- A research paper uses information from sources like books, articles, and the internet to tell readers about a topic. It requires choosing a topic, narrowing the topic into specific questions, creating an outline to organize research, taking notes from reliable sources, writing a rough draft, revising for clarity, editing for errors, and publishing the final draft. - Students should avoid plagiarism by properly citing sources and giving credit to the original authors. Keeping track of all sources is important for creating a bibliography or "Sources Cited" page at the end. - When researching, students should use reliable sources like educational websites and avoid copying directly from sources like Wikipedia without citing. Taking notes on index cards can help