From writing this research essay, a few things became more clear. First of all, you need to put your citations on right away. This is something that I’m always bad at, and did a little bit better on this time. Still, I had a last minute pass remembering that I left off citations in the middle of some paragraphs, and adding them. I picked a hard topic to research, without many things to cite, so I don’t think I learned any special research techniques since it was such a weird topic. I finally found one related paper, and followed all its citations to look at those. That was the most lifesaving part of the whole process.

Perhaps most significantly, I found out the most important part of writing a research paper: You should be interested in your topic. If you’re not, you’re going to have a bad time. Luckily for me, I had a topic that was fun to write about; not so luckily, it wasn’t very interesting to research. Both of those things matter when you’re writing, so be very careful.

I also recently wrote a semi-research paper for chemistry, and that provides me with a little bit of context to compare this paper to. It involved less writing, but I had a topic that was really fun to research and which had more resources available. Here, I can see that I learned about how I need to organize my research, and also that I seem to have learned my lesson about putting in the citations on time. Both of these were helped by using LaTeX which has builtin facilities for handling citations, and that made maintaining a bibliography more fun.