When first tasked with creating a research paper, I am usually very overwhelmed by the large task at hand. But after taking a step back and thinking about the topic in a more compact way, the whole process becomes a lot less daunting.
The first thing I like to do when writing a research paper is to split come up with a specific question that I am going to answer throughout the paper.
Source: Netanimations
This lets me have some sort of guiding factor when doing my research.
After I figure out the overarching question, I usually go and figure out some sub topics that would compliment the question nicely. By doing this, I can go and find specific information and quotes that align with the subtopics I chose and then just add commentary from there. By doing this, the paper slowly starts to form.
Source: Imgur
When looking into the article BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary, this sort of method for doing a research paper really coincides with my theory of how to approach a paper. Bizup talks about segmenting your sources into ones that provide different types of viewpoints throughout the paper (Background, Exhibit, Argument, Method) which makes lots of sense. This allows the writer to go into more detail about each argument which provides a nice segmentation throughout the paper.