Ultimate Guide on Finding Academic Sources for Research Papers

Exploring existing literature, both old and new, for information on your chosen topic is one of the critical steps to writing a research paper. Though reading through as many pieces as possible may be daunting, it is a necessary evil because every research paper should have a trustworthy academic source. As a result, you should be able to differentiate scholarly works from ordinary write-ups.

What are scholarly sources for academic papers?

Academic sources are credible information on previous research found in books, journals, publications, and internet sources. These sources mostly work from experts on particular fields or topics and include students, professors, academic societies, and other professionals.

Before any publication or academic work is certified, a panel of scholars, academic bodies, and other professionals sit on it to define its scientific value and relevance.

Features of an Academic Article

A research paper contains all or some of the following sections:

1. Abstract
2. Table of content
3. Abbreviations
4. Introduction
5. Literature review
6. Methodology
7. Objectives
8. Discussions
9. Conclusion
10. References of sources used for the papers

Places to search Academic Sources for Research Papers

You can get scholarly sources, both online and offline. To save time and energy, you can start your search from your university/college’s websites, library, and academic publications. Also, you can use web sources like Google Scholar, Google, Book, websites of government agencies, agencies. Websites like JSTOR, ScienceDirect, PubMed, Openlibrary, SciSeek, and Science.gov can help when searching for credible sources.

Guide for Collecting Academic Sources

As you research for your academic work, it is important to keep records to avoid oversights. To be productive in your research, you need to compile a useful bibliography to prevent you from going back and forth, searching for sources of information. Also, you don’t need to:

• Include  information you aren’t sure of its relevance to your work
• Eliminate sources with the same or repeated group of information
• Put together as many resources as possible
• To avoid plagiarism, paraphrase information from sources or reword them
• In case you want to use direct quoting, maintain the original wordings of the source
• Reference all the sources you use in the paper

Tools to help you save and structure your sources

As you peruse literature for your research, make sure you take notes to save you time and energy on the writing process. While keeping notes, you should also keep the sources for them to make referencing easier. Through your readings, take notes of the

• Sources bibliography
• Objectives of the author
• Data and methodology used
• Theories
• Findings of the research
• Limitations of the research
• Sources of the publications

For a proper organization of your sources, you can use services and applications including:

1. Zetoro

It is a free application that enables you to add tags, sort items, and save your research information. Zetoro has an extension that helps you navigate the web to collect information.

2. Mendeley

It helps you save your sources, generate references, and access them from any device.

3. Evernote

Evernote helps researchers to create folders, get information, add tags and save images for your research.