11 Tips to Improve Your Research Skills for Academic Success

Strong research skills are a must-have skill for academic success. Why are research skills important?

They’re essential for academic success. You need them for all term papers, research reports, and assignments. These skills also help to deepen your understanding of all the topics in your curriculum.

By design, research questions are not answerable by simple Google searches. They require planning, hypothesis evaluation, data or information analysis, critical thinking, information synthesis, logical and well-thought-out presentation, and more.

With these skills, you can produce credible, logical, accurate, and plagiarism-free research efficiently and promptly.

Moreover, being a skilled researcher is not only necessary for academic success. It is a lifelong competency that would remain helpful in your future career and personal life.

Learning to evaluate credibility is also a skill reinforced in academic settings outside of university such as an online summer school, where students often practise distinguishing between academic and non-academic sources while working on research projects.

Some tips you can adopt to improve your research skills include understanding the research process, using library resources, effectively searching the internet, adopting proper citation and referencing, developing your analytical skills, managing time efficiently, utilising academic support services, enhancing your note-taking capabilities, using primary sources only, and avoiding confirmation bias.

Below, we examine these strategies to help you improve your research skills.

1. Always Create a Research Strategy Document

Think of strategy as a roadmap highlighting how you want to attack the research problem. We believe creating a strategy before diving knee-deep into research provides clarity and saves you time.

Some of the constituents of the strategy document include:

• Research goals
• Research deadline
• Rewriting the research problem the way you understand it, in your own words and simple terms. Then, translate the research problem into a research question. “HR managers are struggling to attract and keep top talent with top talent spending an average of 6 months in each role” is an example of a research problem, while “What strategies and techniques can HR managers adopt to better attract and retain top talents?” is an example of a research question.  
• Outline the major outcomes the research must fulfil. For example, “The research must provide a nexus between company actions and top talent loyalty, in addition to providing actionable tips for HR managers.”  
• Identify the type of research you’re doing. There are three categories of research: basic vs applied, exploratory vs explanatory, and inductive vs deductive research.
• Findings from preliminary research. We recommend quick preliminary research to see the resources, including scholarly knowledge, readily available in the public domain. This step can help identify a new angle to pursue your research from or drop if you reckon other researchers and authors have adequately dealt with the question, preventing you from wasting time and resources on research that adds no additional value to the body of existing knowledge.

2. Understand the Research Process

The research process consists of six major stages, including topic selection, literature evaluation, refining the research topic, relevant information gathering (could also include sampling and recruitment, depending on the topic or research focus), data analysis, and knitting everything together.

Topic Selection

Sometimes, your tutor may provide the research topic. However, you’ll likely need to work with your supervisor to choose a topic for your thesis and undergrad projects.

For your choice of research topic, it’s imperative to think of your current interests and future ambitions.

Beyond top grades, your undergrad research may serve as evidence of your interest in a particular area and be helpful for future academic and career progression.

Many students gain early exposure to academic research principles through collaborative programs such as a Cambridge summer school or an Oxford summer school, where they explore how to refine ideas into focused and researchable questions under academic supervision.

Every research topic or question starts from a broad problem statement, which you can then fine-tune after exploring the existing body of knowledge in that field.

Overall, a great topic has the following characteristics:

• Focused on a single issue. However, you may subdivide the issue into several interconnected but related problem statements.
• Researchable with credible sources. For example, requiring proprietary data that is not readily available may seriously hamper your success.
• Feasible and specific. Additionally, ensure that you have adequate time and resources to complete the study before the due date.
• Avoids value judgement questions like “Is vitamin D better than magnesium in treating bone issues?”
• Not close-ended such that the answer is a simple yes or no. The lack of clear answers provides room for robust investigation and is where your arguments shine.
• The answer to your question should not be readily available. It must require rigorous work and iterative problem-solving to complete.
• The topic must be original and address a relevant industry or niche problem. Originality doesn’t mean other researchers haven’t attempted something similar but that you’re presenting a new angle.

Literature Review

The goals of conducting the literature review include:

• To ensure other researchers haven’t answered the research question before and that the study will contribute significant value to the existing body of knowledge.
• To identify gaps in existing works and determine how your project will fill that gap. In essence, the research must considerably add to existing knowledge or improve on earlier methodologies. Without meeting these standards, most research journals will not accept your work.
• The third goal is to help you evaluate the research methods, research design, data sources, and key concepts other researchers adopted for their work.

A literature review is a lot of work and requires scouring through numerous academic journals, books, and online publications.

You can leverage AI tools like Elicit AI, Research Rabbit, Semantic Scholar, and Connected Papers to find papers, summarise studies, conduct citation-based mapping, find similar research papers, and more.

Refine Research Topic

Armed with more information, context, potential data sources, availability of reliable and credible data, and the scope of work required from your literature review, you often need to refine your topic.

For example, your research question may be too narrow if you find very few credible papers and books on the subject. Your research topic could also be suffering from being too broad.

You can finetune a broad project topic by asking the why, what, who, where, and when questions.

Which group of people are you targeting for the research? What geographic location would the study be limited to? Why do you think the research is relevant? What period would you limit the research to?

For example, “What will be the impact of climate change in the United Kingdom?” is quite broad. What kind of impact are we talking about? Economic? Migration? Health?

A more specific variant of the question would be: “How will climate change affect net migration between the UK coastline and major cities in the next 20 years?”

Data Gathering

Collecting data is the heart of the research process. This step allows you to gather variables essential for reaching conclusions. Depending on your research question, these variables can either be qualitative (non-numerical) or quantitative (numerical).

You may gather data through one or more of the following methods:

Surveys

Surveys are a series of questions used to extract specific data from a sample of the target population. When running surveys, you should take note of the following:

• Sample size: Ensure the number of participants adequately represents the population.
• Bias: Ensure the questions do not tilt respondents in a particular direction or the sampling is not based on subjective measures. For example, assuming the age of shoppers who walk into a store can lead to bias.
• Ambiguity and clarity: Avoid ambiguous questions that are prone to personal interpretation. “Do you drink plenty of alcohol during the week?” is subjective because the answer depends on who you ask.
• Resource management: The larger the sample size, the more expensive and time-consuming the survey process is.

Experiments

Experiments will be your go-to research method if you’re in any natural and physical sciences programme. It’s easier to establish a cause-and-effect relationship with experiments than with surveys.

A typical example of an experiment involves splitting test subjects into a control and an experimental group. The researchers then give the latter group a medicine, drug, or treatment or subject them to changes.

The researchers then evaluate the two groups for a specific variable. If the variable varies significantly, then suffice it to say that the changes made to the experimental group are responsible for the significant differences in the observed variable.

Observational Studies

Observational studies are more popular in social sciences for obvious reasons. They involve going to the field to observe the attitudes and behaviours of a specific group in the natural habitat.

Observational studies may either be participant observation or nonparticipant observation. The former involves the researcher staying in the same habit as the group they’re observing, while the latter is the reverse.

Participant observation may influence how the target population acts. So, it’s imperative to conduct the study such that your presence is not disruptive to the data collection process.

Existing Data

In every sector or industry, there’s existing data that can help with your research. Need economic activity data on the UK? The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is perhaps the most credible primary source on the subject matter.

What about data on the UK environment? The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs data services platform (DSP) is your best bet.

Beyond facts and figures, court records, medical records (without personally identifiable information), and police interview tapes can also be excellent sources of information.

Data Analysis

You have gathered all the data you need to answer your research question. Now, this is where you begin to look for clues, determine relationships between variables, establish trends, find patterns, and more.

For numerical variables, you’ll need complex statistical techniques to extract insights from the data. Tools like Statistical Analysis System (SAS), R, Python, MS Excel, and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) can help with quantitative data analysis.

Some tools can help with most qualitative methodological techniques. Examples of these tools include nVivo and ATLAS.ti. It’s imperative to note that while these tools are helpful, you’ll need to put on your sound critical thinking cap to ensure your analysis is accurate.

Result Discussion

The data analysis above will provide evidence to prove or disprove your hypothesis or question. The discussion section helps you convey these results in a deeper conversation.

What results do you have? What are the implications of such results? How relevant are the results from both a statistical point of view and practical applications?

These and many more questions are the answers this section should provide. Furthermore, share the limitations of your research and potential avenues for further exploration.

If there’s any additional tip we would leave you with here is to stay with the facts and provide your findings in context with previous studies. Doing this strengthens your argument and makes your research more credible and citable.

3. Use Library Resources

Librarians curate only authoritative and credible sources. These sources include books, journals, and databases.

Another benefit of using library resources is that they are organised, making it easy for you to find the resources you need.

As a college student, you should never pay out of pocket for any resource. Your school library probably already provides access to that resource. If not, you can make a request, and it’ll most likely be granted.

So, what kind of resources are available?

• A searchable library catalogue tool, basically a search engine for academic sources
• Access to third-party databases
• Extensive collection of e-books
• Access to conference papers, newspaper articles, and other credible publications
• Subject Librarian to help you with resources not in the library catalogue
• Reference management tools and resources on how to use them

Tips to Search Databases

• Use the truncation symbol (*) and the wildcard symbol (?) to broaden your search to ensure you do not miss out on relevant results due to spelling or plural versions. For example, “agricultur*” will provide search results that include the following words: agriculture, agricultural, and agriculturalist. “Lab?r” will search for resources with both “labor” and “labour” in them.
• Use boolean operators. We discuss this extensively below. The same principles apply here.
• Use inverted commas to search for a specific phrase together. We also explain this below.
• Leverage proximity search: This tells the database to return results that have words within certain distances from each other. For example, typing “labour same union” on Web of Science returns publications with “labour” and “union” in the same sentence. Typing “labour union ~4” on JSTOR retrieves records where “labour” and “union” are only separated by four words.
• Combine the methods above to create more sophisticated search queries.

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