Skip to main content

Do I have enough information?

When researching for assignments, you may gather a lot of information from websites, books, e-journals, etc. How do you know when you have enough information for your assignment? On this page we give some practical tips.

Knowing if you have enough information can be tricky but the following tips should help you.

  • Find out the requirements of your assignment. Consult your course guide, information about the assignment in Canvas, or your lecturer.
  • Go beyond what is required. If your assignment specifies the number of sources to use, for example 'Use three scholarly journal articles', try to find more than the minimum number and then evaluate your sources to find the best ones to use.
  • Read and gather enough information to provide an in-depth response to your assessment task.
  • If no new ideas are emerging from your sources, you might need to look for sources that cover a different aspect of the topic.

Once you have started the first draft of your assignment, you may discover that you need more information. At this stage you can do some additional reading.

Image: Journal articles, by RMIT, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

Am I research ready?

This self-assessment checklist provides a guide to help you get research ready.

Do you know how to:

More resources

If you have completed your research, you might be ready to begin writing. Use the following resources to help you get started.

Reading critically

Resources including videos and tutorials covering basic to more advanced reading skills.

Referencing

Resources including videos and tutorials on how to reference your written work.

Easy Cite referencing tool

An easy to use referencing tool that shows you how to reference using the different RMIT referencing styles.

Keywords