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Searching, compiling, understanding, and explaining the literature relative to one’s research or project represents an essential 21-st century skill for students. The innovation in the present work is that the full range of these diverse topics can be integrated and team taught, in a single unified course format. There is widespread awareness that the rapid advances in technology have greatly accelerated fundamental progress in science, engineering, and medicine as well as in the entrepreneurial development in these fields. Simultaneously, there have been, perhaps less publicized, advances in information science, database technology, literature searching tools, data compilation tools, and data sharing tools. To be competitive, students need to learn about and to incorporate these powerful tools into their research and engineering project work while they are in school and after graduation. Lessons learned in developing a productive academic research laboratory (Optics Laboratory at Georgia Tech) were used to formulate an inclusive suite of the needed topics and to introduce these via a course for undergraduate students to be team taught by an engineering professor and several librarians. After five offerings, this course has earned permanent listing. The resulting 2-credit hour elective “Research Methods” course has gotten high course evaluations. The course has enrolled not only the intended undergraduate students, but also has attracted graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and faculty as well.