Where You're At...Where You're Going

At this point, my hope for you is that you've collected 10, 12, 14, 1000 Tier I/II sources and started to look through your dragon horde of information. The next goal is to decide: What am I going to try and convince people is true?

For instance, maybe your research questions is What could improve the resilience of polar bears in the Arctic? After a bunch of research, you decide that Sustainable entrepreneurship is the best method to maintain polar bear numbers in the arctic. That's your claim. That's what the whole essay will attempt to prove.

Your next goal is to sketch out your best idea for a line of reasoning and figure out what research you still need to do. This means you need a series of reasons for why your claim is true. For the example above:

Sustainable entrepreneurship provides the resources necessary to protect animals.
We can't expect emissions mitigation to save the polar bears in time.
Sustainable entrepreneurship collects all of the stakeholders together to solve the problem.
There is already a great demand for ecotourism that can be tapped for this issue.

Next, start outlining your paper. You shouldn't really need help with, but below there is an example template to use if you need it. You will probably find that you need to do more research to fill in the blanks. Generally, you'll need at least two sources per body paragraph that support or synthesize to make your argument. Remember, you can have critics within your body paragraph to offer pushback before you rebut with your source(s), or you can wait until the end to have a few paragraphs of challenge, limitations, and implications. Here you can see multiple options for your outline. Or...

PT2 - IWA Outline.docx

Next Research Stage

At this point, you're probably in a mop up stage. Here, use some of the new tools to find sources that your current sources inspire:

Don't forget you can ask elicit to give you sources that are newer or older or that are related to sources you already have.
ConnectedPapers: Find out other papers that you might connect to the one you already have.
ResearchRabbit: An interesting way to visualize your papers within the context of other papers cited from and by.
Scite is a high powered version of the above and you can get a free 7-day trial.
Semantic Scholar also helps you find new resources.
ExplainPaper: Upload your study, highlight a section that is mystifying you, and our Robot Overlords will tell you what it means.
ScienceHub Mutual Aid: This is how you get access to those papers that don't have free .pdf's readily available. It's totally free, legal, and reasonably ethical.