Decide where you want to go with the research and what you need to accomplish. Write down any questions, and endeavour to answer them before your research is complete. Many people research to answer burning questions, finding a deep satisfaction on solving those riddles that are questions. Other reasons to research are job security and skill advancement. Characteristics of a successful researcher often include honesty, open-mindedness, curiosity, patience, skepticism, perception, persistence, caution, motivation, creativity, and in my case, just plain nosiness.
Many avenues exist to help researchers.
Depending on the subject being researched, encyclopedias, libraries, newspapers, Internet, and Internet search engines are all going to be your tools. More important than any of these are the researcher s good old-fashioned intuition and persistence. In my experience, intuition is the most valuable tool available to any researcher. Very often as adults our intuition is turned off or placed on the back burner. As a researcher you ll find you retrieve your intuition, dust it off and begin to trust it like an old friend.