Week 2 - My Research

My unconventional start to researching for a paper is always to go straight to the library website and see what I can find without doing background reading. Why do I do this? Because it starts my brain thinking in the right context and without doing this I find starting assignments daunting.

My topic for this assignment is; "Only individuals who are already registered as organ donors should be eligible to receive an organ donation." After skimming through a few more general articles I went on to the more reasonable route of reading simpler sources, like Wikipedia and donor.co.nz, to get a broader idea of the topic. 

Now that I had a familiarity with the language around the topic I could search for key terms such as 'organ allocation priority' which gave me articles and books with far more relevance. I accessed each source that looked like it had relevance and skimmed through any piece of information (the abstract or the index) that would tell me whether it would be useful. I also went to good web resources and looked for useful information on these.

My next step was reading my sources. For this assignment most of what I read was journal articles although there were some government documents and a few books as well. Instead of reading entire books I looked through the contents and index for any words or topics that are related to organ donation priority. 

Around halfway through my research I started planning and writing small pieces of my paper as I started to get a complete grasp on the topic and exactly where I stand on it.

That brings me to the difficulties I faced during research:

Finding what words would return results in a search was difficult; prioritizing organ donation according to registration is a complex idea that doesn't immediately appear to have common terms across sources. Eventually I found a few ways of phrasing the idea that returned more results but it held up my research a little bit. 

My first reaction when I read the topic was 'of course not! that wouldn't be fair.' But as I read my stance became more confused; if we have a shortage of organs is it so wrong to find ways to encourage donation? But what about those who can't donate for more complex reasons?  I began to make a 'for' and 'against' list and I found myself wanting to argue more with the points I made on the 'against' side than I did those on the 'for' side which finally settled my confusion and gave me a clear position for my paper. 

So what could I have done better? My research process can be quite all-over-the-place and very inefficient sometimes. I could have skipped that first step. It's not really necessary and more time wasting than anything else and I could have started my 'for' and 'against' list far earlier into the research process rather than spending time worried about what my stance was. 

Overall, despite my weird way of doing things I managed to get all my reading done well within time and without too many hiccups and I think I came away from it with a good grasp on the topic I am writing about.