Do some preliminary reading before settling on a topic. If you know very little about the topic you have chosen, you may need to narrow or broaden your topic later. Browse subject encyclopedias, magazine articles, textbooks, etc. for ideas.
Gather background information to familiarize yourself with your topic. Reference materials such as subject encyclopedias are great resources to start. Encyclopedia articles are comprehensive overviews of important topics in the field. You may also consult particular books for more information.
Depending on your topic, you may also need other forms of scholarly information, such as research data or reports, which may not be found in literature databases. The web portals and search engines listed on the Web Sources tab are useful to find such information. Note: As most information free online is not peer-reviewed, you need to evaluate the authority and reliability of information found on the Internet before using it.
Why Cite?
Citing Styles
|
Use EndNote to manage your citations and cite while you write!EndNote is a citation management program that lets you:
EndNote comes with more than 3,300 predefined bibliographic styles for the leading journals. Visit the EndNote Guide to see how to use EndNote. |
Image source: Steve Lawrence, “Online or Invisible?” Nature, 2001, 411 (6837): 521.
Publishing in open access journals can increase impact and exposure of your work, as can including your publication in an institutional and/or disciplinary repository after publication.
Take a look at the Journal Citation Reports and see which journals rank high in your field. At the same time, you also need to consider which journals can help you increase your research impact.
You may deposit your publication into a disciplinary repository and/or our institutional repository (GSU Digital Archive). Before depositing, you need to check the publisher's copyright transfer agreement to see if you have the right to post your publication.