Academic Research Booklet

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Planning your research Carefully planning your research will help you both save time and stay organised throughout your project. Not only is it a good idea to think carefully about the questions you need to answer and the sources you need to look at, but you will also need to think about how long you have to get things done. Creating a timeline for completion is incredibly important as project end dates which are over a term away can make it feel like you have all the time in the world to do the work but in reality you have that long because there is a lot to do. Breaking down the tasks early on is essential. Top Tip: use your diary to work back from your deadline and set yourself goals per lesson, week, cycle and per half term. Methodology In relation to planning, as you’re researching you need to make deliberate decisions on the sources you spend your time reading. These deliberate decisions will then be presented as your ‘methodology’ (approach to research) in your essay introduction. NOTE: If you are doing a science-based essay in the introduction you should use the terminology ‘approach to research’ as you may need to instead include a separate section titled methodology which outlines your experiment or data gathering (check with your supervisor). If you have been told to include a literature review , you need not include your methodology in your introduction as the literature review will cover it in more detail.

Go to page 25 for how to write a methodology and page 26 for literature reviews.