【正文】 most require that other materials, including print publications, be sought. Similarly, discussion lists and online “chat rooms” are helpful for sharing ideas but, except for rare occasions, are not deemed acceptable resources for research papers. 3. Taking Notes. When you determine that material is reliable and useful, you will want to take notes on it. Although everyone agrees that notetaking is essential to research, probably no two researchers use exactly the same methods. Some prefer to take notes by hand on index cards or sheets of paper. Using a puter might save you time and should improve the accuracy with which you transcribe material, including quotations, from your sources into the text of your paper. However you take notes, set down first the author’s full name and the plete title of the sourceenough information to enable you to locate the source easily in your working bibliography. There are, generally speaking, three methods of notetaking: summary, paraphrase, and quotation. Summarize if you want to record only the general idea of large amounts of material. If you require detailed notes on specific sentences and passages but do not need the exact wording, you may wish to paraphrasethat is, to restate the material in your own words. But when you believe that some sentence or passage in its original wording might make an effective addition to your paper, transcribe that material exactly as it appears, word for word, ma for ma. Whenever you quote verbatim from a work, be sure to use quotation marks scrupulously in your notes to distinguish the quotation from summary and paraphrase. Using electronic materials calls for special vigilance. If you download a text and integrate quotations from it into your paper, check to see that you have placed quotation marks around words taken from the source. In summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting, keep an accurate record of the pages or other numbered sections (., numbered paragraphs in an electronic text) that you use. When a quotation continues to another page or section, carefully note where the page or section break occurs, since only a small portion of what you transcribe may ultimately find its way into your paper. Using a word processor to store notes is handy, but while you are doing research, you may find yourself in a situationfor example, working in the librarywhere you do not have access to a puter. Then you will need to write your notes by hand and transfer them into a puter later. Strategies of storing and retrieving notes vary. For a short paper for which you have taken few notes, you may place all notes in a single file and draw material from it whenever you want. For a linger paper that makes use of numerous sources, you may create a new file for each source. Another strategy is to write out summaries and paraphrases of the source by hand and to enter into puter files only quotations, which you can electronically copy into your text as you write. At the least, this strategy will eliminate the time and effort and, more important, the possibility of error involved in transcribing quoted words more that once. Of course, when you download quotations from a database to your puter disk, you never transcribe them at all. Finally, since note files are essential to your paper, be certain to save them on your working disk and to keep copies of them both on paper and on a backup disk. In taking notes, seek to steer a middle course between recording too much and recording much and recording too little. In other words, try to be both thorough and concise. Above all, strive for accuracy, not only in copying words for direct quotation but also in summarizing and paraphrasing authors’ ideas. Careful notetaking will help you avoid the problem of plagiarism. 4. Outlining Some writers like to work from an outline。 incorporates a number of bibliographic databases, such as National Newspaper Index, Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, Business Periodicals Index, Humanities Index, Social Sciences Index, and General Science Index, and other kinds of reference works like those discussed in the next section。 conducting a survey or an interview。 or carrying out a laboratory experiment. Primary sources include statistical data, historical documents, and works of literature or art. Secondary research is the examination of studies that other researchers have made of a subject. Examples of secondary sources are books and articles about political issues, historical events, scientific debates, or literary works. Most academic papers depend at least partly on secondary research. No matter what your subject of study, learning to investigate, review, and productively use information, ideas, and opinions of other researchers will play a major role in your development as a stude