A Person's Size Does Not Always Directly Relate to How Healthy They Are

The I-search paper is a personal narrative about your research journey. It is a metacognitive essay where you are recording your research process, methods, and results, then reflecting on the importance of the topic. In this paper, I will be your audience. There are three sections to an I-search paper, although that does not mean that you will only have three paragraphs.

The Search Story: In the Search Story section, you will begin the essay with what you know about the topic before you conduct any research at all. You may use what you know about the topic based on past experiences and knowledge, as well as other courses or formal education you have had. Next, you will include what you wanted to learn during your research process and why. This should be in the form of a formal research question. You may develop up to four “sub-questions” as parts of that inquiry. Finally, you will turn to describing your search in detail. What search terms did you use? What sources did you find? Where were they? Why did you select the sources that you did? Are there sources that you “rejected” because they were not reliable sources or because you had too many .com websites? What challenges did you have with your search?

Note: as you are choosing sources, you should consider whether or not they are reliable, credible sources. You may not use more than one .com website. You will have to integrate at least three sources into your formal research paper, so for the I-search paper and the Annotated Bibliography, you must have 5 sources.

The Search Results: In the Search Results section you will tell me about the content of the sources that you have chosen. How have they helped you answer your research questions? In this section, you my include quotations, and paraphrases to reflect the findings of your research. In this section, you must use correct parenthetical citations for your sources. This is different from the Annotated Bibliography summaries because here you are focusing only on the part of the source that will be useful for you. For example, if you use a journal article that is 15 pages long, in the Annotated Bibliography you will summarize all 15 pages. For “The Search Results” in the I-search essay you will only focus on what you will actually use—maybe the first three pages. You should also make distinctions about what information might be useful for the shorter multimodal text versus the formal academic research essay.

Remember: whether you summarize, paraphrase, or quote, you must cite material that you did not know before you began your research project. That means that virtually ALL of this section will be cited.

The Search Reflection: In the final section of the essay, you will reflect on the search process. Describe what you learned about researching (what makes a source credible? Where should you start when you are conducting academic research? How do you limit/expand initial search terms? Etc.) as well as about your topic. Additionally, reflect on how this process and the information you learned might impact your future.