Your ability to remain in Bridgeport depends on whether you can keep your grades high enough to retain your scholarship. Your scholarship is the only thing standing between you and the Orange County bankruptcy attorneys back home. Your grades depend on handing in a Grade A research paper. That's a lot of pressure for a student! It can cause some to pay for their homework, but let us give you the tools that will allow you to do your own research instead

Preliminary

The first stage in your research is topical. You want to learn only enough about a given subject to know whether you're interested enough to write a whole paper and whether there's enough material out there to create a paper from. At this stage it's best to use encyclopedias or course textbooks. Their indexes cover everything from plastic tubing cutters to World War II and are great for overviews. Yes, even Wikipedia counts, but only if the entry is properly cited.

Library, Library, Library

The internet may be one stop shopping for everything in your mind but there is still no substitute for a proper library so get out of your dorm room and into the stacks. University libraries are best for research papers because they focus on non-fiction rather than filling the shelves with romance novels featuring women who do wedding catering in Hamilton. Start with a subject search in the online catalog then peruse titles and indexes to narrow it down to a few tomes to check out for intensive reading.

JSTOR and the Internet

The internet can provide some excellent supplementary material, but you won't find it by doing a Google search. Your university library website should give you access to online databases of scanned articles from scholarly, peer-reviewed journals, such as the JSTOR history database. Within these databases you can search both article titles and texts for relevant phrases like "Canadian trademark filings for 1818," limit searches to certain journals, and jump right to relevant paragraphs.

Interviews

First hand sources add excellent color and immediacy to research papers. You can find them in memoirs or collect them yourself through interviews. Keep in mind though that everything you learn about cable glands during the interview will have to be verified independently (i.e. in other interviews, peer reviewed journals, or non-fiction books) before it can be taken as fact unless you're just using the interview to humanize the facts you have already learned from other sources.