux et points de vue ", CAIRN. " Enseigner la méthodologie de la recherche en technologie éducative : des conceptions aux concepts seuils ", Open Edition Journals. " 28 meilleurs moteurs de recherche académiques pour la recherche en 2022 ", Testsiteforme, 14/09/2022, Gabriel Artega. " MÉTHODOLOGIE DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE ", Friedrich Ebert Siftung.   Information : This informative article does not require any personal reflection and was written with the help of ChatGPT. On the basis of an outline that we constructed beforehand, we questioned ChatGPT. Then, we reworked these automatically generated contents to delete repetitions, add details, check the veracity of the information... The assistance of an AI allowed us to save time in writing and to enrich our good practices in using such a tool.

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How to collaborate more effectively: 5 tips for researchers

Participating in a collaborative effort can be extremely challenging. To get the most out of it, you need a strategic approach.

Andrea Aguilar

Credit: DrAfter123/Getty Images

28 January 2020

DrAfter123/Getty Images

A successful collaboration can achieve high-impact findings and give you access to new funding sources and expertise. It can also be a great opportunity to think about the tools and outputs that can make your research more accessible to your peers and the public.

Here are five tips to help you manage collaborative projects more efficiently, from the Nature Masterclasses + online course, Effective Collaboration in Research .

1. Be strategic – and don’t overcommit

It can be tempting to accept every offer to team up, but it’s not a quick, easy, or cheap way to achieve a goal.

Carefully assess the time and resources that would be required for a potential collaborative project and decide whether it fulfils a specific need in your research and if it will help you achieve your career objectives.

2. Create a collaboration agreement

Whether you’re setting up a research collaboration or participating in someone else’s project, it’s a good idea to record a framework in a formal document (“collaboration agreement”).

These contracts are often used in large and medium-sized collaborations, or in partnerships with industry, but you can choose to create a written collaboration agreement for a project of any size and scope.

“It sounds very dry and impersonal, but it’s a way to show that this is being done professionally and is done with good intention,” says John Kao, chair professor of translational medical engineering at the University of Hong Kong, in the Nature Masterclasses ’ online course on research collaboration.

“That transparency really helps to build trust.”

Your collaboration agreement can outline the key goals for the project, as well as timelines, roles and responsibilities, intellectual property, and authorship for any written outputs (especially publications).

Discussing, agreeing, and recording these things at an early stage helps to ensure that there are no surprises partway through the project.

3. Communicate your failures, not just your success

Clear and regular communication is crucial to the success of any research collaboration, and communicating delays or problems should not be seen as ‘admitting failure’.

Knowing about a delay as early as possible will be useful for the leader of the collaboration and will enable them to adapt the timeline or task-list accordingly.

Mark Hahnel, founder and CEO of online open access repository, Figshare, and expert contributor to the Nature Masterclasses ’ online course, says there is no such thing as too much communication in a collaborative project. “If you think you are over-communicating, you’re not,” says Hahnel. “Communication is only ever a good thing [in a collaboration].”

4. Embrace all types of outputs, not just papers

Common outputs of collaborative efforts include scientific publications, preprints, datasets, and conference presentations and posters. These will likely be built into your collaboration framework and management plan.

But you might decide to create further types of outputs to help you generate additional value and impact.

Creating a website can help you communicate your results to the public, and make your project more visible and accessible to other academics and potential collaborators. This can also be a good place to share other outputs you might create, such as images, maps, videos, or animations.

Interactive outputs such as simple video games and smartphone applications can also be good option, depending on the goals of your project.

Be sure to revisit your outputs regularly throughout your collaboration to see if there are any new opportunities that you might not have considered earlier. This becomes particularly important as you reach the end of a planned set of experiments or grant funding.

“We created a website where people can come and measure their own implicit biases,” Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science and a Nature Masterclasses collaboration expert, says of one of his first psychology projects.

“It's a great instructional tool about this area of research and a great way to collect some data about how these biases might operate,” says Nosek. “The datasets generated from that have potential uses far beyond what we considered as the initial collaborative team.”

5. Learn what it takes to be a good team player

One of the great strengths of collaborative research is the innovation that comes from bringing together researchers of different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. Sometimes it can seem hard to adapt to different ways of thinking and working, but being flexible and open to new ideas will pay dividends.

“Even though you might be the world expert on something, be prepared to allow yourself to think that you might not know everything about it,” says Nature Masterclasses collaboration expert, George Pankiewicz, a collaborations manager at the MET Office in the UK.

“There are others who will bring great insight. They may not be a world expert, but they may have something to contribute.”

For more tips on how to collaborate, see the Nature Masterclasses online course, Effective Collaboration in Research and try the one-hour free sample .

+ Disclosure: Nature Masterclasses are run by Nature Research, part of Springer Nature, which also publishes the Nature Index.

How-To Geek

How to research a topic online.

Online research is a crucial skill, whether you're working on an academic paper, writing a blog post, or just trying to learn something new about your houseplants.

Quick Links

Organize your information early on, start broad and collect a lot of information, decide what's important, and narrow things down, optimize your google search, go further than google, double-check your research, what if you find conflicting information.

Online research is a crucial skill, whether you're working on an academic paper, writing a blog post, or just trying to learn something new about your houseplants. But it's not always easy when you're tackling a complicated or niche topic.

Organizing your information can help you save time, and it can save you from forgetting or misremembering anything that you've learned from your research. You should keep a link to every webpage that you visit from the start to the very end of your research. It's best to write down a little bit of information for each link so that you remember why you saved them and what kind of information that you could take from them. You should also save any PDF's or images related to your research because you can use them as valuable primary sources.

If you need to organize a lot of data across multiple devices, consider using a note-taking app like  Evernote , OneNote , or Google Keep . They're all great for keeping track of web pages, PDF's, photos, and whatever else you need for your big project.

If you're just trying to knock out a short essay or learn something about DIY woodworking, then you probably don't need to grab a dedicated note-taking app unless you already use one. You might find it easier to cut and paste web pages into a Word or Google Doc file and save any PDFs or images to your local or cloud storage drive. Just make sure that you keep your files organized  and take notes for all of your sources.

In the end, you'll probably only use a handful of the links that you save. But if you're publishing a blog post or writing an essay, you need to be able to double-check and cite all of your sources. Otherwise, you might end up creating a lot of extra work for yourself later.

When researching, it's tempting to dive straight into the first exciting thing that you find. But you should try to start as broad as possible. Otherwise, you might miss out on some fascinating pieces of information and end up with a poor understanding of your topic.

That's why you should try to find a lot of information on your topic, more than you think that you'll need. A good way to start broad is to search Google for general terms related to your topic. If you're researching the difference between sunflowers and tulips, then you should learn a bit of information about each flower before going deeper.

Of course, Wikipedia is also a fantastic place to begin your research. You can use Wikipedia to find a lot of general information on your topic, and you can use it to find related topics or primary sources that may be useful as you go deeper into your research.

Once you've collected a broad swath of data, you need to review everything and decide on what to focus. Don't just go for the first thing that sounds interesting to you. Try to find any new relationships between the different pieces of information that you've gathered.

Let's say that you're researching an author, like Mark Twain. You found in your broad research that he was in the Civil War and that some of his stories take place in the antebellum south. On their own, those two pieces of information are boring and hard to care about. But when you put them together, it's clear that there may be a tantalizing relationship that's worth some in-depth research.

It's okay to research a relationship that seems obvious or well-known, especially if you're writing a blog, doing personal research, or doing a rudimentary history paper. But if you want to find something unique, then you need to think about how to narrow your research.

Okay, you're ready to do some more in-depth research. Now what? If you're looking into something that's kind of unique, then you may have trouble finding some good search results on Google.

That's why you need to use some  Google Search Operators  to get the most out of your Google searches. There are a lot of search operators that you can use, and they're all pretty straightforward. But there are a few that are especially useful for doing online research.

If you need to look up exact phrases or names on Google, then you can put them in quotation marks. For example, if you search the phrase "mole people" on Google, then you'll only find pages that contain the word "mole" followed by the word "people."

"Mole people"

The idea of starting broad and then narrowing your search applies to searching the web, too.

For example, if your search for "mole people" include too many results related to New York, then you could use a minus sign to exclude those results. This is what it would look like:

"Mole people" -"New York"

Note that we also used quotation marks around "New York" in that search because we want the whole phrase excluded.

If you hit a point in your research where you can't find any new websites to visit, then you should try to switch up your Google search. Try using variations on the same search terms, and change which Search Operators you're using. Sometimes the slightest change in your search will give you wildly different results.

Sometimes Google's expertise won't be enough for you. If you're working on a full academic paper or writing a deep-dive blog post, then you may need to look through some magazines, academic papers, or old books. You know, "primary sources."

Some websites, like  Project Muse and JSTOR , are an excellent resource for periodicals, academic papers, and other primary sources. You can usually access them through your University or public library. There's also some free alternatives to these websites, like Google Scholar  and SSRN .

But if you're writing a deep-dive on dairy advertisements, then you're going to need to find some old catalogs, magazines, periodicals, and posters.  Google Books  is an excellent resource for this kind of material.

You can also use Wikipedia to find some primary sources. At the end of every Wikipedia article, there's a "References" table. This table tells you the sources for all of the information in the article. If you come across a juicy bit of information while reading a Wikipedia article, then there's usually a small number that links to the reference table.

It's good to look into all of these resources because they usually come up with different results for the same search. They also tend to have built-in advanced search functions, which are useful for topics that are unique or niche.

Once you've completed your research, you need to make sure that all of your information is accurate. You can save yourself a lot of heartbreak by double-checking all of your research before doing any writing.

Go and reread all of your sources, because there's a chance that you misinterpreted what they're saying. Of course, you're not the only person that can misread a source, so it's good to check any citations that you find on a website.

You should also consider how you used Google to research your topic. If you included any bias in your search terms, then there's a chance that the information that you gathered will reflect that bias. Try searching Google with a variety of search terms and  Google Search Operators .

There are also fact-checking websites that you can use to make sure that your information is accurate. Websites like  Factcheck.org  or Snopes  are pretty fantastic; just don't use them as your only fact-checking resource.

Sometimes you'll spend a lot of time double-checking all of your research, and you'll realize that things don't seem to line up. In this situation, it's tempting to stand behind some information that may not be entirely factual. After all, it's a lot easier to go along with inaccurate information than to redo your entire research process.

But you should never write or publish any information unless you're confident that it's accurate. If you run into conflicting information while researching a topic, go back to the drawing board or try to spin the pieces of contradictory information in your favor.

For example, if you find a lot of conflicting eyewitness accounts while researching the Titanic, then you can quickly turn those conflicting accounts into an exciting piece of information. You could even go back and do some in-depth research into who made those eyewitness accounts, and how they shaped the public's opinion on the sinking of the Titanic. Hey, that could be a book.

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How to Get Started on Your First Psychology Experiment

Acquiring even a little expertise in advance makes science research easier..

Updated May 16, 2024 | Reviewed by Ray Parker

• Why Education Is Important
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• Students often struggle at the beginning of research projects—knowing how to begin.
• Research projects can sometimes be inspired by everyday life or personal concerns.
• Becoming something of an "expert" on a topic in advance makes designing a study go more smoothly.

One of the most rewarding and frustrating parts of my long career as a psychology professor at a small liberal arts college has been guiding students through the senior capstone research experience required near the end of their college years. Each psychology major must conduct an independent experiment in which they collect data to test a hypothesis, analyze the data, write a research paper, and present their results at a college poster session or at a professional conference.

The rewarding part of the process is clear: The students' pride at seeing their poster on display and maybe even getting their name on an article in a professional journal allows us professors to get a glimpse of students being happy and excited—for a change. I also derive great satisfaction from watching a student discover that he or she has an aptitude for research and perhaps start shifting their career plans accordingly.

The frustrating part comes at the beginning of the research process when students are attempting to find a topic to work on. There is a lot of floundering around as students get stuck by doing something that seems to make sense: They begin by trying to “think up a study.”

The problem is that even if the student's research interest is driven by some very personal topic that is deeply relevant to their own life, they simply do not yet know enough to know where to begin. They do not know what has already been done by others, nor do they know how researchers typically attack that topic.

Students also tend to think in terms of mission statements (I want to cure eating disorders) rather than in terms of research questions (Why are people of some ages or genders more susceptible to eating disorders than others?).

Needless to say, attempting to solve a serious, long-standing societal problem in a few weeks while conducting one’s first psychology experiment can be a showstopper.

Even a Little Bit of Expertise Can Go a Long Way

My usual approach to helping students get past this floundering stage is to tell them to try to avoid thinking up a study altogether. Instead, I tell them to conceive of their mission as becoming an “expert” on some topic that they find interesting. They begin by reading journal articles, writing summaries of these articles, and talking to me about them. As the student learns more about the topic, our conversations become more sophisticated and interesting. Researchable questions begin to emerge, and soon, the student is ready to start writing a literature review that will sharpen the focus of their research question.

In short, even a little bit of expertise on a subject makes it infinitely easier to craft an experiment on that topic because the research done by others provides a framework into which the student can fit his or her own work.

This was a lesson I learned early in my career when I was working on my own undergraduate capstone experience. Faced with the necessity of coming up with a research topic and lacking any urgent personal issues that I was trying to resolve, I fell back on what little psychological expertise I had already accumulated.

In a previous psychology course, I had written a literature review on why some information fails to move from short-term memory into long-term memory. The journal articles that I had read for this paper relied primarily on laboratory studies with mice, and the debate that was going on between researchers who had produced different results in their labs revolved around subtle differences in the way that mice were released into the experimental apparatus in the studies.

Because I already had done some homework on this, I had a ready-made research question available: What if the experimental task was set up so that the researcher had no influence on how the mouse entered the apparatus at all? I was able to design a simple animal memory experiment that fit very nicely into the psychological literature that was already out there, and this prevented a lot of angst.

Please note that my undergraduate research project was guided by the “expertise” that I had already acquired rather than by a burning desire to solve some sort of personal or social problem. I guarantee that I had not been walking around as an undergraduate student worrying about why mice forget things, but I was nonetheless able to complete a fun and interesting study.

My first experiment may not have changed the world, but it successfully launched my research career, and I fondly remember it as I work with my students 50 years later.

Frank McAndrew, Ph.D., is the Cornelia H. Dudley Professor of Psychology at Knox College.

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How to Study Effectively: 12 Secrets For Success

Being properly organized and prepared for tests and exams can make all the difference to school performance. Effective studying starts with the right attitude—a positive outlook can shift studying from a punishment to an opportunity to learn.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach when learning how to effectively study. Studying methods should be tailored to each student. Everyone has different abilities, so it is important to determine what works for you and what doesn’t. (Find out what type of learner you are and which study techniques will work best for you!)

For some students, studying and staying motivated comes easily — others may have to work a little bit harder.

What Is The Most Effective Way To Study?

Finding the best way to study is an ongoing process. It isn’t something that can be left to the night before the test. You should be constantly improving your study skills to better understand what works (and what doesn’t).

Learning how to study better helps avoid panic and frustration the next time a big test is coming up. After all, you are more likely to do well and be less stressed before a test when you have had time to properly review and practice the material!

Mastering effective study habits not only makes it easier to learn but will also help you get better grades in high school and post-secondary.

Discover the 12 secrets to studying effectively that will help you ace your next test.

How to study effectively, get organized, pay attention in class, steer clear of distractions, make sure notes are complete, ask questions if you don’t understand, make a study schedule/plan.

Start Studying More Effectively

Get more out of your study sessions with the complete study toolkit including note taking templates, tips, and more.

Review notes from class every evening

Talk to teachers, designate a study area, study in short bursts, simplify study notes, study with a group, study smart, not hard.

Knowing how to study effectively is a skill that will benefit you for life. Developing effective study skills requires lots of time and patience. If you follow these tips you’ll be on your way to discovering which type of studying works best for you—so you can knock your next test out of the park!

Need some extra help? Oxford Learning is here for you. Get more study tips and learning resources to help you succeed in school:

How To Take Study Notes: 5 Effective Note Taking Methods

How to be more organized in middle school (for students & parents), related studying resources.

The Feynman Technique: Study Skills' Secret Weapon

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Homework procrastination: why do students procrastinate.

Can You Enhance Study Sessions With Background Music?

10 Essential Study Skills Every Student Needs 

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Condom Use: An Overview

• Correct use of condoms can prevent Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) and pregnancy.
• Condoms and dental dams offer protection during sex.
• Correct use of condoms reduces the risk of disease but does not eliminate it.

Why it's important

Using condoms correctly can prevent the spread of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) including human immunodeficiency disease (HIV) and hepatitis. Condoms can also protect against other diseases transmitted through sex, including Zika and Ebola viruses, and pregnancy. Male (also called external) and female (also called internal) condoms must be used every time to be effective.

Regular use of latex condoms can reduce the risk of disease and pregnancy but does not provide absolute protection. The best way to prevent STDs is to abstain from sex or be in a long-term relationship with one uninfected partner.

Male (also called external) condom effectiveness

Condom effectiveness for STD and HIV prevention has been demonstrated in many studies.

Laboratory studies show latex condoms provide an effective barrier against even the smallest STD pathogens.

Epidemiologic studies show that consistent use of condoms is highly effective in preventing the spread of HIV.

Condoms can be expected to provide protection depending on the type of STD. They will provide protection against STDs spread by genital fluids (such as gonorrhea or chlamydia).

Condoms will not provide protection against STDs spread by skin-to-skin contact (genital herpes or syphilis).

Latex condoms must be used correctly and consistently to provide the best protection.

When condoms are used incorrectly or inconsistently:

• STDs or HIV can spread from a single sex act with an infected partner
• Condoms can break, slip, or leak
• Pregnancy can occur

How to use condoms and other barriers

Always use a new condom for the entirety of every act of vaginal, anal, or oral sex.

To correctly use an external condom:

• Put the condom on the tip of the erect penis with rolled side out.
• Pinch the tip to create a half-inch gap at top of condom.
• Unroll condom to the base of the erect penis while holding tip.
• After ejaculation, grip rim of condom and carefully withdraw.
• Gently pull condom off penis, making sure semen doesn't spill out.
• Wrap condom in a tissue and throw it in the trash.

If you feel the condom break at any point during sexual activity, stop immediately. Remove the broken condom and put on a new one.

Use water-based lubricants. Oil-based lubricants (petroleum jelly, body lotions, etc.) can weaken latex and break the condom.

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Correctly using condoms during sex can reduce the risk of sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy. Learn how to use them effectively.

• Published May 15, 2024
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What Is Leadership?

Artificial intelligence in strategy

Can machines automate strategy development? The short answer is no. However, there are numerous aspects of strategists’ work where AI and advanced analytics tools can already bring enormous value. Yuval Atsmon is a senior partner who leads the new McKinsey Center for Strategy Innovation, which studies ways new technologies can augment the timeless principles of strategy. In this episode of the Inside the Strategy Room podcast, he explains how artificial intelligence is already transforming strategy and what’s on the horizon. This is an edited transcript of the discussion. For more conversations on the strategy issues that matter, follow the series on your preferred podcast platform .

Joanna Pachner: What does artificial intelligence mean in the context of strategy?

Yuval Atsmon: When people talk about artificial intelligence, they include everything to do with analytics, automation, and data analysis. Marvin Minsky, the pioneer of artificial intelligence research in the 1960s, talked about AI as a “suitcase word”—a term into which you can stuff whatever you want—and that still seems to be the case. We are comfortable with that because we think companies should use all the capabilities of more traditional analysis while increasing automation in strategy that can free up management or analyst time and, gradually, introducing tools that can augment human thinking.

Joanna Pachner: AI has been embraced by many business functions, but strategy seems to be largely immune to its charms. Why do you think that is?

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Yuval Atsmon: You’re right about the limited adoption. Only 7 percent of respondents to our survey about the use of AI say they use it in strategy or even financial planning, whereas in areas like marketing, supply chain, and service operations, it’s 25 or 30 percent. One reason adoption is lagging is that strategy is one of the most integrative conceptual practices. When executives think about strategy automation, many are looking too far ahead—at AI capabilities that would decide, in place of the business leader, what the right strategy is. They are missing opportunities to use AI in the building blocks of strategy that could significantly improve outcomes.

I like to use the analogy to virtual assistants. Many of us use Alexa or Siri but very few people use these tools to do more than dictate a text message or shut off the lights. We don’t feel comfortable with the technology’s ability to understand the context in more sophisticated applications. AI in strategy is similar: it’s hard for AI to know everything an executive knows, but it can help executives with certain tasks.

When executives think about strategy automation, many are looking too far ahead—at AI deciding the right strategy. They are missing opportunities to use AI in the building blocks of strategy.

Joanna Pachner: What kind of tasks can AI help strategists execute today?

Yuval Atsmon: We talk about six stages of AI development. The earliest is simple analytics, which we refer to as descriptive intelligence. Companies use dashboards for competitive analysis or to study performance in different parts of the business that are automatically updated. Some have interactive capabilities for refinement and testing.

The second level is diagnostic intelligence, which is the ability to look backward at the business and understand root causes and drivers of performance. The level after that is predictive intelligence: being able to anticipate certain scenarios or options and the value of things in the future based on momentum from the past as well as signals picked in the market. Both diagnostics and prediction are areas that AI can greatly improve today. The tools can augment executives’ analysis and become areas where you develop capabilities. For example, on diagnostic intelligence, you can organize your portfolio into segments to understand granularly where performance is coming from and do it in a much more continuous way than analysts could. You can try 20 different ways in an hour versus deploying one hundred analysts to tackle the problem.

Predictive AI is both more difficult and more risky. Executives shouldn’t fully rely on predictive AI, but it provides another systematic viewpoint in the room. Because strategic decisions have significant consequences, a key consideration is to use AI transparently in the sense of understanding why it is making a certain prediction and what extrapolations it is making from which information. You can then assess if you trust the prediction or not. You can even use AI to track the evolution of the assumptions for that prediction.

Those are the levels available today. The next three levels will take time to develop. There are some early examples of AI advising actions for executives’ consideration that would be value-creating based on the analysis. From there, you go to delegating certain decision authority to AI, with constraints and supervision. Eventually, there is the point where fully autonomous AI analyzes and decides with no human interaction.

Because strategic decisions have significant consequences, you need to understand why AI is making a certain prediction and what extrapolations it’s making from which information.

Joanna Pachner: What kind of businesses or industries could gain the greatest benefits from embracing AI at its current level of sophistication?

Yuval Atsmon: Every business probably has some opportunity to use AI more than it does today. The first thing to look at is the availability of data. Do you have performance data that can be organized in a systematic way? Companies that have deep data on their portfolios down to business line, SKU, inventory, and raw ingredients have the biggest opportunities to use machines to gain granular insights that humans could not.

Companies whose strategies rely on a few big decisions with limited data would get less from AI. Likewise, those facing a lot of volatility and vulnerability to external events would benefit less than companies with controlled and systematic portfolios, although they could deploy AI to better predict those external events and identify what they can and cannot control.

Third, the velocity of decisions matters. Most companies develop strategies every three to five years, which then become annual budgets. If you think about strategy in that way, the role of AI is relatively limited other than potentially accelerating analyses that are inputs into the strategy. However, some companies regularly revisit big decisions they made based on assumptions about the world that may have since changed, affecting the projected ROI of initiatives. Such shifts would affect how you deploy talent and executive time, how you spend money and focus sales efforts, and AI can be valuable in guiding that. The value of AI is even bigger when you can make decisions close to the time of deploying resources, because AI can signal that your previous assumptions have changed from when you made your plan.

Joanna Pachner: Can you provide any examples of companies employing AI to address specific strategic challenges?

Yuval Atsmon: Some of the most innovative users of AI, not coincidentally, are AI- and digital-native companies. Some of these companies have seen massive benefits from AI and have increased its usage in other areas of the business. One mobility player adjusts its financial planning based on pricing patterns it observes in the market. Its business has relatively high flexibility to demand but less so to supply, so the company uses AI to continuously signal back when pricing dynamics are trending in a way that would affect profitability or where demand is rising. This allows the company to quickly react to create more capacity because its profitability is highly sensitive to keeping demand and supply in equilibrium.

Joanna Pachner: Given how quickly things change today, doesn’t AI seem to be more a tactical than a strategic tool, providing time-sensitive input on isolated elements of strategy?

Yuval Atsmon: It’s interesting that you make the distinction between strategic and tactical. Of course, every decision can be broken down into smaller ones, and where AI can be affordably used in strategy today is for building blocks of the strategy. It might feel tactical, but it can make a massive difference. One of the world’s leading investment firms, for example, has started to use AI to scan for certain patterns rather than scanning individual companies directly. AI looks for consumer mobile usage that suggests a company’s technology is catching on quickly, giving the firm an opportunity to invest in that company before others do. That created a significant strategic edge for them, even though the tool itself may be relatively tactical.

Joanna Pachner: McKinsey has written a lot about cognitive biases  and social dynamics that can skew decision making. Can AI help with these challenges?

Yuval Atsmon: When we talk to executives about using AI in strategy development, the first reaction we get is, “Those are really big decisions; what if AI gets them wrong?” The first answer is that humans also get them wrong—a lot. [Amos] Tversky, [Daniel] Kahneman, and others have proven that some of those errors are systemic, observable, and predictable. The first thing AI can do is spot situations likely to give rise to biases. For example, imagine that AI is listening in on a strategy session where the CEO proposes something and everyone says “Aye” without debate and discussion. AI could inform the room, “We might have a sunflower bias here,” which could trigger more conversation and remind the CEO that it’s in their own interest to encourage some devil’s advocacy.

We also often see confirmation bias, where people focus their analysis on proving the wisdom of what they already want to do, as opposed to looking for a fact-based reality. Just having AI perform a default analysis that doesn’t aim to satisfy the boss is useful, and the team can then try to understand why that is different than the management hypothesis, triggering a much richer debate.

In terms of social dynamics, agency problems can create conflicts of interest. Every business unit [BU] leader thinks that their BU should get the most resources and will deliver the most value, or at least they feel they should advocate for their business. AI provides a neutral way based on systematic data to manage those debates. It’s also useful for executives with decision authority, since we all know that short-term pressures and the need to make the quarterly and annual numbers lead people to make different decisions on the 31st of December than they do on January 1st or October 1st. Like the story of Ulysses and the sirens, you can use AI to remind you that you wanted something different three months earlier. The CEO still decides; AI can just provide that extra nudge.

Joanna Pachner: It’s like you have Spock next to you, who is dispassionate and purely analytical.

Yuval Atsmon: That is not a bad analogy—for Star Trek fans anyway.

Joanna Pachner: Do you have a favorite application of AI in strategy?

Yuval Atsmon: I have worked a lot on resource allocation, and one of the challenges, which we call the hockey stick phenomenon, is that executives are always overly optimistic about what will happen. They know that resource allocation will inevitably be defined by what you believe about the future, not necessarily by past performance. AI can provide an objective prediction of performance starting from a default momentum case: based on everything that happened in the past and some indicators about the future, what is the forecast of performance if we do nothing? This is before we say, “But I will hire these people and develop this new product and improve my marketing”— things that every executive thinks will help them overdeliver relative to the past. The neutral momentum case, which AI can calculate in a cold, Spock-like manner, can change the dynamics of the resource allocation discussion. It’s a form of predictive intelligence accessible today and while it’s not meant to be definitive, it provides a basis for better decisions.

Joanna Pachner: Do you see access to technology talent as one of the obstacles to the adoption of AI in strategy, especially at large companies?

Yuval Atsmon: I would make a distinction. If you mean machine-learning and data science talent or software engineers who build the digital tools, they are definitely not easy to get. However, companies can increasingly use platforms that provide access to AI tools and require less from individual companies. Also, this domain of strategy is exciting—it’s cutting-edge, so it’s probably easier to get technology talent for that than it might be for manufacturing work.

The bigger challenge, ironically, is finding strategists or people with business expertise to contribute to the effort. You will not solve strategy problems with AI without the involvement of people who understand the customer experience and what you are trying to achieve. Those who know best, like senior executives, don’t have time to be product managers for the AI team. An even bigger constraint is that, in some cases, you are asking people to get involved in an initiative that may make their jobs less important. There could be plenty of opportunities for incorpo­rating AI into existing jobs, but it’s something companies need to reflect on. The best approach may be to create a digital factory where a different team tests and builds AI applications, with oversight from senior stakeholders.

The big challenge is finding strategists to contribute to the AI effort. You are asking people to get involved in an initiative that may make their jobs less important.

Joanna Pachner: Do you think this worry about job security and the potential that AI will automate strategy is realistic?

Yuval Atsmon: The question of whether AI will replace human judgment and put humanity out of its job is a big one that I would leave for other experts.

The pertinent question is shorter-term automation. Because of its complexity, strategy would be one of the later domains to be affected by automation, but we are seeing it in many other domains. However, the trend for more than two hundred years has been that automation creates new jobs, although ones requiring different skills. That doesn’t take away the fear some people have of a machine exposing their mistakes or doing their job better than they do it.

Joanna Pachner: We recently published an article about strategic courage in an age of volatility  that talked about three types of edge business leaders need to develop. One of them is an edge in insights. Do you think AI has a role to play in furnishing a proprietary insight edge?

Yuval Atsmon: One of the challenges most strategists face is the overwhelming complexity of the world we operate in—the number of unknowns, the information overload. At one level, it may seem that AI will provide another layer of complexity. In reality, it can be a sharp knife that cuts through some of the clutter. The question to ask is, Can AI simplify my life by giving me sharper, more timely insights more easily?

Joanna Pachner: You have been working in strategy for a long time. What sparked your interest in exploring this intersection of strategy and new technology?

Yuval Atsmon: I have always been intrigued by things at the boundaries of what seems possible. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s second law is that to discover the limits of the possible, you have to venture a little past them into the impossible, and I find that particularly alluring in this arena.

AI in strategy is in very nascent stages but could be very consequential for companies and for the profession. For a top executive, strategic decisions are the biggest way to influence the business, other than maybe building the top team, and it is amazing how little technology is leveraged in that process today. It’s conceivable that competitive advantage will increasingly rest in having executives who know how to apply AI well. In some domains, like investment, that is already happening, and the difference in returns can be staggering. I find helping companies be part of that evolution very exciting.

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10 Common Interview Questions and How to Answer Them

Have a job interview coming up? Interview preparation is key. Before going, review the most common interview questions, plan your responses, and research the company so you can walk into that room prepared. 

When you land an interview, you’re probably excited and wondering about the most common interview questions. To prepare for your interview and make a great first impression, you can explore this list of 10 common interview questions and plan your responses to them. 

1. Tell me about yourself. 

This warm-up question is your chance to make an impactful first impression. Be prepared to describe yourself in a few sentences. You can mention: 

Your past experiences and how they relate to the current job

How your most recent job is tied to this new opportunity

Two of your strengths

One personal attribute, like a hobby or an interest

The majority of this response leans on your past work experience, with a small dash of your personal life added at the end of the response. Keep your answer to two to four minutes.

2. Why do you want to work for this company?

The answer to this interview question should include specifics about the company, so you’ll need to do some pre-interview research. If, for example, the company is known for its collaborative culture, you could point out successes you’ve had while collaborating with a team. 

Look for company-specific information on their website and social channels. Pay attention to the company’s mission statement, values, and the ‘About us’ section. Explore employee-specific posts on social media to learn about the company’s culture or outreach programs. Combine this information with relatable skills to show your preparedness and enthusiasm for the company. 

3. Why are you leaving your current role?

When asked about leaving a previous job, be honest but positive. Even if you left a job under trying circumstances, keep your response short and upbeat. Here are some suggestions:

I’m looking for a company that better aligns with my values. 

I’m excited to find a company where I can grow my career. 

I’ve decided to go down a different career path.

My position was downsized, but I’m looking forward to a new opportunity. 

I’m excited to explore a culture in line with my personality. 

I’m ready to take on a new challenge with an innovative company. 

I’ve aspired to work for this company and seized the chance to apply.

Read more: Reasons for Leaving a Job and How to Talk About Them

4. What is your biggest weakness?

When it comes to identifying weaknesses, think about some conflicts you’ve had to overcome. Maybe it’s difficult for you to take criticism, collaborate, or make public presentations. Take these challenges and frame them with a solution. For instance, you learned to take feedback to better a project, collaborate to elevate a product’s offerings, or use presentations as a way to build your confidence. 

Read more: How to Describe Your Weaknesses in a Job Interview

5. What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Your greatest achievement should be something specific, like bringing a new video game to a saturated market despite a lack of resources. Discuss a work-related triumph as a way to humbly mention your achievements as opposed to listing awards or accolades. This achievement should also fall in line with the company’s mission, goals, or the position’s objectives.

6. Tell me about a difficult situation you’ve faced and how you handled it. 

This question is really asking about your character during moments of stress. Think of a time when you faced an impossible deadline, had to choose sides, or navigated interoffice turmoil. Explain the problem, how you stayed calm, and focus on the solution that produced a resolution. 

7. Give an example of how you’ve gone above and beyond your role requirements. 

While you might be tempted to mention the extra hours you put in or the additional tasks you take on, it’s best to showcase your skills with a story. Talk about the innovative methods you deployed to revive a stalled project or roles you filled when your team was downsized.   

8. What are your salary expectations?

Salary talks can be sensitive, but they’re necessary. Research a competitive salary before you go into your interview, so you don’t aim too high or low. You can use tools like a Salary Calculator or Salary Comparison and Estimator to get baseline compensation. Be sure to mention years of experience or specific certifications that enhance your value.   

9. Where do you see yourself five years from now? 

Another common interview question looks at your five-year plan. You should promote your commitment to the company while looking toward growth opportunities.  

More specifically, you can craft a response that explores your:

Position-related goals

Potential experiences within the company over the next five years

Possible certifications, skills, or achievements you might obtain

Aspirations for growth within the role 

Read more: What Are Your Career Goals?

10. Do you have any questions for us? 

Typically, this is the last question of the interview, and it might be tempting to say, “No. I’m all set.” However, this question allows you to show your interest in the position. Some questions you could ask include:

What are the day-to-day tasks involved in this role?

How do you evaluate the progress of this role? 

What ongoing educational or training opportunities could I pursue in this role?

Where do you see the company in five years?

How would you describe the company culture?

Read more: Questions to Ask at the End of an Interview

How to prepare for an interview

Before your interview, you should do a few things in preparation. To make a great first impression, you should research the company, practice your responses to common interview questions, and run through a practice interview. For more specific tips, take a look at this pre-interview checklist:  

Research the company.

Start your research on the company website. Look over the company mission statement, values, and company history. Next, check Google News for any articles that include the company. Comb through the company’s social accounts, paying particular attention to the product- or employee-related posts. Also, read the LinkedIn profiles of the company’s key players, and if possible, the profile of your hiring manager. 

Understand company work culture.

Take some time to learn about the company culture by looking at employee photos on social media and checking out the company's news coverage. You might see team-building events on its Facebook Page or news coverage of a recent fundraiser, which can help you understand the culture. You can also check for employee testimonials on business rating platforms, like Glassdoor.

Prepare your answers.

Take some time to review the most common interview questions and practice your answers. You don’t want to sound rehearsed, so write down a few bullet points for each question and talk through them a little differently each time. 

Practice the interview.

Ask a friend or family member to role-play with you. Go through the standard interview questions, and practice your greeting and exit. Wear the outfit and shoes you plan to wear during the practice to make sure you’re comfortable.

Read more: What to Wear to an Interview

Ask for feedback. 

Ask your mock interviewer to give you feedback. Maybe you slouched in the chair, nervously bounced your knees, or got stuck on a particular interview question. The person helping you can give you some tips to improve your interview skills.  

Prepare for your next interview with Coursera

In addition to role-playing, you might consider taking an online class or two to improve your interview skills.

For step-by-step guidance throughout the interview research process, consider taking the University of Maryland's Interview Research and Preparation course. In just 19 hours, you'll identify transferable skills, practice your communication skills, and learn to use efficient language to discuss your skills.

Strategize your resume writing, job search, and interviewing techniques with the Interviewing and Resume Writing in English Specialization from the University of Maryland. Over the course of three months, you'll learn advanced interviewing techniques, write a winning resume and cover letter, and practice your interviewing skills with other job seekers from around the globe. 

If you're preparing for a coding interview, get specialized practice with an industry leader by enrolling in Meta's Coding Interview Preparation course. In this intermediate-level program, you'll focus on technical interview topics for coders, such as algorithms, pseudocode, and data structure.

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Reproductive rights in America

Despite state bans, abortions nationwide are up, driven by telehealth.

Elissa Nadworny

Abortion rights activists at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. on March 26, the day the case about the abortion drug mifepristone was heard. The number of abortions in the U.S. increased, a study says, surprising researchers. Drew Angerer/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Abortion rights activists at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. on March 26, the day the case about the abortion drug mifepristone was heard. The number of abortions in the U.S. increased, a study says, surprising researchers.

In the 18 months following the Supreme Court's decision that ended federal protection for abortion, the number of abortions in the U.S. has continued to grow, according to The Society of Family Planning's WeCount project .

"We are seeing a slow and small steady increase in the number of abortions per month and this was completely surprising to us," says Ushma Upadhyay , a professor and public health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco who co-leads the research. According to the report, in 2023 there were, on average, 86,000 abortions per month compared to 2022, where there were about 82,000 abortions per month. "Not huge," says Upadhyay, "but we were expecting a decline."

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What's at stake in the supreme court mifepristone case.

The slight increase comes despite the fact that 14 states had total abortion bans in place during the time of the research. According to the report, there were about 145,000 fewer abortions in person in those states since the Dobbs decision, which triggered many of the restrictive state laws.

"We know that there are people living in states with bans who are not getting their needed abortions," says Upadhyay. "The concern we have is that that might be overlooked by these increases."

Florida, California and Illinois saw the largest surges in abortions, which is especially interesting given Florida's recent 6-week ban that started on May 1.

Abortion rights opponents demonstrate in New York City, on March 23. Some states' abortion bans are known as "heartbeat bills," because they make abortion illegal after cardiac activity starts, usually around six weeks of pregnancy. Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Abortion rights opponents demonstrate in New York City, on March 23. Some states' abortion bans are known as "heartbeat bills," because they make abortion illegal after cardiac activity starts, usually around six weeks of pregnancy.

The latest report also captures for the first time the impact of providers offering telehealth abortions from states with protections for doctors and clinics known as shield laws – statutes that say they can't be prosecuted or held liable for providing abortion care to people from other states.

Between July and December 2023, more than 40,000 people in states with abortion bans and telehealth restrictions received medication abortion through providers in states protected by shield laws. Abortion pills can be prescribed via telehealth appointments and sent through the mail; the pills can safely end pregnancies in the first trimester.

The report includes abortions happening within the U.S. health care system, and does not include self-managed abortions, when people take pills at home without the oversight of a clinician. For that reason, researchers believe these numbers are still an undercount of abortions happening in the U.S.

Tessa Longbons Cox is a senior research associate at Charlotte Lozier Institute, a research organization that opposes abortion. She says the WeCount report, "highlights a concerning trend" that policies around mail-order abortion pills are boosting abortion rates. "By recklessly removing in-person medical visits and safeguards, abortion advocates have put women's health and safety last," Longbons Cox says in a statement.

Accounting for the increases

A major factor in the uptick in abortions nationwide is the rise of telehealth, made possible in part by regulations first loosened during the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the report, telehealth abortions now make up 19% of all abortions in the U.S. In comparison, the first WeCount report which spanned April 2022 through August 2022 showed telehealth abortions accounted for just 4% of all abortions. Research has shown that telehealth abortions are as safe and effective as in-clinic care.

"It's affordable, it's convenient, and it feels more private," says Jillian Barovick, a midwife in Brooklyn and one of the co-founders of Juniper Midwifery , which offers medication abortion via telehealth to patients in six states where abortion is legal. The organization saw its first patient in August 2022 and now treats about 300 patients a month.

A Supreme Court abortion pill case with potential consequences for every other drug

"Having an in-clinic abortion, even a medication abortion, you could potentially be in the clinic for hours, whereas with us you get to sort of bypass all of that," she says. Instead, patients can connect with a clinician using text messages or a secure messaging platform. In addition to charging $100 dollars for the consultation and medication – which is well below the average cost of an abortion – Barovick points to the cost savings of not having to take off work or arrange child care to spend multiple hours in a clinic.

She says her patients receive their medication within 1 to 4 business days, "often faster than you can get an appointment in a clinic."

A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday followed about 500 women who had medication abortions with the pills distributed via mail order pharmacy after an in-person visit with a doctor. More than 90% of the patients were satisfied with the experience; there were three serious adverse events that required hospitalization.

In addition to expansions in telehealth, there have been new clinics in states like Kansas, Illinois and New Mexico, and there's been an increase in funding for abortion care – fueled by private donors and abortion funds.

The impact of shield laws

During the period from October to December 2023, nearly 8,000 people per month in states with bans or severe restrictions accessed medication abortions from clinicians providing telehealth in the 5 states that had shield laws at the time. That's nearly half of all monthly telehealth abortions.

"It's telemedicine overall that is meeting the need of people who either want to or need to remain in their banned or restricted state for their care," says Angel Foster, who founded The MAP, a group practice operating a telehealth model under Massachusetts' shield laws. "If you want to have your abortion care in your state and you live in Texas or Mississippi or Missouri, right now, the shield law provision is by far the most dominant way that you'd be able to get that care."

Foster's group offers medication abortions for about 500 patients a month. About 90% of their patients are in banned or restrictive states; about a third are from Texas, their most common state of origin, followed by Florida.

"Patients are scared that we are a scam," she says, "they can't believe that we're legit."

Since the WeCount data was collected, additional states including Maine and California have passed shield laws protecting providers who offer care nationwide. The new shield laws circumvent traditional telemedicine laws, which often require out-of-state health providers to be licensed in the states where patients are located. States with abortion bans or restrictions and/or telehealth bans hold the provider at fault, not the patient.

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One small pill — one big court case.

Existing lawsuits brought by abortion opponents, including the case awaiting a Supreme Court decision, have the potential to disrupt this telehealth surge by restricting the use of the drug mifepristone nationwide. If the Supreme Court upholds an appeals court ruling, providers would be essentially barred from mailing the drug and an in-person doctor visit would be required.

There is also an effort underway in Louisiana to classify abortion pills as a controlled substance.

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Key Facts on Abortion in the United States

Usha Ranji , Karen Diep , and Alina Salganicoff Published: Nov 21, 2023

Note: This brief was updated on January 4, 2024 to correct the description of the data collected by the federal CDC Abortion Surveillance System. On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned the constitutional right to abortion as well as the federal standards of abortion access, established by prior decisions in the cases Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey . Prior to the Dobbs ruling, the federal standard was that abortions were permitted up to fetal viability. That federal standard has been eliminated, allowing states to set policies regarding the legality of abortions and establish limits. Access to and availability of abortions varies widely between states , with some states banning almost all abortions and some states protecting abortion access.

This issue brief answers some key questions about abortion in the United States and presents data collected before and new data that was published shortly after the overturn of Roe v. Wade .

What is abortion?

How safe are abortions, how often do abortions occur, who gets abortions, at what point in pregnancy do abortions occur, where do people get abortion care, how much do abortions cost, does private insurance or medicaid cover abortions, what are public opinions about abortion.

Abortion is the medical termination of a pregnancy. It is a common medical service that many women obtain at some point in their life. There are different types of abortion methods, which the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM ) places in four categories:

• Medication Abortion – Medication abortion, also known as medical abortion or abortion with pills, is a pregnancy termination protocol that involves taking oral medications. There are two widely accepted protocols for medication abortion. In the U.S., the most common protocol involves taking two different drugs, Mifepristone and Misoprostol. Typically, an individual using medication abortion takes Mifepristone first, followed by misoprostol 24-48 hours later. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved this protocol of medication abortion for use up to the first 70 days (10 weeks) of pregnancy, and its use has been rising for years. Another medication abortion protocol uses misoprostol alone . Patients can take 800 µg (4 pills) of misoprostol sublingually or vaginally every three hours for a total of 12 pills. The regimen is also recommended for up to 70 days (10 weeks) of pregnancy, but it is not currently approved by the FDA and is more commonly used in other countries.

Guttmacher Institute estimates that in 2020, medication was used for more than half (53%) of all abortions. While medication abortion has been available in the U.S. for more than 20 years, studies have found that many adults and women of reproductive age have not heard of medication abortion. Many have confused emergency contraception ( EC ) pills with medication abortion pills, but EC does not terminate a pregnancy. EC works by delaying or inhibiting ovulation and will not affect an established pregnancy.

• Aspiration , a minimally invasive and commonly used gynecological procedure, is the most common form of procedural abortion. It can be used to conduct abortions up to 14-16 weeks of gestation. Aspiration is also commonly used in cases of early pregnancy loss (miscarriage).
• Dilation and evacuation abortions (D&E) are usually performed after the 14th week of pregnancy. The cervix is dilated, and the pregnancy tissue is evacuated using forceps or suction.
• Induction abortions are rare and conducted later in pregnancy. They involve the use of medications to induce labor and delivery of the fetus.

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Decades of research have shown that abortion is a very safe medical service.

Despite its strong safety profile, abortion is the most highly regulated medical service in the country and is now banned in several states. In addition to bans on abortion altogether and telehealth, many states impose other limitations on abortion that are not medically indicated, including waiting periods, ultrasound requirements, gestational age limits, and parental notification and consent requirements. These restrictions typically delay receipt of services.

• NASEM completed an exhaustive review on the safety and effectiveness of abortion care and concluded that complications from abortion are rare and occur far less frequently than during childbirth.
• NASEM also concluded that safety is enhanced when the abortion is performed earlier in the pregnancy. State level restrictions such as waiting periods, ultrasound requirements, and gestational limits that impede access and delay abortion provision likely make abortions less safe.
• When medication abortion pills, which account for the majority of abortions, are administered at 9 weeks’ gestation or less, the pregnancy is terminated successfully 99.6% of the time, with a 0.4% risk of major complications, and an associated mortality rate of less than 0.001 percent (0.00064%).
• Medication abortion pills can be provided in a clinical setting or via telehealth (without an in-person visit). Research has found that the provision of medication abortion via telehealth is as safe and effective as the provision of the pills at an in person visit.
• Studies on procedural abortions, which include aspiration and D&E, have also found that they are very safe. Research on aspiration abortions, the most common procedural method, have found the rate of major complications of less than 1%.

There are three major data sources on abortion incidence and the characteristics of people who obtain abortions in the U.S: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Guttmacher Institute, and most recently, the Society of Family Planning’s (SFP) #WeCount project.

The federal CDC Abortion Surveillance System requests data from the central health agencies of the 50 states, DC, and New York City to document the number and characteristics of women obtaining abortions. Most states collect data from facilities where abortions are provided on the demographic characteristics of patients, gestational age, and type of abortion procedure. Reporting these data to the CDC is voluntary and not all states participate in the surveillance system. Notably, California, Maryland, and New Hampshire have not reported data on abortions to the CDC system for years. CDC publishes available data from the surveillance system annually.

Guttmacher Institute , an independent research and advocacy organization, is another major source of data on abortions in the U.S. Prior to the Dobbs ruling, Guttmacher conducted the Abortion Provider Census (APC) periodically which has provided data on abortion incidence, abortion facilities, and characteristics of abortion patients. Data from this Census are based primarily on questionnaires collected from all known facilities that provide abortion in the country, information obtained from state health departments, and Guttmacher estimates for a small portion of facilities. The most recent APC reports data from 2020.

The CDC and Guttmacher data differ in terms of methods, timeframe, and completeness, but both have shown similar trends in abortion rates over the past decade. One notable difference is that Guttmacher’s study includes continuous reporting from California, D.C., Maryland, and New Hampshire, which explains at least in part the higher number of abortions in their data.

Since the Dobbs ruling, the Guttmacher Institute has established the Monthly Abortion Provision Study to track abortion volume within the formal United States health care system. This ongoing effort collects data on and provides national and state-level estimates on procedural and medication abortions while also tracking the changes in abortion volume since 2020. The Monthly Abortion Provision Study was designed to complement Guttmacher’s APC along with other data collection efforts to allow for quick snapshots of the changing abortion landscape in the United States.

Society of Family Planning’s (SFP) #WeCount is another national reporting effort that measures changes in abortion access following the Dobbs ruling. The project reports on the number of abortions per month by state and includes data on abortions provided through clinics, private practices, hospitals, and virtual-only providers. The report does not include data on self-managed abortions that are performed without clinical supervision. The most recent #WeCount report analyzes data from April 2022 to data from June 2023, marking one full year of abortion data since Dobbs. The effort represents 83% of all providers known to #WeCount who agreed to participate in their research.

This KFF issue brief uses data from the CDC, Guttmacher, and SFP as well as other research organizations.

How has the abortion rate changed over time?

For most of the decade prior to the Dobbs ruling, there was a steady decline in abortion rates nationally, but there was a slight increase in the years just before the ruling.

In their most recent national data, Guttmacher Institute reported 930,160 abortions in 2020 and a rate of 14.4 per 1,000 women. CDC reported 622,108 abortions in 2021 and a rate of 11.6 abortions per 1,000 women (excludes CA, DC, MD, NH). Guttmacher’s study showed an upward trend in abortion from 2017 to 2020 whereas CDC’s report showed an increase in abortions from 2017 to 2021 except for a slight decrease in 2020.

While most attribute the long-term decline in abortion rates to increased use of more effective methods of contraception , several states had reduced access to low- or no-cost contraceptive care as a result of reductions in the Title X network under the Trump Administration, which may have contributed to the slight rise in abortions prior to the Dobbs ruling. Other factors that may have contributed to the increase could include greater coverage under Medicaid that subsequently made abortions more affordable in some states and broader financial support from abortion funds to help individuals pay for the costs of abortion care.

Even prior to the Dobbs ruling, abortion rates varied widely between states.

National averages can mask local and more granular differences. Lower state-level abortion rates do not reflect less need. Some of the variation has been due to the wide differences in state policies, with some states historically placing restrictions on abortion that make access and availability to nearly out of reach and, on the other side, some states enshrining protections in state Constitutions and legislation.

• In 2020, the abortion rate (per 1,000 women ages 15-44) ranged from 0.1 in Missouri to 48.9 in the District of Columbia (DC). Trends also varied between states. While the national rate of abortion increased between 2017 and 2019, some states saw declines, with particularly sharp drops in states where heavy restrictions were put into place.

While the number of abortions in the U.S. dropped immediately following the Dobbs decision, new data show that the number of abortions increased overall one year following the ruling. However, the upswing obscures the declines in abortion care in states with bans.

SFP’s #WeCount estimates there were 2,200 cumulative more abortions in the year following Dobbs (July 2022 to June 2023) compared to the pre- Dobbs period (April 2022 and May 2022). Nationally, the number of abortions varied month-by-month, with the largest decrease observed in November 2022 (73,930 abortions; 8,185 fewer abortions than pre- Dobbs period ) and the largest increase in March 2023 (92,680 abortions; 10,565 more abortions than pre- Dobbs period). The states with the largest cumulative increases in the total number of abortions provided by a clinician during the 12-month period include Illinois, Florida, North Carolina, California, and New Mexico. States with abortion bans experienced the largest cumulative decreases in the number of abortions, including Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana (data varies by month in each state; data not shown).

States without abortion bans experienced an increase of abortions following the Dobbs ruling likely due to a combination of reasons: increased interstate travel for abortion access, expanded in-person and virtual/telehealth capacity to see patients, increased measures to protect and cover abortion care for residents and out-of-state patients, and potentially reduced abortion-related stigma as a result of community mobilization around abortion care.

However, the overall national increase in the number of abortions masks the absence and/or scarcity of abortion care in states with total abortion bans or severe restrictions. States with total bans experienced observed 94,930 fewer clinician-provided abortions a year following the ruling (data not shown). Note, this figure is an underestimate due several state policies that restricted abortion access during the pre- Dobbs period. These estimates do not include abortions that may have been performed through self-managed means.

Most of the information about people who receive abortions comes from data prior to the Dobbs ruling. In 2021, women across a range of age groups, socioeconomic status, and racial and ethnic backgrounds obtained abortions, but the majority were obtained by women who were in their twenties, low-income, and women of color.

• Women in their twenties accounted for more than half (57%) of abortions. Nearly one-third (31%) were among women in their thirties and a small share were among women in their 40s (4%) and teens (8%).
• Seven in ten abortion patients were of women of color. Black women comprised 42% of abortion recipients, White women 30% , Hispanic women 22%, and 7% women of other races/ethnicities.
• Many women who sought abortions have children. More than six in 10 (61%) abortion patients in 2021 had at least one previous birth.

The vast majority (94%) of abortions occur during the first trimester of pregnancy according to data available from before the Dobbs decision.

Before the 2022 ruling in Dobbs, there was a federal constitutional right to abortion before the pregnancy is considered to be viable, that is, can survive outside of a pregnant person’s uterus. Viability is generally considered around 24 weeks of pregnancy. Most abortions, though, occur well before the point of fetal viability.

• Data from 2021 found that more than four in ten (45%) abortions occurred by six weeks of gestation, a third (36%) occurred between seven and nine weeks, and 13% at 10-13 weeks. Just 7% of abortions occurred after the first trimester.
• Prior to the decision in the Dobbs case, almost half of states (22) had enacted laws that ban abortion at a certain gestational age. Most of these limits are in the second trimester, but some are in the first trimester, well before fetal viability. Many of these laws were blocked because they violated the federal standard established by Roe v Wade. Some states have enacted laws banning abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, or around 6 weeks of pregnancy, which is often before a person knows they are pregnant. In addition to banning abortion, states can now establish pre-viability gestational restrictions because the federal standard has been overturned.

Just over half of abortions were provided at clinics that specialize in abortion care in 2020. Others were provided at clinics that offer abortion care in addition to other family planning services.

Guttmacher Institute estimated that 96% of abortions were provided at clinics and just 4% were provided in doctors’ offices or hospitals in 2020. Most clinic-based abortions were provided at clinics that specialize in providing abortion care, but many were provided at clinics that offer a wide range of other sexual and reproductive health services like contraception and STI care. Most abortions are provided by physicians. However, in 19 states and D.C., Advanced Practice Clinicians (APCs) such as Nurse Practitioners and midwives may provide medication abortions. Conversely, 31 states prohibit clinicians other than physicians from providing abortion care.

Even prior to the ruling in Dobbs , access to abortion services was very uneven across the country though. The proliferation of restrictions in many states, particularly in the South, had greatly shrunk the availability of services in some areas. In the wake of overturning Roe v. Wade , these geographic disparities are likely to widen as more states ban abortion services altogether.

Telehealth has grown as a delivery mechanism for abortion services.

While procedural abortions must be provided in a clinical setting, medication abortion can be provided in a clinical setting or via telehealth. Access to medication abortion via telehealth had been limited for many years by a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) restriction that had permitted only certified clinicians to dispense mifepristone in a health care setting. The drug could not be mailed or picked up at a retail pharmacy. However, in December 2021, the FDA permanently revised its policy and no longer requires clinicians to dispense the drug in person. Additionally, in January 2023, the FDA finalized a change that allows retail pharmacies to dispense medication abortion pills to patients with a prescription.

While some states are regulating the use of mifepristone as an abortion method, the Biden Administration has asserted that the FDA has regulatory power over all drugs, including mifepristone. This could result in future legal action as the authority of the state to regulate health care will be pitted against the authority of the federal government to regulate drugs through the FDA will be contested.

• In a telehealth abortion, the patient typically completes an online questionnaire to assess (1) confirmation of pregnancy, (2) gestational age and (3) blood type. If determined eligible by a remote clinician, the patient is mailed the medications. This model does not require an ultrasound for pregnancy dating if the patient has regular periods and is sure of the date of their last menstrual period (in line with  ACOG ’s guidelines for pregnancy dating). If the patient has irregular periods or is unsure how long they have been pregnant, they must obtain an ultrasound to confirm gestational age and rule out an ectopic pregnancy 3 and send in the images for review before receiving their medications. If the patient does not know their blood type or has Rh negative blood, the  provider  may prompt the patient to visit a nearby clinic for an injection to prevent adverse reactions between maternal and fetal blood ( RhoGAM ), The follow-up visit with a clinician can also happen via a telehealth visit.
• However, even in some of the states that have not banned abortion altogether, telehealth may not be available. Many states had established restrictions prior to the Dobbs ruling that limit the use of telehealth abortions by either requiring abortion patients to take the pills at a physical clinic, require ultrasounds for all abortions, set their own policies regarding the dispensing of the medications used for abortion care, or directly ban the use of telehealth for abortion care. As of November 2022, of the 33 states that have not banned abortion, eight had at least one of these restrictions, effectively prohibiting telehealth for medication abortion.
• Medication abortion has emerged as a major legal front in the battle over abortion access across the nation. Multiple cases have been filed in federal courts regarding aspects of the FDA’s regulation of medication abortion as well as the mailing of medications. One notable ongoing case is Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA , where the plaintiffs are challenging the FDA’s authority and approval process for mifepristone. The plaintiffs also contend that an 1873 anti-obscenity law, the Comstock Act, prohibits the mailing of any medication used for abortion. In April 2023, a US Supreme Court ruling allowed current FDA rules to remain in effect as the case proceeds through the courts. This means that mifepristone remains available for medication abortion either in a clinic or via telehealth where state law permits.

Data from SFP’s October 2023 #WeCount report show that abortions provided by virtual-only clinics represent approximately 5% of all abortions post- Roe . The number of telehealth abortions increased 72% from a monthly average of 4,045 abortions in April and May 2022 to 6,950 abortions per month in the 12 months post- Dobbs . Nearly all of these abortions occurred in states that permit abortions.

Self-managed abortions are provided without a clinician visit.

Self-managed abortions typically involve obtaining medication abortion pills from an online pharmacy that will send the pills by mail or by purchasing the pills from a pharmacy in another country. This does not typically involve a direct consultation with a clinician either in person or via telehealth.

Research has found that prior to Dobbs , more than one in ten patients who obtained abortions at clinics had considered self-managing their abortions. This is likely to increase going forward since abortion care is not available in many states, and there have already been reports of people ordering pills from online markets outside the U.S. medical system. Tracking information on these online orders can help fill in gaps in abortion count estimates but can also be difficult. Some companies may not share data on purchases, and it would also be unclear whether patients take the abortion medication after receiving it in the mail.

The median costs of abortion services exceed $500.

Obtaining an abortion can be costly. On average, the costs are higher for abortions in the second trimester than in the first trimester. State restrictions can also raise the costs, as people may have to travel if abortions are prohibited or not available in their area. Many people pay for abortion services out of pocket, but some people can obtain assistance from local abortion funds.

• In 2021, the median costs for people paying out of pocket in the first trimester were $568 for a medication abortion and $625 for a procedural abortion. The Federal Reserve estimates that nationally about one-third of people do not have $400 on hand for unexpected expenses. For low-income people, who are more likely to need abortion care, these costs are often unaffordable.
• The costs of abortion are higher in the second trimester compared to the first, with median self-pay of $775. In the second trimester, more intensive procedures may be needed, more are likely to be conducted in a hospital setting (although still a minority), and local options are more limited in many communities that have fewer facilities. This results in additional nonmedical costs for transportation, childcare, lodging, and lost wages. nonmedical costs for transportation, childcare, lodging, and lost wages.
• Abortion funds are independent organizations that help some people pay for the costs of abortion services. Most abortion funds are regional and have connections to clinics in their area. Funds vary, but they typically provide assistance with the costs of medical care, travel, and accommodations if needed. However, they do not reach all people seeking services, and many people are not able to afford the costs of obtaining an abortion because they cannot pay for the abortion itself or cover the costs of travel, lodging or missed work.

Insurance coverage for abortion services is heavily restricted in certain private insurance plans and public programs like Medicaid and Medicare.

Private insurance covers most women of reproductive age, and states have the responsibility to regulate fully insured private plans in their state, whereas the federal government regulates self-funded plans under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). States can choose whether abortion coverage is included or excluded in private plans that are not self-insured.

• Prior to the Dobbs ruling, several states had enacted private plan restrictions and banned abortion coverage from ACA Marketplace plans. Currently, there are 11 states that have policies restricting abortion coverage in private plans and 26 that ban coverage in any Marketplace plans. Since the Dobbs ruling, some of these states have also banned the provision of abortion services altogether.
• A handful of states ( 9 ), however, have enacted laws that require private plans to cover abortion.
• The Medicaid program covers approximately one in five women of reproductive age and four in ten who are low-income. For decades, the Hyde Amendment has banned the use of federal funds for abortion in Medicaid and other public programs unless the pregnancy is a result of rape, incest, or it endangers the woman’s life.
• States have the option to use state-only funds to cover abortions under other circumstances for women on Medicaid, which 16 states do currently. However, more than half (56% ) of women covered by Medicaid live in Hyde states.
• According to a Guttmacher Institute survey of patients in the year prior to the Dobbs ruling, a quarter (26%) of abortion patients in the study used Medicaid to pay for abortion services, 11% used private insurance, and 60% paid out of pocket. People in states with more restrictive abortion policies were less likely to use Medicaid or private insurance and more likely to pay out of pocket compared to people living in less restrictive states.
• Federal law also restricts abortion funding under the Indian Health Service, Medicare, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Over the years, language similar to that in the Hyde Amendment has been incorporated into a range of other federal programs that provide or pay for health services to women including: the military’s TRICARE program, federal prisons, the Peace Corps, and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.

National polls have consistently found that a majority of the public did not want to see Roe v . Wade overturned and that most people feel that abortion is a personal medical decision. The public also strongly opposes the criminalization of abortion both among people who get abortion and the clinicians who provide abortion services. Nearly three quarters of adults (74%) and 79% of reproductive age women say that obtaining an abortion should be a personal choice rather than regulated by law (data not shown). For example, two-thirds of the public are concerned that bans on abortion may lead to unnecessary health problems for people experiencing pregnancy complications.

Additional KFF resources:

Abortion in the US Dashboard

Access and Coverage of Abortion Services

Issue Brief: Abortion at SCOTUS: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health

Issue Brief: State Actions to Protect and Expand Access to Abortion Services

Policy Watch: A Year After Dobbs: Policies Restricting Access to Abortion in States Even Where It’s Not Banned

Policy Watch: Employer Coverage of Travel Costs for Out-of-State Abortion

Issue Brief: Exclusion of Abortion Coverage from Employer-Sponsored Health Plans

Interactive: How State Policies Shape Access to Abortion Coverage

Medication Abortion

Issue Brief: Legal Challenges to the FDA Approval of Medication Abortion Pills

Infographic: The Availability and Use of Medication Abortion Care

Fact Sheet: The Availability and Use of Medication Abortion

Issue Brief: The Intersection of State and Federal Policies on Access to Medication Abortion Via Telehealth

Public Opinion on Abortion

Web Event: Americans’ Knowledge and Attitudes About Abortion Access and The Pending Supreme Court Ruling

KFF Health Tracking Poll: Early 2023 Update On Public Awareness On Abortion and Emergency Contraception

KFF Health Tracking Poll: Views on and Knowledge about Abortion in Wake of Leaked Supreme Court Opinion

Other Resources on Women’s Health

Interactive: State Profiles for Women’s Health

Interactive: State Health Facts on Women’s Health Indicators

Homepage: Women’s Health Policy

• Women's Health Policy
• Access to Care

Also of Interest

• The Availability and Use of Medication Abortion
• State Actions to Protect and Expand Access to Abortion Services
• Legal Challenges to State Abortion Bans Since the Dobbs Decision
• Legal Challenges to the FDA Approval of Medication Abortion Pills
• Employer Coverage of Travel Costs for Out-of-State Abortion
• Abortion in the United States Dashboard