Group Research Problems

I have gradually developed an utter hatred for group research projects over my time in college. The two things are often shoved together, unfortunately. It seems like four of five assignments we're given in groups involve secondary research: scanning through databases, looking for articles and (occasionally) not being allowed to say anything, even points of common knowledge or what seem to be profoundly obvious extrapolations, without pointing to someone else who said it first and in print.

The work of organizing groups, and trying to get quality work out of other students over whom I ultimately have no power has always been something I dread. When a classmate sends me, two days before a report is due, a piece of writing that I can barely untangle into readable English, that gives a link to a source that contradicts rather than supports it, I as another mere student have to try to find a way to explain that we can't use this, that it's not good enough, in a way that actually gets my teammates to do better rather than starting a fight about why I get to decide what we do and don't use... Or ignore their contribution and rewrite their entire part in whatever time remains and look forward to complaints about my having done so... Or use the nonsense they give me anyway and let the incoherence of the work drag me down with them.

There's a community I really admire called Effective Altruism (shortens to EA). Every time I've seen suggestions in EA articles or discussions promoting research as one of the best ways to do good in the world, I've gotten an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I'll never be able to help as much as other people who can stomach research. It occurred to me recently that this seems a lot like the reflexive rejection many other people have from any subject with a substantial numerical component because they're "bad at math". Maybe if I hadn't become conditioned through college to associate research with the feeling of either herding cats or dragging them around on my back in a sack that occasionally grew claws, I wouldn't think I was "bad at research", or that research was inherently miserable. Maybe I should try to find out what the experience of research is like in a more professional environment as opposed to what college usually turns it into.