Finding and reading sources
How to find sources for a paper, tell credible from unreliable, confirm a journal is peer-reviewed, and read a research paper without reading all of it.
Most students start a paper by searching for something that sounds like their topic, then keep whatever appears first. That is why reference lists fill up with sources that sit next to the argument without supporting any specific sentence in it.
Better order: write the question first, then search for work that answers it. A research question tells you which keywords to use, which databases to search, and, once you find a paper, whether it is actually relevant. Library databases, Google Scholar, PubMed, and DOAJ each cover different literature, so searching only one leaves gaps you will not see.
Then judge what you found. Peer review means a journal sent the paper to other researchers before publishing it. That is a real filter, not a guarantee, and predatory journals claim it without doing it. The CRAAP test gives you a fast pass on currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose.
Reading is its own skill. Nobody reads a research paper top to bottom. Read the abstract, then the conclusion, then the figures, and only then decide whether the methods are worth your time. Take notes tied to the claim you plan to make, with a page number, so you can cite them later without rereading anything.
8 guides
All topicsWhere to look for sources, how to judge them fast with the CRAAP test, and how to confirm each one is real before you rely on it. The step most students skip.
What makes a source credible, with examples. Apply the CRAAP test, tell scholarly from popular and primary from secondary, and check the source is real.
Where to find peer-reviewed work, from library databases to Google Scholar, JSTOR, Scopus, and PubMed, and how to confirm a journal is genuinely peer-reviewed.
Stop reading top to bottom. The order researchers actually read in, the three-pass method, what to extract, and how to keep notes that survive until you write.
The two parts of every entry, the three things a good annotation does (summarize, evaluate, reflect on relevance), and a worked example you can copy the shape of.
A worked literature review example: a real thematic synthesis paragraph, taken apart to show why it works, plus a structure template and how to organize one.
A step-by-step way to use AI for the slow parts of a literature review, finding, sorting, and summarising real papers, while keeping every citation traceable.
Reverse-search a sentence you already wrote to find real backing, using free tools. And what to do when no source supports it.