Planning Your Research: Some Basics

It is important for you to understand that good research and good writing go hand in hand, and this means that if you want to create an excellent piece of work on paper, it is best and only logical that you focus well on the writing part first. This is probably the single most important key towards the road to success when you are writing on any topic. If you are looking for a good historical research firm consider Omega Historical Consulting.

To achieve that end, you will have to start with two options:

 (a) think about a problem that you are genuinely interested in which you think is unique and challenging but also tackle able.

(b) Secondly, you need to focus on a specific issue or maybe a controversy, a technique, an instrument, person, and other aspects that are likely to offer a fruitful way forward for exploring the problem at hand.

 In the early stages, it is only normal and in fact, a good idea to be general about or very specific about the issue. There is another important thing to consider here. So before you get into working on any subject matter seriously, it is always a good idea to go for some secondary literature surrounding the subject, or associated with the subject.

This does not actually mean that you have to engage yourself with an exhaustive search, not at least at this stage, but it is very important that you are able to master the fundamentals of the process because you need to be in a position to gauge the relevance of anything that you find and decide to what extent that piece of the source material will be used or can come i handy to your work. In case you find out that there are lectures being offered which relates to your topic, make sure to attend them; and try to obtain a preliminary bibliography from the lecturer.

Once these aspects are covered, it is only logical that you immerse yourself in your main primary sources as soon as possible. In case you are studying a museum object, this is precisely when you look at it closely; in case you are preparing a piece of debate material, collect the main papers relevant to it and make sure that you give them a close reading; if in case you are writing on or working on a specific experiment, go through the published papers, and also the laboratory notebook, and other relevant letters. Try not to fall into the tendency to spend hours in the initial stages of research trying to fret out hard-to-find details, unless you are very sure that they can be of central importance to the viability of your topic.

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alexissamuel260 Joined: April 15th, 2020