Confluence Campus Library

This guide will walk you through the research process.

Purdue OWL for Grades 7-12 Students and Teachers

This site offers resources / tutorials for the research process, as well as other writing processes. Learn more about research and using citations.

To avoid plagiarism, cite all sources. This means you must credit your sources by using in-text citations and a bibliography.

This guide covers specific steps in the research process. You will likely revisit one or more of these steps as you work through the research process.  

Search Strategies: Use key strategies to help you conduct a more efficient search.

Find Information: Find and retrieve information for your research assignment.

Evaluate Information: Evaluate what you have found to determine what will be used for your assignment.

Cite Information: To avoid plagiarism, cite your information sources.

The first step of any assignment is to read it thoroughly and note any specific requirements:

• Type of assignment (report, critique, essay, analysis, presentation)
• Number of resources
• Types of resources (articles, books, videos, websites etc.)
• Citation format (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.)

A useful strategy to manage your research is to keep notes as you go. Take clear, accurate notes about where you found specific ideas, and, as you consult sources and make notes, keep a list of the sources you used.

There are many ways that you can keep notes to manage your research and citations more easily:

• Use index cards or a notebook.
• Use a wordprocessor document.
• Use an app like Evernote or Google Keep

Simply put, plagiarism is the unacknowledged use of other people’s ideas or work. Plagiarism occurs when you:

• Misrepresent someone else’s work as your own
• Copy another person’s work from an article, journal or website
• Copy sentences or paragraphs without citing the source
• Quote material without proper use of quotation marks
• Use specific facts without proper attribution
• Use a specific argument or logic without crediting the source
• Use art, graphs, illustrations, maps, statistics, and photographs without proper citation
• Paraphrase or summarize information without proper acknowledgement

The above information was adapted from the SFU Library.