This post is part of a series of enumerated posts about tips and strategies for doing effective academic research. Click here for the full series (so far). 

The top level bullet points in terms of advice for this post are:

• Don’t tell yourself you’ll do all the research before you start writing
• Jump right in and start writing as soon as you start researching
  • Don’t write notes, write full sentences
  • It’s ok if they seem random or unconnected, just write down your thoughts & ideas in full sentences
  • Fully and correctly cite these writtens sentences

I have always been daunted by academic research. I blame my high school teacher, Ms. Yungel, who forced us all to do heavily researched essays about our own ideas about books we read. Why do I need scholarly support for my own ideas about a book?, was not a question she ever adequately answered. She also made us read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, which may be a good book, but not when you’re in tenth grade. 
Anyway, Ms. Yungel instilled in me a resistance to academic research that caused a host of problems later in my academic life, and I know struggle with all of the following issues:

1. Not knowing where to start
2. Feeling overwhelmed by too much relevant information
3. Feeling overwhelmed by not enough relevant information
4. Reading incessantly and coming away with nothing usable
5. Underlining and highlighting for three days straight and realizing I haven’t written a word or remembered any of it and I have a mess of notes that don’t really make that sense or fit together in a clear way.
6. Reading entire articles from start to finish
7. Struggling to find reputable vs. non-reputable sources
8. Knowing when to quote and when to summarize
9. Not knowing where to stop

I hope to address all of these issues in this series, but let’s just start with numbers 4 and 5, because it’s an easy one to avoid. For me it’s a mental problem that arises from unrealistic expectations. The myth is that I can read and take notes for days, weeks, or months at a time, and at the end of it all, I’ll magically be able to “put it all together” in a coherent essay. In reality I’m tricking myself into avoiding doing actual work by telling myself I’ll do it later. That way I can leisurely read all of these articles (mostly zoning out the whole time), and tell myself I’m working on my research, that I’ absorbing it all, underlining or highlighting a lot, and taking great notes.

Be Honest With Yourself and Realistic about Your ProcessMy difficulties with academic research are also at least partially psychological or habit-based. Like a lot of students, I tend to overestimate the efficacy of my study habits. When I start a project, I tell myself I can read everything, digest it, and then come back and start writing. I tell myself I can take my time and read even less relevant material because it might have some bearing on my final work product. I tell myself I can effectively break the research process into phases, so I can spend all day reading and underlining, because “I’ll go back later and pull out the quotes I need.”

But like a lot of students, I wind up procrastinating, forgetting, losing interest, getting lost in the weeds, getting overwhelmed with information, or just running out of time. So now, when I start a research project, I prepare myself to be relentless and ruthless. “You’re not here to peruse articles and declare ‘oh, how interesting,’ you namby pamby. You’re here to get this thing finished, and if you like it so much, read more about it later.” I will literally say things like this to myself. I don’t break things into pieces anymore, I start writing right away, and I let my writing guide the research, rather than vice versa. This is not how your teachers and professors will tell you to do a research project. But it works.

Jump in Right Away with Quotes, Citations, and Full Sentences. Don’t Try to Split Up Your Processes.Think of your research project as a jigsaw puzzle. You don’t sit there staring at each piece individually, trying to memorize it, and then later think everything you stared at will later come together in a separate process. No, in a jigsaw puzzle, you put things together as you see them, you start making connections before you know the bigger picture at all. The same goes for research. As soon as you see a connection or have an idea, write it down. And don’t write notes, write sentences, use quotes, and cite everything correctly. 
Think about it like this: you have a fully formed thought in your head, so why shorten or abbreviate it? You’ll only have to re-translate the abbreviation back into a full thought later, so why not write down the full thought right now, as an English sentence? 

What about the context?, you might ask, How can I write the sentence if I don’t know how it fits in to the larger research project? 

Just give it a try, is my response, and I think you’ll be surprised. Or just leave out the context altogether and put it in later.. You may not ultimately use what you write, but I bet you will. Anyway, it only takes a few seconds longer to write out a sentence and correctly cite the source. And, more importantly, you probably will use what you write, and by the time you’re finished researching, you’ll already have half of the writing done.

So that’s my first piece of advice for this first post in the series on the research process. Jump right in, write all your thoughts down in full sentences, that are correctly cited. You’ll likely use it all later, and find out that a lot of your writing is already done.