Or, more accurately, how I do my research. But I'm hoping you all can learn something from my experience. Actually, I wrote a post similar to this one a while back, on research sources (which you can read here!), but this post will go more into depth on how I personally research my topics.
The Topic Finding a topic isn’t very hard. I look at the news (disregarding current presidential politics), I look at government sites, I look at current, former, and pending legislation written by Congress, whether the laws have been passed or not, and I do like addressing topics in failed bills. Then I come up with a bunch of general topics, which must be: 1) debatable, 2) relevant, and 3) pollable. The Research First, I run the topic through a news source, like New York Times, which will give me an idea of ‘is there actually research out there on this topic already’. And if there is, I run the topic through several think-tanks. My go-tos are the Cato Institute and the Brookings Institute. Then I look at the Hoover Institution and the Heritage Foundation. For things related to foreign policy or other countries, I use the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Council on Foreign Relations. For policy in the science field, I go to the Kaiser Family Foundation and Rand Corporation. For policy in government, I try to find law reviews from universities. If I want hard data or scientific research, I run some searches through Google Scholar, see if I can find some good research on there, usually from universities or PubMed. I may also look at organizations that are related to my topic for information. Writing The Article After I’ve compiled my sources, I start writing the article. I give a general introduction, with a couple of facts and figures in my What’s the deal? and What’s the status quo? sections. Then I make The Argument section, pulling data and information from my sources to support the 2-3 main points that I’ll argue for, going either for or against The Argument. And then, for the Additional Resources section, I link the articles or research that I found which I didn’t use as sources for my argument, so that you guys can take a look at…well, additional resources that are legitimate. Done Yet? And…that’s how I do it! It's the actual research takes me the longest time, since while I’m doing research, I’m also forming the points I’m going to make in my argument. They go together hand-in-hand, really. And I want to make sure I see both sides before picking one. I usually pick the one that would be more interesting to argue, but I'll admit, sometimes I pick the easier side! Maybe if I have time, I’ll go back and write another argument section going for the other side that I went previously. It sounds like fun, but I’ll only do that if I have a whole day free to write articles for The Aviat…and that’s not happening. Well, I hope you found that entertaining/informative (either one is okay)! Thank you for your continued support. Stay informed, stay curious. Like The Aviat? Subscribe to the newsletter on the blog sidebar or check out more political science articles under the Public Policies tab!
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LIA R.G.The writer of The Aviat. Non-partisan and non-PC. ARCHIVES
February 2017
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