To discover good information that you can use for a given purpose, you’ll have to conduct research. You might be working on a college research paper right now or you might be anxious about one that’s ahead of you. As you contemplate these projects, be sure that you understand what research involves.

In the past you might have completed assignments that asked you to demonstrate how to use a library’s online catalog, databases, government documents collection, map depository, and interlibrary loan service. Or you might have been given a subject, such as ethics, or an assignment to find a definition or a related book, journal article, or Web page. If so, what you accomplished was retrieval, and although that is an essential element of research, it’s just one step, not the end of the road.

Nor is research a matter of copying passages or finding a handful of sources and patching together bits and pieces of information without commentary. In fact, such behavior could easily slip into the category of plagiarism, a serious misstep that could result in a failing grade or worse (read more about plagiarism here). At the very least, repeating information or ideas without interpreting them puts you at risk of careless use of sources that might be new or old, useful or dangerously in error, reliable or shaky, research-based or anecdotal, or objective or biased beyond credibility.

Good research, by contrast, is information literacy in action. Let’s take up the ethics topic again. If you were assigned to select and report on an ethics issue, you might pick ethics in politics, accumulate a dozen sources, evaluate them, interpret them, select a few and discard a few, organize the keepers into a coherent arrangement, extract portions that hang together, write a paper or presentation that cites your sources, compose an introduction that explains what you have done, draw some conclusions of your own, and submit the results. That’s research. If you learn to do it well, you’ll experience the rush that comes with discovery and the pleasure that accompanies making a statement or taking a stand. The conclusion that you compose on the basis of your research is new information!