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2Researching Your Topic

One-minute overview: In Chapter One, you learned how important it is to consider the needs of your reader, determine your purpose, and think about your topic before you begin a draft of your essay. These exercises will help get you started and provide you with some focus. After you have thought about your topic, you must find out as much as you can about what the experts have to say. An academic essay demands research. Research will provide you with much of the information you will need, in order to develop the ideas you present in your essay. Research also lends that aura of authority to your work, which your professor will expect. There are basically three sources of information you will need to access in order to research your topic completely. They are:

 Books

 Periodicals

 The internet

Finding the right books

To find book titles which will provide some of the information you will need to discover and develop the ideas you will present in your essay, check your course outline to see if your professor has included a bibliography or a list of further readings relevant to the course material. If he or she has, and if the list includes a title that sounds like it is relevant to your topic, do all you can to find the book and see if it contains relevant information. Study also any bibliographies or lists of further or related readings at the end of text-book chapters or at the end of the text book itself. Most text books contain bibliographies and they are invaluable sources of potentially useful information.

Assuming you have found from your course outline or your text book, a list of a dozen or so promising titles, go to your library and check your card catalogue to see if your library has the books and if they are available. Almost all university libraries are computerised now, so you must go to a terminal (usually located throughout the library) and follow the instructions (which should be close by) on how to find out if your library has the book you need. The process usually involves typing in the author’s name and the title. If your library has the book, the computer screen will tell you where in the library the book is located by providing you with a call number. The call number is a series of letters and numbers indicating where, in the library, the book is stored. If, for example, the call number is PE 1471. S65 1997, you find the book shelf with the PE label on it and move down the aisle until you find your number. The screen will also tell you whether or not the book is in or has been signed out, and, if it has been signed out, when it is due back. If it is not due back for a long period of time, you can usually put a recall on it and get it sooner.

If you have not found any specific titles from course outlines or text-book bibliographies, you will have to do a search by subject. Instead of typing author’s names and book titles into the library computer, try typing in various versions of the subject of your essay. If, for example, you were taking a music history course and had to write an essay on the English madrigal, type in the word ‘madrigal’ as a subject search and you are bound to get some leads. You can also type in a name as a subject, so for your madrigal essay you could find sources by typing in the names ‘Orlando Gibbons,’ ‘Thomas Weelkes,’ or other English madrigal composers, not as authors’ names but as subjects. Begin by making your subject search as specific as possible so that you get the most relevant information. Avoid making your search too broad because you will be overwhelmed by the number of books you can access.

Remember, as well, to check reference books such as encyclopaedias and biographical and other specialised dictionaries. Such books are useful if you need an overview of your topic. In the 1997 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, has a seven-paragraph history of the Madrigal, tracing it origins in fourteenth century Italy, and describing its popularity in sixteenth-century England.

Finally, you can might check theses and dissertations, which are lengthy studies carried out by university students, as part of their requirements to obtain an advanced degree. Theses and dissertations are vetted by experts, usually a team of the students’ professors, so they are reliable and authoritative, and are often excellent, readable sources for undergraduates working on a writing assignment. To access a theses or a dissertation, go to:

<http://library.dialog.com/bluesheets/html/bl0035.html>

Checking periodicals

Periodicals are texts published at regular intervals: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. They include newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. Some periodicals are aimed at the general reader; some are aimed at readers interested in a specific topic or academic discipline. There are thousands of them, at least one about any topic you can imagine.

Journals are invaluable sources of information for your academic essays. The advantage they have over books is their currency. Because they are published so regularly, the information in them is usually up to date.

To find a journal article, which will provide you with information you might be able to use in an academic essay, you need to access a periodical index. Periodical indexes are available in print but the print versions are being superseded by their on-line siblings.

There should be, on the menu of the computer screen in your college library, a list of the periodical indexes available. The computer in my university library, for example, lists these Indexes: Applied Science and Technology, Art, General Science, Humanities, Reader’s Guide, and Social Sciences. To find information about madrigals, I called up the Humanities Index and typed the word ‘madrigal’ on the subject line. On my screen appeared twenty-six titles, including ‘Filippo Storzzi and the Early Madrigals,’ ‘Thomas Morley and the Italian Madrigal Tradition,’ and ‘Thomas Weelkes Borrowings from Salamone Rossi.’ I called up the last of these and found out that the article was written by Judith Cohen and that it appeared on pages 110 to 117 of the April, 1985, volume 66 issue of the journal Music and Letters. I returned then to the main menu, typed in the journal title, and learned that the call number for this journal is ML5. M64.

With the call number, of course, you can find your journal the same way you would find a book, in the library stacks. Note that the most recent issues of journals are often kept in a Periodicals Reading Room, not the stacks, and that they are sometimes organised not by call number, but alphabetically.

Searching the internet

The internet has become a valuable research tool. There is a warehouse of information stored in cyberspace, and it is relatively easy to access. First you need to log on to the internet, usually done by clicking the appropriate icon on your computer screen. Next you must select a search engine, which is a data base containing a wide variety of information, usually organised by subject. Click onto your search engine, type in your subject, and you will be offered access to a lot of information. A good search engine will help you refine your search so you get exactly what you are looking for.

To find internet information on the English madrigal composer Thomas Weelkes, for example, I Googled Weelkes’ name on the search line. Google offers 10,200 web pages on Weelkes, some of which are audio, which means you can not only learn something about the composer but also listen to some of his music on line.

You must exercise some caution when accessing information from the internet. Anyone can publish anything on the internet, including misinformation and disinformation. You must make certain the website you are using is authoritative. If it is affiliated with an institution of higher learning or associated with a known expert in the field you are investigating, the information should be valid. Unless you have a way of authenticating internet information, be wary of using it.

Consulting your librarian

If you are having trouble finding information about your topic, if you are having trouble using the library computer, if you aren’t sure where something is located in the library, don’t hesitate to consult your librarian. Librarians are experts at tracking down information, and I have never met one who was unwilling to help.

Our Case Study continued

Having mulled over the needs and expectations of her reader, considered her aim in writing her essay, and spent some time freewriting, Audrey is ready to research her topic: the characters in Shakespeare’s sonnets and the possibility they had real-life counterparts.

As almost all students do today, Audrey begins her research by logging on to the internet and then on to her favourite search engine. Into the subject line she types “characters in Shakespeare’s sonnets” (without quotation marks). The search engine gives her a list of some 11,000 websites. Audrey proceeds to scan the descriptors of the sites and she calls up about a dozen of the ones that seem promising. There after, the sites become less and less relevant to her topic, more concerned, as they are, with the plays and with biographical information; many of them are syllabi for courses that feature or even merely touch upon Shakespeare’s work. Of the dozen sites she does scan, several contain the texts of the sonnets (some with commentary), while others feature bright colours and flashing lights to get her attention and encourage her to buy essays about the sonnets or order books about them. She does find one promising site, containing 23 pages, specifically about the identity of the three characters whose identity she is exploring, but it is a personal website and the identity of the author is not completely clear. This is a problem because such sites can be unauthoritative and unreliable. Other sites link to this one, though, and that suggests the site has some credibility, as does the fact that the author includes a bibliography of authoritative sources. But she will have to use information from this site with discretion. Her internet search rewards her with a few other promising leads, which she might return to later and pursue. But her plan now is to walk over to her university library and look for books and journal articles about her topic.

At the library, Audrey goes to the computer which catalogues all the books and journals the library contains and tries a “keyword search” by typing “Shakespeare and sonnets” (without quotation marks) into the search line. Up comes a list of more than 400 book titles. Clearly she has not been specific enough so she tries again, this time typing “Shakespeare and sonnets and characters” into the search line. This time only a dozen books are listed. She jots down the call numbers of the most promising titles.

Audrey then accesses a humanities database that catalogs journal articles, and she is overwhelmed again by the volume of information available. In one journal alone, The Shakespeare Quarterly, there are thousands of scholarly papers about the sonnets, some explicating a single line, a single reference, the structure, even the punctuation of single poems. Here she makes a wise decision: she will stick for now to books about the sonnets and only check journal articles later if she feels the books do not provide her with the current, relevant, and authoritative information she requires. Were she writing a thesis about the prototypes for the characters in the sonnets, she would have to study the scholarly journals, but for a basic undergraduate essay, on a topic about which many books have been written, she is safe to limit her research to authoritative websites and books. Some of the books she will eventually select are collections of the best articles that originally appeared in journals, so, in a sense, she has that base covered anyway.

Audrey goes to the third floor of her library where the books she needs are located and makes her selections. While she is doing so other potentially useful and relevant titles catch her eye and, by the time she has completed her search, she has eleven books relevant to her topic including many by scholars she knows from the class lectures are recognised experts in the field.

Audrey signs out the eleven books, stuffs as many as she can into her backpack, precariously balances the remaining ones in her arms, catches the bus back to her flat, and drops the books onto her desk.

She then begins to read, making notes as she goes. Some student writers use index cards at this point in the process, since using cards forces the researcher to make clear, concise notes. Audrey simply uses a separate notebook. She carefully begins with all of the relevant bibliographical information—full title, author’s complete name, place of publication, date of publication. She is careful to put page numbers after the notes she makes. There is nothing more frustrating than returning a borrowed book to the library then having to go and find it again, after discovering you need it for a page number or an author’s first name you forgot to include during the note-taking phase. Carefully write down all of the information that must appear in your source list at the end of the essay to avoid this inconvenience.

As she works, Audrey is careful to limit her notes to information clearly relevant to her topic and, in so doing, she is beginning to formulate a plan, a structure for her essay.

Tutorial

Progress questions

1 1 When should you do your research for an academic essay you must write?

2 2 What is a call number?

Discussion points

1 1 What are the advantages and disadvantages of searching for information on the internet?

2 2 What advantages do journal articles have over books? Do books have over journal articles?

Practical assignment

1 1 Find the call number of a book written by one of your professors.

2 2 Find the titles of three journals which should contain information relevant to your course of study.

3 3 Find a website which should contain information relevant to your course of study

Study and revision tip

1 1 Check your textbooks for bibliographies, lists of additional readings, lists of related readings, and references. You can often find titles relevant to your area of interest, and your research will be easier if you have to look for a specific book or journal title.