Notes on Doing Research and Writing Research Papers

Students are responsible for conducting thorough and credible research. Communication Studies students are expected to follow the advice and guidelines contained in these pages. You can elect whether to employ APA or MLA format, but in any case, it will be important for you to review all the other material on research skills and the actual construction of your paper.

Purdue University's OWL website offers extensive writing resources for students. The links under the "Navigation" section include citation, grammar and other helpful information. Below are more specific sections of the OWL website:

Research Skills and Resources

Productive Web Searches
Searching the World Wide Web
Evaluating Sources of Information

Using American Psychological Association (APA) Format
Using Modern Language Association (MLA) Format
Formatting in Sociology
Resources for Documenting Sources (in any format)
Documenting Electronic Sources (in any format)

Writing Research Papers

Annotated Bibliographies
Writing Research Papers: A Step-by-Step List
Developing an Outline
Paraphrasing: exercise and answer key
Plagiarism
Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing
Sample Outline
Using Statistics