Why Research Matters
Marty Wallace
The traditional term paper is absolutely necessary, those skills are necessary. Hopefully by the time you're a junior or senior in chemistry, you're not learning those skills, but you're applying them and refining them a little bit.

Greg Liggins
If I have an idea, at home I will go online oftentimes, and not only read stories from the Associated press wire or other news sources out there, but if it's a topic, say, I will kind of research the topic by using the Internet. Sometimes I can go out there on stories and I think I have a little more background than other reporters because I've had that resource available to me.

Michael Moore
Well, research is very important to me and I hired three research assistants, all of whom worked on TV Nation, to work on this book. And they spent months with me digging this stuff up. It's very important, especially when you present this, especially when you present it in a humorous fashion, for me at least, that the satire have a sort of back up. I want people to know I'm not just making a joke, I'm not just saying this stuff to get a laugh. I want people to think.

Tom Robbins
I do an enormous amount of research but I try not to let it show too much. I read seventeen books, I believe it was 17 books, on the life of the historical Christ, in preparation for writing Another Roadside Attraction. All of my facts are accurate, although I may start out with an accurate fact, and then give it a twist and play with it a little bit.

Geoffrey Philip
So I walk into Honors 1102 and the lady says to me: 'You have a research paper due in sixteen weeks." I'm going like, "What's a research paper." Because I'm coming straight from Jamaica. We didn't…I mean, I had never been to college. And so when she said 'research paper" I went…so I got one of my classmates and I said, "What's a research paper?" And so they helped me…you know, put it together and so on and so forth…and then of course, going all the way through grad school. You know, up to… I finally started to master it like in about my third, fourth year, because I'd never done it before. So one of the reasons why I try to just ground it into them—you gotta learn this—is because it's a skill that they'll have to use for the rest of their career.

Donald Pharr
If there is any magic in education, it works in moments like this. I find that in doing this research I find new ideas. Stuff…I thought I had the subject pretty well covered, but someone out there's thought about it longer and harder and worked, done more work than I have. And I think, God that's good, and I'm gonna work that person's opinion into my paper too. I'm gonna change my thesis slightly. I'm not gonna have to redo my paper, but it's gonna make my paper better. And that's the interesting thing…finding that new opinion that opens a new world for you. And suddenly not only have you finished your research paper by doing it in this way, you've made it a lot better because again, that is the purpose of research, to find out what other people have had to say.

Charles Turner
In the area of history, we certainly find the students haven't developed the skills for research at all. They, in many cases, never have done a research paper.

Xavier Pino
Dr. Turner…said you know, like, I had a… we had a research paper last year, I mean, he basically said: research paper, four-six pages MLA citation, pick a topic. And you had to go ahead and do it. And I really hadn't done a research paper and I can honestly say that…high school research papers are going to the World Book Encyclopedia and looking up your topic and OK that works for me, that's all it takes. But I've never you know…learned how, you know…go to periodicals, Internets, books, journals, things like that… I feel now I can really go about it and I'm not having mastered it in any way and I won't even say that I'm very good at it, but at least I know how to go about, you know, the task of gathering information and piecing it together and puzzling it all together to formulate a nice long research paper.