Writing A Science Research Paper: A System For Taking Notes

When you are in the middle of researching information to include in your Science research paper, you are going to need to have a pen and paper handy in order to be fully prepared to take the necessary notes. When students are reading to get a sense of the topic it is common for students to not take notes because he or she does not know what it going to end up being important. However, this is actually the opposite of how you should proceed to prepare for writing a research paper. Some of the most important elements of researching a subject include:

• Always take notes of what you feel is important at the time
• It is better to have more information written down instead of too little information
• When you are taking notes it is important for you to write down the citation for source that you found that piece of information from
• By writing down the source from which you got the information, you will be able to better identify the proper citation in your final paper
• Furthermore, this will help you to keep your information organized
• When you are taking notes, it is better to have a different paper, or document for each source
• You can later intersperse the information from various texts with one another in the paper; however, at this point you need to keep your information organized
• When you keep your information organized you are going to be able to better utilize your sources to show that you supported your argument with equal information from a variety of sources

If you are in the process of writing a research paper for a Science class, then you are going to have a system for taking notes. Keeping the notes from various sources separate during the writing of the research is imperative to ensure that you use different sources equally. Then you are going to want to include the proper citation with each piece of information in your notes. This is important to do even if you are not positive if you are going to use that piece of information in the final text. You will end up saving a lot of time and energy by practicing this note taking system. It takes less time and energy to have too many citations and notes, than it does to back track and try to frantically fill in extra information.