Global Citizen Project: Research Notes and Citations

You need to do research to collect facts and expert opinions to support your point. What is important for others to know? Good note-taking helps you do that. It will prevent you from plagiarizing (copying sentences word for word).

Even changing a few words of a sentence is still plagiarism because you are stealing the author's original sentence structure and idea.

Good note cards:

• Facts or statistics about the problem
• Facts or statistics about the location (that are relevant to the problem)
• Opinions about causes of the problem
• Opinions about solutions to the problem

1. Figure out your research question. What information are you looking for?

2. Skim:

• Headings
• First and last sentence
• First and last paragraph
• Bold and italicized words

3. Scan: Look quickly at the text, searching for keywords, related words, and answers to your questions

4. Read deeper when you find important text.

5. Use these note-taking strategies:

• Quote: Copy the quotation exactly as it appears in the original source.
• Paraphrase: Restate the author's ideas in your own words
• Need to Know: which need-to-know does this information answer

Questions you need to know for your project:

     1. Define and explain your problem

     2. What causes your problem?

     3. How does it affect people, animals, or the Earth?

     4. What should we do to help fix the problem?