Finding, Evaluating, and Processing Information

Understanding where you are getting your information and to what degree it is credible information should be your first priority when researching for your project. Know that sometimes you must first research where the information is coming from. Research is a cycle and once the cycle is complete you will end up with a excellent paper or project. When researching information for your company, you need to take five crucial steps. The first step in researching is planning. Researching without planning in advance wastes time and usually produces disappointing results. In planning your research you must familiarize yourself with the subject, identify information gaps, prioritize research needs and maintaining an ethical attitude. Familiarizing yourself with the subject involves reading, visiting websites, and interviewing experts in the field. Maintaining an ethical attitude includes not forcing a specific outcome by skewing your research, respecting the privacy of your research participants, documenting sources and giving appropriate credit, respecting the intellectual property and digital rights of your resources, not extracting more from your sources than they actually provide, and not misrepresenting who you are or what you intend to do with the research. The second step in researching is locating data and information. Locating data and information includes evaluating sources, collecting secondary information at the library, online, or elsewhere, document your sources, and collecting primary information through surveys and interviews. You can find valuable information thru newspapers and periodicals, business books, directories, almanacs and statistical resources, government publications, and electron databases. Search engines are also a good way of finding information. Search engines identify individual WebPages that contain specific words or phrases you’ve asked for. After collecting data the next step in your research is processing the data and information, and converting it into usable information. Processing the data and the information you gathered involves quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing textual information, and analyzing numerical information. Applying your findings is the fourth step in this process and involves summarizing your findings, drawing conclusions, and making recommendations. The final step is managing the information, and that involves making your research available to others.