A research log is a tool that helps you to organize and save information about the sources you wish to use for your paper. Getting into the habit of using a research log or similar tools at the beginning of each project will save you time and possibly heartache down the road. It's also a tool that you can use throughout your academic career.

The research log involves three steps:

1. Searching for information for your paper
2. Evaluating the information found
3. Saving your research material into your research log

The first two steps help you to organize your thoughts and ideas after you have located and evaluated a possible information source. Step three helps you to save all the necessary information you need to reference your selected source appropriately.

We have prepared the following tutorial to familiarize you with creating a research log to organize and save the material that you wish to use in your paper. Note that in our example we used an internet source. You can and should use your research log to save necessary information from other sources such as books and journal articles.

Key Resources
Using the internet and creating a research log tutorial