Good online resources for teaching students how to write a research paper [closed]

Question

What is a good online resource for a student who doesn't know how to write a research paper? Content I would like to see included in such a resource: how to use library databases, what a thesis statement is, how to distinguish reliable online sources from unreliable ones, how to write a bibliography, how to cite sources in the body of the paper, etc.

The target audience would be first-year undergraduates, although to be honest something written for K-12 students (particularly middle school and high school) would probably be very useful, too.

Edited to clarify: I do not mean "research paper" in the sense of "original research", but rather "Find sources about topic X in the library or online and write about them." This is a fairly common type of assignment for undergraduates (and, for that matter, high school students) in the United States in, for example, the social sciences and the humanities.

Answer 1

First-year undergraduates are rarely taught to write research papers; in my experience, the skill set you look for is taught to Master's students and PhD students. Look for self-help books intended for PhD students. To name a few,

• Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis is a brilliant insight into the subject, dealing with questions such as "I am a student of some obscure subject in some distant town in the middle of nowhere, how do I start?".

• How to write consistently boring literature by Kay Sand-Jensen is more of a style guide and a check list, but it's definitely a valuable extra reading.

• The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research by Marian Petre and Gordon Rugg walks aspiring PhD students through every aspect of their new lives, from working with a supervisor to writing all sorts of articles to delivering a viva.

Please make use of resources in these answers: Learn to write scientific papers in medicine, Are there resources for learning how to write a scientific paper?