Santa Monica College Homelessness in Los Angeles Outline

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Research Outline: 

overview: The purpose of this assignment is to start gathering research for your research paper. This will not be a typical literature review, which is usually done in essay form, but it is a way for you to gather your research and start to see how it all fits together. I would strongly suggest looking at the example paper at the bottom of this page so you can see how this assignment works.

instructions: For this assignment, you will need to find a total of eight sources on your topic (which can—but does not have to—include the two from Modules 5 and 6 and the four from Module 4). I will give you more information about these sources below. For each source, you will give the full reference citation in APA format and then write at least three to five sentences that include useful information from that source for your research paper. You can use a combination of direct quotes and/or summaries of the ideas, but please limit the number of direct quotes. Just make sure that when you use direct quotes, you put them in quotation marks. This will allow you to start to organize your research and see how it fits together so you will be able to write your research paper. 

Four of your sources need to be peer-reviewed articles from academic journals. As you use the Library Research Guide * Links to an external site., be sure to check the Peer-Reviewed box. Here are a few tips for working with your academic articles: I WILL GIVE U THESE 4

  • You can use the articles you used for Assignments 5 and 6.
  • You do not need to summarize the entire article. Just collect the information that is relevant to your research.
  • Make sure that any information you share from that source is true to the author’s intent. Taking a statement or idea out of context to make it fit your narrative is not okay. You need to be truly representing the author’s work.
  • Make sure you are using primary sources. In other words, you should be telling us what that author discovered. If the author of your article talks about a study that someone else did, you cannot include that information as if it came from your article. Instead, you would need to go to the original source, include it as another source, and share the information there.  

The other four sources do not need to be from peer-reviewed sources, although they can be if you want to include more academic sources. You can use newspaper or magazine articles, internet sources, books, or whatever else you can find. Here are a few tips for these sources:

  • Wikipedia and similar sites are not a source. They are a great place to start the research process, and you can use them to help you find other sources, but do not cite Wikipedia in your paper.
  • Assess the validity of your source and use it appropriately. It is okay to use a biased source, but you need to make sure you are using it for the right reasons. For example, you could use a source from a far-right or far-left newspaper to explore the arguments that each side uses to discuss gun control; however, you should not use those sources to cite actual facts about gun control. You would need a less biased site for that.

After you have gathered the information, you will write a one-paragraph synthesis of the information gathered. This paragraph should show how the information fits together. You need to use at least five of your sources in this paragraph and use in-text citations. Remember, this is not just another summary of the sources but should be an attempt to make them fit together into one overarching idea. Think of this paragraph as a mini version of what your research paper will be. It should show how all the research you are doing fits together into one main idea.

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