All good projects start with a good research question. What is your question asking?

• Analysing the question

Time is precious, so it's a good idea to put some plans into place.

• Planning
• Time management

An essay needs structure. It's time to get to grips with the conventions of academic writing.

• Structuring your response

You need to develop your essay, employing critical writing skills to forward your argument.

• Developing your essay

It's important to conduct your search in the right places. Your research question will determine the sources you need to search. Find out about the sources of information that are best for your topic:

• Sources of information
• Choosing the right information sources

It's important to think critically at every stage of the process.

• Critical thinking

Take notes that will be useful to you and that will help you when you need them.

• Note-taking

If you don't like the look of your results, maybe you need to look again at your plan, the places you searched, and how you broke down your research question.

Now it's time to put your plans into practice:

• Search skills

Pick out the essential parts of your question and consider how you might use them to retrieve the information you need:

• Preparing your search

Hopefully your search has produced some results, but are they any good? You'll have to evaluate the qualities of what you've retrieved:

• Evaluation

If you're happy with your results, that's great, but people are constantly adding to the literature. Set up alerts to be informed of new results matching your terms.

• Keeping up-to-date

Keep track of what you've found. It doesn't matter how you do it -- whatever works best for you. But reference management software might help.

• Reference management

It's important to take a critical approach to your reading, and question what an author is saying.

• Critical reading