What’s your go-to technique for research?

As a tech writer, these 5 steps have helped me reduce my research time by half while getting twice as more information.

1. Define- I first try to grasp what my topic means. I research the meaning of every word in the topic relating to the context of the article.

2. Brainstorm- keywords are important in every article, as they help its visibility. Now, I take the keywords of this article and plug it in my search engine to see related articles, videos, and discussions. If my article has no outrightly stated keywords, I brainstorm to find the words that are most relevant to the topic.

3. Preliminary Research- This is similar to skimming through text. However, I barely open all the articles I find. Instead, I’m scanning my search engine results page (SERP) and saving the articles and resources that may be useful.

4. In-depth Research- Now, I go to my bookmarks or wherever I’ve pinned the links to these resources to start checking them properly. After this, I unpin the resources I do not need.

5. Evaluate Sources- Getting information is important to me but guess what? Getting the latest information is more important. I don’t want outdated stories or case studies popping in my article. So, I avoid old content except the article is historical. I do this simultaneously with step 4 above.

That’s all!

Next time, I will talk about how I carry out in-depth research, the stage 4 of my 5-step research process. It’s important to know which information to remove or retain and how to do it swiftly.