1. A research paper is a major project which requires considerable time and effort.



2. You will be working largely on your own, without the help of your teacher.



3. The required format for research papers seems complicated.



4. You don’t know how or where to begin.

This collection of tips about how to prepare a research paper is intended to supplement your teacher’s instructions. It focuses upon how to get started and how to prepare your research paper in a correct format.

Finding a Topic

Since a research paper will be assigned as part of a course you are taking, its subject will already be somewhat defined. However, most faculty members will ask you to develop your own specific topic within the general subject area.

1. Choose a topic in which you are interested. This should always be your first consideration. Having done that, check to be sure that: (1) there is sufficient information about your topic (that means a number of sources, not just one or two), and (2) the topic can be narrowed down enough to be analyzed adequately within the length and time limits your teacher specifies.



2. To avoid choosing a topic that is too broad, make sure that your research paper will attempt to answer a specific question. For example, consider the following potential topic: American Foreign Policy.
   
   As you think about it, you find that this topic is too broad and, furthermore, it cannot be expressed as a specific question. It is not a research paper topic at all, but a whole field of study about which many volumes have been written. But if you are interested in the Vietnam War, you might select the topic: American Public Reaction to the Vietnam War.
   
   This is a narrower topic which can be phrased as a question: “What was American public reaction to the Vietnam War?” Here also a little thought on your part and some preliminary research (more about that shortly) will reveal that this is a very broad topic. You need to do more narrowing down. You now choose this topic: Reaction of Vietnam War Opponents to the Tet Offensive.
   
   You can now ask a relatively narrow question: “How did American opponents of the Vietnam War react to the Tet Offensive?” But is this the right question (topic) for your research paper?
   


3. This is the point at which you find that there is more to choosing a topic than taking a general subject and arbitrarily narrowing it down. Now you must make sure that sufficient information is available to you on the topic. You will need to do some preliminary research at the library, and to skim several articles and books to find out whether available research resources will supply the information needed to answer your question. In short, you need to learn something about your subject before you can limit and define it intelligently.

To find the resources to prepare a research paper, you will have to use a local library, probably the one on your base or post, along with tools available via the Web. For books you will rely on your local library; for journal articles and other resources you will need to use the Web based databases available to you as a UMUC student or similar tools at the library.

To find books at your local library search the library’s catalog by author, subject, title, or keyword. Some base and post libraries have card catalog systems but increasingly libraries on Pacific military installations use computerized catalogs of their holdings.

If the library has a card catalog system, the place to start is with the subject cards. For example, if your topic is “How did American opponents of the Vietnam War react to the Tet Offensive?” you could begin with: Vietnam, Vietnam War, or TET.

If the library offers a computerized catalog system, begin with a keyword search to scan the collection of books for the term(s) you enter. For example, using the same subject, the keywords ‘Vietnam’ and ‘TET Offensive’ should lead to appropriate books. At any rate, the library will have handouts and documents on how to search using their system.

Many installation libraries also offer interlibrary loan service allowing you to borrow books from other military libraries. This process often takes a week or longer so planning ahead is crucial. Interlibrary loan policies vary from library to library so ask the librarian if you are interested.

To find journal articles, newspaper stories, statistical information, and other resources you will need to use electronic databases and indexes available at the library or the Web based UMUC collection of databases called MdUSA. MdUSA provides Web access to 90-plus databases available to UMUC students and faculty. Most contain the full text of the journal articles, newspaper stories, reference materials and other resources. Other databases offer title, abstract, and additional bibliographic information that can then be used to order the article through MdUSA for electronic delivery via e-mail. For more information on accessing and searching MdUSA, see the UMUC Information and Library Services Web page at http://www.umuc.edu/library/ or call DSN 225-3696.

Library catalogs and electronic indexes are just some of the research aids available via the Web and at the library. The UMUC librarians are another important resource available to assist you with your research. From the Web page above, you can contact a UMUC librarian via e-mail, view subject guides and tutorials, and find guides to writing and research tailored to UMUC students. The resources at the Web site will guide your library research process in the appropriate direction regardless of your physical location and availability of local library resources.

Taking Notes

Inexperienced writers sometimes try to save time and effort by not taking notes. By extracting information from their sources and putting it directly into the paper, they believe they have saved several steps. The result, unfortunately, is often a less than satisfactory paper. Taking notes is not just a matter of recording data or photocopying material. It is also an important opportunity for you to think about the data you are collecting. This process is enhanced if you use a well-organized, logical note-taking system.

1. As a preliminary step, you will have to get some note-taking materials. The easiest and most effective thing to do is to buy a large supply of note cards and develop an easy way to use and store them. To make card sorting and storage as simple as possible you should use the same size cards for all your note-taking.



2. Three Kinds of Note Cards:

1. The Bibliography Card.

   For each source that you will be using, prepare a bibliography card in correct bibliographic format (see p. 37). By doing this, and by including the library call number, you will have a record of your sources, an aid in locating the source in the future, and the information necessary for preparing the references that you include in the text of your paper and in your Works Cited bibliography.

	Correct format so that you will be able to do your footnotes and bibliography easily.
Library information so you can find the book again if necessary.	Johnson, Lyndon Baines. The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969. New York: Popular Library, 1971. HD Lib B Joh
	With one of these cards for each source, you have a complete record of your research.

 

2. The Note Card for Information Summarized in Your Own Words.

   You will usually want to put information you find in your own words. Not only will you be able to state it more briefly than your original source did, but this will also give you a chance to think about the information and decide if it is accurate, appropriate, and so forth. Remember, the final paper has to be in your own words. It has to be a product of your own research, thinking and conclusions on the topic. Your lecturer does not want a paper that is just a string of quotations.

In abbreviated form, here is where you obtained the information.	LBJ, Vantage Pt (1971) P. 380: LBJ knew that an offensive at Tet 1968 was planned and blames self for not informing Amer people more carefully. DID HE REALLY KNOW...OR DOES HE SAY THAT SO HE CAN LATER CLAIM THAT U.S. WAS PREPARED?	There are no quotation marks because you have put what LBJ wrote into your own words.
	You have a question about what LBJ wrote so you note it here to remind yourself later when weighing the evidence. Make sure not to confuse your comment with the information you took from the book.

3. The Note Card for Quoted Information.
   Sometimes, to assure that your information is exact or to preserve some colorful language or a particularly important statement, you will want to include a direct quotation in your paper. The following sample note card shows what you should do so that you can quote properly.

LBJ,Vantage Pt (1971) 
P. 384: "There was a great deal of emotional

    & exaggerated reporting of the Tet offensive

    in our press & on television. The media

    seemed to be in competition as to who could

    provide the most lurid & depressing accounts.

    Columnists unsympathetic to Amer involvement in

    Southeast Asia jumped on the bandwagon."



LBJ goes on to say they made Tet seem like a defeat

which he feels it wasn't.



LBJ OPINION ON HOW WAR OPPONENTS FORMED

VIEWS OF TET.

Important: On this note card (and on all others) you put just one piece of information. This is important for your organization. When writing your paper, for example, you will be able to pull together all the cards you have concerning President Johnson's opinions on how opponents of the Vietnam War formed their views of the Tet Offensive, and see how these cards agree or disagree.

1. By preparing accurate bibliography and note cards you have the information you need for writing your paper and correctly acknowledging the sources you are using. Whenever you present information and ideas that come from someone else and whenever you quote a statement spoken or written by someone else, you must acknowledge your source. You make this acknowledgment in the form of references, which serve three purposes.
   1. References enhance your text by providing the reader with information about how you used various pieces of evidence to support your analysis and conclusions. Often, it is the documenting of a fact or statistic from a good source that will convince the reader of the truth of your statement.
   2. References allow readers to check sources for themselves. If you capture the interest of readers, they may wish to look further in the sources you used. Similarly, your lecturer may wish to examine sources to evaluate how effectively you used them in your paper.
   3. References in the text are your way of documenting the ideas of others in your paper. To represent, intentionally or unintentionally, the ideas of others as your own is plagiarism, a form of dishonesty which can result in severe academic penalty. For additional information on plagiarism, please refer to the current UMUC Asia Catalog.
2. Using someone else's ideas: To enhance the quality of your paper and to avoid plagiarism, it is extremely important that you distinguish between ideas and opinions that you develop personally and those which originate with someone else. Always acknowledge someone else's ideas and opinions by citing the sources in the text of your paper and listing them on the Works Cited page.
3. Using your own words to present information you have researched: Students sometimes make the error of thinking that only quotations must be acknowledged. Unfortunately, this mistake is a frequent source of unintentional plagiarism. Whenever you present information that you have not developed yourself, you must cite the source. For example, from the sample note card, you might write in your paper:

President Lyndon B. Johnson, in his book

Vantage Point, claimed that the North

Vietnamese offensive during the Tet holidays

of 1968 was no surprise (380).
               

NOTE that it is necessary to include only the page number since you have already indicated the author and book in your text. Citations in the text should be short; they should contain only the information necessary to identify the source in the Works Cited bibliography:

Johnson, Lyndon Baines. The Vantage Point:

Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969. 

New York: Popular Library. 1971.
               

4. Using short quotations: Naturally, when you quote someone directly you must cite the source. Thus, in the same paper you might prefer to make your point with a short quotation:

Johnson insisted that "there was a great deal 

of emotional and exaggerated reporting of the 

Tet Offensive" in news reports of the event (384).
               

5. Using long quotations: If you use a long quotation (i.e., a quotation of four or more lines), your lecturer may wish you to present this as a "block quotation." For example, if the entire quotation you extracted from page 384 of Johnson's Vantage Point were used, it would appear as follows:

There was a great deal of emotional and exaggerated reporting

of the Tet Offensive in our press and on television. The media

seemed to be in competition as to who could provide the most 

lurid and depressing accounts. Columnists unsympathetic to 

American involvement in Southeast Asia jumped on the bandwagon

(Johnson, 384).
               

Since the single spacing and indenting of the quotation already sets it apart from the text, quotation marks are not necessary.

6. When quoting directly, remember:
   1. Do not change the meaning of the original statement in any way. If you alter the words to give the quotation new meaning or if you use the quotation in the wrong context, then you are not quoting your source fairly or accurately.
   2. Whenever you omit material from a quoted passage, indicate the omission (called an ellipsis) with three spaced periods (. . .). Be sure that the omission neither changes the meaning of the quotation nor makes it grammatically incoherent. If you substitute words of your own in the quotation, enclose your words in square brackets. For example, you might have written the first sentence of the quotation from President Johnson: enclose your words in square brackets. For example, you might have written the first sentence of the quotation from President Johnson:

      Johnson insisted that "there was a great deal of emotional and 
      exaggerated reporting of the Tet Offensive in [the American] 
      press and on television."
                           

   3. Warning: Substitute words in a quotation only for clarity or grammatical consistency. Never change the meaning of the quotation.
   4. Use direct quotations infrequently; use short rather than long quotations. The quotations don't tell the story, you do. If your paper contains several long, unbroken series of quoted material, large portions of the paper are, in effect, being written by someone else. The entire paper should be your words, your thoughts, your conclusions, with quotations adding some spice. A common rule of thumb is that no more than 10% of your paper should be quoted material.

The references in your paper must be presented in a specific, accepted format. Since standard formats vary from academic discipline to discipline, check with your lecturer about which style and which guide you should follow. A particularly useful guide is James D. Lester's Writing Research Papers, A Complete Guide, Fourth Edition, (1984).

Citations Within the Text

Footnotes are no longer required if you are following guidelines established by the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 1984 or the American Psychological Association (APA).

Instead, a page reference is inserted directly into the text either following the mention of the author's name or at the end of your sentence. You may have to include the author's name as well if you have not made clear mention of the author in the text itself.

The following examples show how to signal the beginning of quotations and paraphrased information and how to insert the citation:

Johnson (384) insisted that "there was a great deal of 

emotional and exaggerated reporting of the Tet offensive" 

in news reports of the event.
             

or

Johnson insisted that "there was a great deal of emotional 

and exaggerated reporting of the Tet offensive" in news 

reports of the event (384).
             

The MLA research style should be adequate for most undergraduate assignments. As you can see from the examples above, the references emphasize the author and the work. However, the sciences also focus on the date of a work because scientific information changes quite rapidly. Therefore, in a paper on psychology or computer science, for example, the reference in the text will include the date, as well as the author's name and page number.

Smith (1983) ascribes no species-specific behavior to man.
             

or

He stated, "These data of psychological development 

suggest that retarded adolescents are atypical in 

maturational growth" (Jones, 1983, p. 215).
             

The Works Cited is a selected bibliography containing only those works referenced to within the text and notes. If you have prepared a preliminary bibliography, you will already have all the information you need to complete this portion of your paper. However, you will want to discard those cards for sources you did not use or found to be irrelevant to your paper.

Writing The Paper

After you have completed the research, drawn up a tentative outline of the paper and are ready to write, you should stop to think about all the principles of effective expository writing you have learned. Here are some questions you should ask yourself:

1. Does my paper have unity? Make sure that each paragraph has a topic idea or sentence which is supported by each sentence in the paragraph. Check that all the paragraphs together contribute to the stated purpose of the paper and that the final one provides an appropriate ending or conclusion.
2. Have I supplied adequate transitions between paragraphs? Transitional words, phrases and sentences are the bridges which enable your reader to proceed smoothly from one section of your paper to another and which suggest how all sections relate to one another.
3. Is my paper grammatically and mechanically correct? When rereading your paper, try to eliminate dangling modifiers, run-on sentences, misspellings and unnecessary commas. Be on the alert for typing errors, missing words and other such problems.
4. Have I made my paper readable and clear? Make changes to replace clichés, repetitive words and complex constructions that obscure meaning.
5. Have I allowed sufficient time to write, revise, polish and refine my paper? The first draft of your paper should never be submitted to the lecturer as the final completed product. Put that draft aside for a day or two and then reread it critically. Authors become involved with their papers and often are unable to see shortcomings. Coming back to the paper after a period of time increases your objectivity, gives you the opportunity to see the work from a fresh perspective and makes catching mechanical errors easier. You may also gain objectivity by reading the paper aloud or having someone read it to you. No matter how you do it, the advice "revise, revise, revise," can make the difference between a poor paper and an excellent one.

Unless your lecturer specifies otherwise, your research paper should be arranged as follows:

1. Title page. At a minimum, you must include the title of the paper, your name, the name of the course, the lecturer's name and the date the paper was submitted.
2. Introduction/outline/statement of purpose. Lecturers' requirements about introductions, outlines and statements of purpose vary. Be sure to ask if one of these should be part of your paper. When such a section is required it usually follows the title page and is paginated in lower case Roman numerals starting with ii (ii, iii, iv).
3. Main text. Normally the main text is typed, double-spaced, on standard white paper (8� x 11 inches) with at least a one-inch margin on all four sides of the page. A wider left-hand margin (1� inches) is necessary if you are supposed to bind the pages along that edge. The first page of the main text is numbered "1" with the rest of the pages in the paper, including bibliography or Works Cited pages, numbered consecutively. Manuscript page numbers are usually easiest to find if they are in the top right corner of each page.
4. If at all possible, your paper should be typed rather than handwritten, or printed on a good-quality computer printer. If you do not type, find someone willing to type your paper for a reasonable fee. If you hire a typist, make sure you allow enough time for typing, proofreading and corrections. Remember: you, not the typist, are responsible for the quality and correctness of the final product.
5. Bibliography (Works Cited) section. In the bibliography or Works Cited section you are providing the reader with a complete list of the sources upon which your paper is based.

For your project, unless your lecturer specifies otherwise, the bibliography should simply be an alphabetical listing of all sources actually used to write the paper.

In the bibliography, because materials are alphabetized by authors' surnames, last names appear first. Also, the inclusive pages of an article from a magazine or journal are provided in the bibliography. Make sure that all of this information is included on your bibliography card. Using the sources for the sample paper discussed above, the bibliography would appear as follows:

WORKS CITED*



Brown, Weldon A. The Last Chopper:  The Denouement of the 

    American Role in Vietnam, 1963-1975. Port Washington, 

    N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1976.



Burstein, Paul. "Senate Voting on the Vietnam War, 1964-

    1973." Journal of Political and Military Sociology 7

    (Fall 1979), 271-82.



Capps, Walter H. "The War's Transformation." Center

    Magazine, July-August 1978, pp. 18-26.



Carvallo, Tito V. "Hue, Mass Murder, Mass Burial." Viet-Nam

    Bulletin, April, 1970. Found at 

    <http://www.saigon.com/regions/hue/>, May 1, 1998.
	         

References to material found on the Internet should include author's name, title of article, document date if know, the full URL, and the date of visit. When using the Internet as a resource, however, be aware that much of what has been made available ther has not been subjected to the same peer review or checking of facts as have most printed materials. Check with your instructor before including information found on the Internet in your paper.

"Crisis in Asia: The Vietcong Launch Their 'Revolution,'"

    New York Times, 4 February 1968, sec. 4, p. El.

             

(Since the article is unsigned it is alphabetized by title.)

Friedman, Edward and Mark Selden, eds. America's Asia: 

    Dissenting on Asian-American Relations. New York: 

    Vintage Books, 1971.



Johnson, Lyndon Baines. The Vantage Point: Perspectives of 

   the Presidency, 1963-1969. New York: Popular Library, 1971.



Kahin, George McTurnan and John W. Lewis, The United States 

    in Vietnam. rev. 2d ed. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1969.



New Columbia Encyclopedia, 1975 ed. S.v. "Giap, Vo Nguyen."

             

* The references and bibliography provided in this handbook are intended solely as format samples. For an actual paper you would probably have to use many more sources.

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