From the web page http://www.ipl.org/teen/aplus
*Pages 1--53 from
APlus Research & Writing for High School and College Students
Need to write a research paper?
Want to do an job without going totally NUTS?
Here's help!
Step by Step -guide to researching and writing a paper
Info Search -finding things in cyberspace and your library
Links -to great online resources for research and writing
This is your printable copy of an online resource provided by:
the Internet Public Library
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/
A+ Research & Writing for high school and college students is a
copyrighted work of Kathryn L. Schwartz, 1997. All rights
reserved. These documents may be distributed as long as it is
done entirely with all attributions to all organiza-tions and
authors. Commercial distribution is strictly prohibited. Portions
of this document may be copyrighted by other organizations.
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Table of Contents
Step by Step Research & Writing Page
Why the Step by Step Approach? 3
Step 1 -Getting Started -preparing for the assignment and
getting ready to choose a topic 4
Scheduling Your Project -a worksheet 8
Step 2 -Discovering and Choosing a Topic -reading to
become informed 9
Step 3 -Looking for and Forming a Focus -exploring your
topic 11
Step 4 -Gathering Information -which clarifies and supports your
focus 13
Step 5 -Preparing to Write -analyzing and organizing your
information and forming a thesis statement 15
Step 6 -Writing the Paper -writing, revising and finalizing 17
Info Search
Where's the Information? 20
Learning to Research in the Library 21
Learning to Research on the Web 35
Skills for Online Searching 40
Information Found--and Not Found--on the Web 43
Search Strategy: Getting a Broad Overview of a Subject 47
Search Strategy: Finding Specific Information 49
Links to Online Resources 51
Bibliography -sources 53
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Step by Step Research & Writing
Why the Step by Step Approach? There's a ton of information
available online about writing papers for college classes,
mostly provided by college and university writing departments.
But when your political science or biology or economics
instructor assigns you a research paper, writing the paper is
only half the battle.
Before you can start writing, you have to
· explore the subject to find a topic,
· locate relevant information,
· analyze the issues and
· organize your arguments.
These activities take more time and require different skills than
the final step--writing the paper. And many students haven't had
a lot of formal training in how to do research and prepare
information for writing a "research paper."
Librarians provide a lot of help to students in the exploring,
finding and organizing phases of their writing projects. They've
done research on how students approach these tasks, how they
feel while they're doing them, and what kinds of activities lead
to a successful research paper (Kuhlthau, 1993 and 1994).
The paper is your final product, but a research paper involves an
extensive process before you can generate the product. The Step
by Step section will guide you through this process from getting
the assignment to writing the paper.
is the goal!
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Step 1 -Getting Started
Goal: Preparing for the assignment and getting ready to
choose a topic.
Feelings: Don't be surprised if you feel like many people do as
they get started--worried about the amount of work ahead of you
and a bit unsure of
yourself. You might even feel a little excitement, anticipating
the project! Or maybe not.
Hey wait a minute! Why should I care about how I'm feeling during
this whole process? There's an old saying, "Misery loves
company." If you know
how other students feel as they go through the research and
writing process and you feel about the same way, you'll know
your project is right on track!
Thoughts and Actions: Follow the steps below to get an idea of
things you should be thinking about and doing, and some of the
strategies which will help.
Note the type of information search you should be doing at this
stage. Info Search
Your information search at this stage involves getting a
"bird's eye" view of possible topics, browsing for ideas and
finding out what kind of sources (print, electronic and
internet) might be available to you on various topics.
1.1 Understand the assignment
Read over the instructions for the assignment to make sure you
fully understand what the instructor has in mind and on what
basis you will be graded. The Roane State Community College OWL
(Online Writing Lab) (Henley, 1996) describes some common types
of research papers as:
Report Sometimes, a teacher will assign topics or give students a
range of topics to choose from and ask that the students write a
research paper on the topic. This type of research paper is
really a form of individual study. The measure of success is how
well the student can conduct research, analyze and
organize the information and communicate it clearly in
written form. Frequently, reports require an oral presentation
to the class as well.
Issue Analysis A research paper may highlight a particular issue
or problem in a field of study. The paper may focus on analysis
of the issue and its solutions, possibly from both historical
and current perspectives. The posture of the writer is
frequently 4
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that of a neutral observer more than an advocate for a
particular position. The success of the paper is often based on
how completely and clearly the writer has identified the key
aspects of the issue and their significance to the field to
which they relate.
Advocacy or Persuasion A research paper may involve taking a
stand on an issue and defending it against opposing points of
view. The student will research the issues and read others'
arguments for and
against. The paper will anticipate and deflect arguments
against the position, while presenting supporting evidence in
favor of the position. Success will depend on how
persuasively the paper makes its case and defends against
possible opposition.
There's also a quick reference list of different types of papers
with short descriptions of each type at the Houston Community
College Systems Library, available at its Web site, (http://
www. hccs. cc. tx. us/ Library/ TipSheets/ -Essay. html). See
also our links (p 51) to Common Types of Papers and Papers on
Special Subjects for articles on the unique aspects of various
types of essays and research papers.
Be sure you understand what kind of a paper you've been asked to
write, since the approach you'd take could be vastly different,
depending on the purpose of the paper and the expectations of
your instructor!
1.2 Consider the process you'll use
The paper is your final product, but a research paper involves an
extensive process before you can generate the product. If you
focus too quickly on the end product, you may miss some of the
important research steps and find yourself writing a paper
without enough understanding of the topic to do an A+ job.
Browse over the rest of the steps suggested in this manual to get
an idea of the process and think about how you'll approach each
step. Start a journal or notebook and begin jotting notes about
not only "what" you plan to do but also "how" you plan to do it.
For a quicker overview of similar research steps, and why they're
important, see "Steps in the Research Process," (Hord, 1995 B)
at the HCCS Libraries' Web site (http:// www. hccs. cc. tx. us/
Library/ Center/ Lobby/ Steps. html).
1.3 Set your deadlines for each step of the assignment
Ideally, you will have at least four weeks from the date it's
assigned to complete a research paper of 7 or 8 pages (2,000 to
2,500 words). Shorter papers requiring fairly simple research (4
or 5 pages -1,500 words) may not require four weeks' "lead
time," while a 15 page or longer paper might be a semester-long
project. 5
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The page Scheduling Your Project (p. 8) will help you set time
deadlines for yourself.
1.4 Think about possible topics
The word "topic" is used variably by many teachers of writing and
research to mean anything from the very general "subject matter"
to the very specific "thesis statement." In this manual, the
term topic is broadly defined, while focus means a narrower
perspective on the topic, and thesis statement is the main point
of your paper, which cannot be determined until after research
and analysis is complete. Look over Step 2, Discovering a Topic,
and Step 3, Looking for and Forming a Focus for more information
about these distinctions.
1.5 Info Search -browse, read, relax
Start by thumbing through the textbooks or course pack for the
class in which your paper was assigned. Browse the table of
contents, chapter headings and subheadings, to get an overview
of the subject matter. Visit your library and browse in the
catalog and reference room to find out what sources are held by
the library which may relate to your class. Browse some of the
subject-indexed sources on the internet with the same purpose.
The Info Search section of this manual (p. 20) will help you
learn how and where to browse.
Your objective in this step is to get a "bird's eye view" of the
general subject matter, to give your brain some ideas to work on
while you're getting ready for the step of choosing a topic.
1.6 Relate your prior experience and learning
The process of successful research and writing involves building
on what you know. You don't need to know a lot about a subject
in order to use it as your topic, but choosing one you're
totally unfamiliar with could be a mistake. It may take so much
time and effort to become informed about the subject that you
don't really have time to get into the depth required by your
assignment.
1.7 Jot down your questions and ideas about possible topics Use
your notebook to starting recording questions which interest you
or ideas for possible topics. If you're researching a paper for
a 20th century American history class, write down questions you
wonder about:
· Why did the stock market crash in 1929?
· Who was the worst 20th century American President?
· Did the Cigarette Smoking Man from X-Files really kill JFK?
You'll end up with a list of ideas and musings, some of which are
obviously ridiculous and not reasonable topics for your paper,
but don't worry about that at 6
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this point. Think about things which interest you and which build
upon some experience or knowledge you have or build upon things
you're presently learning in class.
Also see the links to Reading Techniques and Journal Writing
(http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksplanning. htm# reading)
for tips on how to use a journal to help you in researching and
writing a paper.
1.8 Brainstorm, alone and with others
Toss ideas around in your mind. Bounce ideas off of your
classmates, your teacher or (heaven forbid) your siblings and
parents, to get their reactions and ideas. Many times another
person will have a fresh perspective you might not have thought
of, or something they say will trigger an idea for you. 7
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Scheduling your project A time crunch could be one of your
biggest challenges in completing a successful research paper.
Take the time now to plan your deadlines--it will help you get
going and tell you when to wrap up one step and move on to the
next.
Step by Step Research
& Writing
Percent of
Time*
Date you will finish this
step
Step 1 -Getting started:
planning the process 5%
Step 2 -Discovering and
choosing a topic 10%
Step 3 -Looking for and
forming a focus 20%
Step 4 -Gathering infor-mation:
detail research 25%
Step 5 -Preparing to
write 10%
Step 6 -Writing and
revising 30%
*Suggested times for each step
The suggested percentages of time are to give you an idea in
general how you may want to divide up your time between now and
the time your paper is due. As you can see, the research steps
are projected at 60% of the total time, while writing is 40%.
Depending on how complex your topic is and how much you know
about it at the beginning, your time could be more or less
heavily weighted toward research versus writing.
As you work through the Step by Step approach, you will find that
you'll need time for reading and research at almost every step.
This means a trip to the library, or an internet session on your
computer, so be sure to plan enough time for those activities.
Also, the whole process works best if you have time for
reflection, thinking--time for you to put the project aside and
"sleep on it." If you possibly can, build these times into your
schedule. Your paper will be a better product and you are likely
to be happier with the whole process. 8
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Step 2 -Discovering and Choosing a Topic
Goal: Discovering and choosing a topic for your research.
Feelings: You may feel confused, adrift in a sea of information.
You may be anxious to pick a topic and "get on with it." Once
you've made a choice, you'll
probably feel elated and excited -for a while, at least!
Thoughts and Actions: Follow the steps below to get an idea of
things you should be thinking about and doing, and some of the
strategies which will help.
Note the type of information search you should be doing at this
stage. Info Search
Your information search at this stage might be viewed as
"surveying the territory." Instead of the birds' eye view you
took at first, picture yourself piloting a helicopter, at times
soaring over the landscape, then hovering for awhile over
an interesting area and maybe even dipping down for a
closer look.
2.1 Info Search -read for overview of various topics
Use the notes you've made and the thinking you've done so far to
select some areas for general reading. Use the library's
reference room--encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs--to get an
overview of possible topics (even if your instructor has told
you that you can't use an encyclopedia as a reference--that's
not important at this stage).
Explore CD-ROM tools in your library, like newspaper and magazine
indexes, searching with key words representing your topic ideas.
Explore the internet by using several of the resources organized
by subject. The Info Search section of this manual (p. 20) will
help you learn how and where to find these resources.
Remember to keep your concept of topic rather broad at this
stage--you can look for a focus later, after you know something
about the topic. Read the article "Narrowing Your Essay Topic,"
from the University of Victoria, (http:// webserver. maclab.
comp. uvic. ca/ writersguide/ Pages/ EssayNarrowTopics. html)
for some specific examples of broader and narrower topics. Also
consider framing your topic as a question, as recommended by the
HCCS Libraries in "The Art of Research Questions"
(http:// www. hccs. cc. tx. us/ Library/ Center/ Lobby/ Question.
html). 9
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2.2 Continue thinking and jotting down questions and ideas in
your notebook
As you read, ideas and questions may strike you -write them down,
or you'll lose track of them. Look for issues which interest
you, which arouse your curiosity or your passion (no, not that
kind of passion, unless it's a human sexuality course). Consider
the audience for your research paper: what kinds of things have
been discussed in class that seemed to interest the class and
the instructor? What kinds of issues were touched upon but could
use further study and elaboration?
Here is advice from Colgate University on this process:
Write down all the ideas that occur to you--the brilliant
insights, the stupid questions, the complaints, the emotions,
the reactions, the things you're reminded of--everything.
(Typically these ideas will crowd into your head as you write
out your answers to the prewriting tasks. Instead of pushing
them aside, forgetting them, or telling yourself that they are
irrelevant, write them down. Later you may find relevance to
things that at first seemed immaterial.) (http:// www2. colgate.
edu/ diw/ model. html)
Also see the links to Planning and Starting the Writing Process
(p. 52), especially the Ideas section and Reading Techniques and
Journal Writing.
2.3 Info Survey -what print and electronic resources are
available? When you've narrowed your choices down, make a quick
survey of the research resources which will be available to you
on each potential topic. How much information seems to be
available in your library's catalog? If it's a current topic, is
there information in newspaper and magazine indexes and are those
newspapers and magazines held by your library? Is there much
authoritative information on your topic on the internet? Is the
available information slanted to one side of an issue versus
another? How much work will it take to get the information you
need if you choose a particular topic?
2.4 Try different topics on for "size"
The topic you choose should "fit" in several important respects:
your interests and knowledge, the purpose of the assignment, the
type of paper (report, issue, argument), the length of the
paper. Don't worry too much about having a broad topic at this
point--in Step 3 you'll be looking for a focus to narrow the
topic down to a manageable size for research and writing. Look
for topic ideas at Researchpaper. com (http:// www.
researchpaper. com/) or in your library. Ask the reference
librarian if the library has books of suggested topics like
10,000 Ideas for Term Papers, Projects, Reports & Speeches
(Lamm, 1995). 10
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Step 3 -Looking for and Forming a Focus
Goal: Exploring your topic, finding and forming a focus
for your research.
Feelings: You're probably still feeling uncertain, even though
you have a topic. As you root around in your topic, you may have
your darkest hour in the whole
process, feeling threatened by the choice of a focus--what if you
pick the "wrong" one? Try to tolerate these feelings. Once you
choose a focus, you should start to feel some optimism and
confidence. You may even have an "Aha!" experience, but don't
worry if you don't--there's not an "Aha!" in every A+ paper.
Thoughts and Actions: Follow the steps below to get an idea of
things you should be thinking about and doing, and some of the
strategies which will help.
Note the type of information search you should be doing at this
stage. Info Search
Now that you have a topic, you need to learn about it!
Instead of piloting a helicopter over the landscape,
you're now on the ground. Picture your topic as a
square mile of land. Your task is to explore it, which
will require going around, over and through it several
times to see what's there, looking at it from different
perspectives.
3.1 Info Search -exploring your topic
Before you can decide on a focus, you need to explore your topic,
to become informed about the topic, to build on your knowledge
and experience. You'll be locating books, articles, videos,
internet and other resources about your topic and reading to
learn! You're looking for an issue, an aspect, a perspective on
which to focus your research paper.
This is the first step in which you'll probably be checking books
out of the library. Encyclopedias won't be much help here.
You're looking for treatments of your topic which are either
more comprehensive or more specific than an encyclopedic
treatment, with various authors' summaries, analyses and
opinions. But, until you've chosen a focus, you're not really on
a mission of gathering information. If you gather information on
the topic as a whole, you'll waste a lot of time doing it and
have way too much to sort through when you are ready to write
your paper. Resist the temptation to "gather" until you've chosen
a focus. 11
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Now you'll be using the library's online catalog, online indexes
and the Web search engines along with the reference room and the
subject-based Web directories. Learn how in the Info Search
section (p. 20).
3.2 Info Search -preliminary note taking
As you read, start taking notes of what you're learning about
your topic--concepts, issues, problems, areas where experts agree
or disagree. Keep track of the bibliographic references for the
information you're using, and write down a note or two of what's
contained in the book, article, Website, etc. There's nothing
more frustrating than knowing you read something earlier about a
particular point and not being able to locate it again when you
decide it's something you need.
Find out what kind of citations are required by your instructor
and make sure you're recording what you'll need to do your
bibliography. See links to Citing Sources (p. 52).
3.3 Purposeful thinking about possible focuses
While you're learning about your topic, intentionally look for
possible focuses in the material. You could spend enormous
amounts of time reading, especially about an interesting topic,
without being any closer to a focus unless you purposefully keep
that goal in your mind while you read.
3.4 Choosing a focus or combining themes to form a focus
Try your choices of focus on for "size" as you did your topic.
Which ones fit the assignment, the size, scope and type of the
paper? Think about which of your possible focuses has the best
chance for making a successful A+ paper. If you find several
themes within your topic which each are too small to support the
entire paper, can they be combined to form a focus?
If you haven't yet read the online linked articles on
· Ideas (http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksplanning. htm#
ideas) · The topic (p. 52)
· Thesis statement (p. 52)
browse through them to get suggestions for focusing and narrowing
your topic. 12
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Step 4 -Gathering Information
Goal: Gathering information which clarifies and supports
your focus.
Feelings: Many people feel interested and challenged at this
stage. The agonizing part of choosing what to research is over
and the task of finding the
specific information you need is more like solving a puzzle or
going on a treasure hunt. If any part of this process is going
to be fun, this is the part.
Thoughts and Actions: Follow the steps below to get an idea of
things you should be thinking about and doing, and some of the
strategies which will help.
Note the type of information search you should be doing at this
stage. Info Search
Your information search at this stage is focused and
specific, and you're keeping a careful record of what you
find. Instead of the square mile of land to explore, you've
roped off half an acre. You're walking it systematically,
bending down now and then to pick up something and
chuck it in your backpack, then recording in your
notebook what you found and where you found it.
4.1 Info Search -finding, collecting and recording
This is the step most people think of when they think of "library
research." It's a hunt for information in any available form
(book, periodical, CD, video, internet) which is pertinent to
your chosen focus. Once you know the focus of your research,
there are lots of tools and strategies to help you find and
collect the information you need.
Your information search should be focused and specific, but pay
careful attention to serendipity (finding, by chance, valuable
things you weren't even looking for). Keep your mind open to
continue learning about your focused topic.
Now is the time to carefully record your sources in the
bibliographic format required by your instructor. Every piece of
information you collect should have bibliographic information
written down before you leave the library. See the links to
Citing Sources (p. ) for information on how and when to use
quotation, paraphrase and summary and how to conform to the
required styles of citation in different fields of study. You
should also pay attention to the quality of the information you
find, especially if you're using information you find on the
internet. See the linked articles about Interpretation and
Evaluation of Information (http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/
linksother. htm# interpret). 13
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Now is also the time to learn the details of using search
engines. Many of the sources you will want to use are online,
whether in the library or on the internet. See the Info Search
section (p. 20) and specifically the Skills for Online Searching
article (p. 40).
4.2 Think about clarifying or refining your focus
As you gather information about your focused topic, you may find
new information which prompts you to refine, clarify, extend or
narrow your focus. Stay flexible and adjust your information
search to account for the changes, widening or narrowing your
search, or heading down a slightly different path to follow a
new lead.
4.3 Start organizing your notes
Start organizing your notes into logical groups. You may notice a
gap in your research, or a more heavy weighting to one aspect of
the subject than what you had intended. Starting to organize as
you gather information can save an extra trip to the library.
It's better to find the gap now instead of the night before your
paper is due (obviously!).
Look through the articles linked under Organizing Information (p.
52), which includes taking notes, outlining and organizing by
mapping, cubing, etc.
4.4 Think about what your thesis statement will be
The thesis statement is the main point of your paper. The type of
thesis statement you'll be making depends a lot on what type of
paper you're writing--a report, an issue analysis, an advocacy
paper or another type. As you gather specific information and
refine your focus, intentionally look for a main point to your
findings. Sometimes, a thesis emerges very obviously from the
material, and other times you may struggle to bring together the
parts into a sensible whole. The tricky part is knowing when to
stop gathering information--when do you have enough, and of the
right kind? Seeking a main point as you research will help you
know when you're done.
Read the linked articles on Thesis statement (p. 52) for
guidance. 14
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Step 5 -Preparing to Write
Goal: Analyzing and organizing your information and
forming a thesis statement.
Feelings: You may feel uncertain where to start or overwhelmed by
information, but you also probably see a glimmer of "light at the
end of the
tunnel" that encourages you.
Thoughts and Actions: Follow the steps below to get an idea of
things you should be thinking about and doing, and some of the
strategies which will help.
Note the type of information search you should be doing at this
stage. Info Search
Don't turn in your library card yet. Be prepared to go back to
your information sources to fill in any gaps you find as you
analyze and organize your information prior to
writing.
5.1 Analyze and organize your information
The word "analyze" means to break something down into its parts.
A meaningful analysis identifies the parts and demonstrates how
they relate to each other. You may have information from
different sources which examines different aspects of your
topic. By breaking down the information, you may be able to see
rela-tionships between the different sources and form them into
a whole concept.
When you're trying to make sense of the information coming out of
your research process, you often have to look at it from
different perspectives and sometimes have to step back and try
to get a "big picture" view. Some ways to do this are to try out
different organization patterns: compare and contrast,
advantages and disadvantages, starting from a narrow premise and
building on it, cause and effect, logical sequence. There are
many tools to use in analyzing and organizing research findings,
such as webbing, outlining, cubing, mapping--see the linked
articles on Organizing Information (p. 52).
5.2 Construct a thesis statement and try it on for "size"
Before beginning to write the paper, write the thesis statement.
Boil down the main point of your paper to a single statement.
Hamilton College (Williams) gives this explanation of the thesis
statement:
A well-written thesis statement, usually expressed in one
sentence, is the most important sentence in your entire paper.
It should both summarize for your reader the position you will
be arguing and set up the pattern of 15
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organization you will use in your discussion. A thesis sentence
is not a statement of accepted fact; it is the position that
needs the proof you will provide in your argument. Your thesis
should reflect the full scope of your argument--no more and no
less; beware of writing a thesis statement that is too broad to
be defended within the scope of your paper.
The article from which this quote is taken also gives some
excellent examples of thesis statements for papers in various
disciplines. See the Hamilton College article and others in the
Links section for Thesis statement (p. 52).
Another way to summarize the nature and function of the thesis
statement is that it is a single sentence, usually in the first
paragraph of the paper, which:
· declares the position you are taking in your paper,
· sets up the way you will organize your discussion, and
· points to the conclusion you will draw.
5.3 Weed out irrelevant information
Guess what. Now that you have all those wonderful notes and
citations from your research, you're going to have to get rid of
some of them! No matter how profound and interesting the
information is, if it doesn't relate to and support the thesis
you've chosen, don't try to cram it into the paper--just sigh
deeply and set it aside. You'll have an easier time writing if
you do this weeding before you start.
5.4 Info Search -fill in the gaps
Once you've identified which of your research notes you'll use,
you may see some gaps where you need an additional support for a
point you want to make. Leave enough time in your writing plan
for an extra trip to the library, just in case.
16
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Step 6 -Writing the Paper
Goal: Writing, revising and finalizing the paper.
Feelings: When your paper is finished, you may feel satisfaction,
or dissatisfaction, depending on how you feel about the end
product. You'll
probably feel a sense of relief and the strong urge to take a
nap--go ahead, you deserve it!
Thoughts and Actions: Follow the steps below to get an idea of
things you should be thinking about and doing, and some of the
strategies which will help.
Note the type of information search you should be doing at this
stage. Info Search
Get to know the OWLs -the Online Writing Labs -from
universities all over the country. Many colleges have put
information online to help both the students enrolled in
writing courses and students who have to research and write for
other courses. The OWLs' online handouts cover almost
every conceivable aspect of writing, from grammar and
punctuation to choosing a title for your paper.
6.1 Think about the assignment, the audience and the purpose To
prepare for writing, go over once more the requirements of the
assignment to make sure you focus your writing efforts on what's
expected by your instructor. Consider the purpose of the paper,
either as set forth in the assignment, or as stated in your
thesis statement--are you trying to persuade, to inform, to
evaluate, to summarize?
· Who is your audience and how will that affect your paper? ·
What prior knowledge can you assume the audience has on the
topic? · What style and tone of writing are required by the
audience and the assignment--informal, scholarly, first-person
reporting, dramatized?
Read the linked articles that discuss Audience and Tone (http://
www. ipl. org/ -teen/ aplus/ linkswritingstyle. htm# audience).
Also, look at the articles about the structure and purpose of
different kinds of papers--Common Types of Papers and Papers on
special subjects (p. 51)--to make sure your writing goals are
clear to you.
17
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6.2 Prepare an outline
Try to get a "model" outline for the type of paper you're
writing, or look at examples of good papers to see how they were
organized. The Roane State Community College OWL (Henley, 1996)
gives an example of an outline for a paper written to describe a
problem:
· · Introduction
· · Statement of the Problem
· · Thesis Sentence
· · Body: Paragraphs 1 and 2
· · History of the Problem (Include, perhaps, past attempts at
solutions. Work in sources.)
· · Body: Paragraphs 3 and 4
· · Extent of the Problem (Who is affected? How bad is it? Work
in sources.)
· · Body: Paragraphs 5 and 6
· · Repercussions of the Problem (Work in sources.)
· · Body: Paragraphs 7 and 8
· · Future solutions (not necessarily your own. More sources.) ·
· Conclusion
· · Summarize your findings
There are a lot more model outlines and instructions for
preparing outlines available in books and at the OWLs. See the
links under Organizing information (p. 52) for lots of articles
on outlining and other ways to organize your paper.
6.3 Write the rough draft --visit the OWLs
Here's where the Online Writing Labs excel--there are many dozens
of great articles on every aspect of writing your paper. The
Links to Online Resources pages (p. 51) have classified these by
topic so that you can browse easily and pick out articles you
want to read. The entire Links for Writing section will be
helpful, and specifically the sections on:
· Title, introduction and conclusion
· Writing style and technique
· Grammar and punctuation
18
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6.4 Know how to use your source materials and cite them
See the section Citing sources on the Links page (p. 52). There's
also a nice section on using sources in the middle of another
article entitled "Writing a General Research Paper"
(http:// www2. rscc. cc. tn. us/~ jordan_ jj/ OWL/ Research.
html) from the Roane State Community College OWL (Henley, 1996).
The section, "What Happens When the Sources Seem to be Writing
My Paper For Me?" describes how to break up long quotations and
how to cite an author multiple times without letting the author
take over your paper, and it links to both the MLA and the APA
style requirements for partial quotations, full quotations,
indented quotations, in-text quotations, and paraphrasing.
6.5 Have others read and critique the paper
Read your paper out loud, to yourself. See if the arguments are
coherent, logical and conclusive when read aloud. Have several
experienced people read and critique your paper. If your school
has a writing lab, use the tutors or helpers there as critics.
If your only choice is other students, make sure they're A
students!
See the linked articles on Critiques and peer review (http://
www. ipl. org/ teen/ -aplus/ linksrevising. htm# critiques).
6.6 Revise and proofread
See the "Revision Checklist" section of the article The Research
Paper (http:// www. chesapeake. edu/ Writingcenter/ respaper.
html) from Chesapeake College. The checklist asks some general
questions to help you step back and take a look at the overall
content and structure of the paper, then drills down to
paragraphs, sentences and words for a closer examination of the
writing style.
Almost all the OWLs have very large sections on grammar, sentence
and paragraph structure, writing style, proofreading, revising
and common errors. Browse some of the larger OWLs like Purdue
University and University of Victoria and see the linked
articles on Revising and rewriting (p. 52).
Congratulations! You made it through all the steps to
researching and writing an paper. We hope your
instructor agrees!
19
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Info Search
Where's the information? Searching for information today is both
easier and harder than it was when your only choice was the
library and its massive card catalog. More information is
available than ever before, and you can access information from
across the country or around the world. But finding what you
want requires more skill on the part of the researcher, mainly
because the human intermediaries--the reference librarian and
the skilled cataloguer/ indexer--are largely absent from
cyberspace.
This means that you, the researcher, need to understand where
information is most likely to be found, how it's organized and
how to retrieve it effectively using computerized search tools.
The reference librarian is an invaluable resource to help teach
you and advise you, but won't be there when you're searching
Yahoo at midnight on the weekend before your paper's due.
Here are several articles to get you started:
· · Learning to Research in the Library (p. 21)
· · Learning to Research on the Web (p. 35)
· · Skills for Online Searching (p. 40)
· · Information Found--and Not Found--on the Web (p. 43)
· · Search Strategy: Getting a Broad Overview of a Subject (p.
47) · · Search Strategy: Finding Specific Information (p. 49)
20
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Learning to research in the library
Get to know your library
The resources available to you will vary a lot depending on
whether you're using an academic library at a large university,
a public library in a large (or small) community, or a high
school library. Find out early in your research project what
resources your library has, by visiting and taking a tour, if
possible. Some college libraries offer an online tour of the
library or a self-guided tour using handouts in addition to
tours guided by librarians.
Many people who use libraries don't make full use of the
reference collection except for the encyclopedias, while
reference librarians have spent large amounts of money and time
in developing wonderful reference collections for research. See
Reference Sources in Libraries (p. 29) to see a small sample of
the kind of information may be hiding in your library's
reference room.
Libraries build their collections based on what they think their
patrons will need, so the collections of reference materials,
fiction and non-fiction will differ between a public and an
academic library. Be aware of what kind of collection you're
working with, and make arrangements to visit a different library
if necessary.
Learn to browse -understand the classification scheme in your
library A library's classification scheme is a system by which
books are organized to be placed on the shelves. Browsing the
shelves is an important step when you're trying to get ideas for
your research project, so it's worth the effort to become
familiar with your library's system.
Most libraries in the U. S. use either the Dewey Decimal system
or Library of Congress system, while Britain uses the UDC and
other countries use various systems. All of the systems attempt
to "co-locate" books with similar subject matter. In a smaller
library, many times you can bypass the catalog as a starting
point and go directly to the shelves for a first look at your
topic, so long as you have a chart of the classification scheme
as a guide.
Remember, though, that a book can have only one location in a
library. Some books cover more than one subject and the
cataloguer has to choose one place to locate the book. Also,
non-book materials such as videos and films, will be located in
a different section of the building and could be missed by simply
shelf-browsing the book collection.
See our charts summarizing the Dewey Decimal Classification
System (p. 25) and the Library of Congress Classification System
(p. 27). 21
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Learn how online library catalogs work
A library catalog is a listing of all the items held by a
particular library. A cataloguer examines the item (book, video,
map, audio tape, CD, etc.) and decides how it will be described
in the library's catalog and under what subject it will be
classified. When the item is entered into the library's online
catalog database, information is entered into different fields,
which are then searchable by users.
Library catalogs usually treat a book as a single "item" and
catalog it that way, even if it might be a book of poetry or a
book of essays by different authors. You can't find a reference
to a particular poem in the library catalog, nor to a particular
essay within a book of essays. The same is true of magazines,
journals and newspapers. The library catalog will tell you if
the library keeps a particular periodical in its collection, but
will not list all the articles within the periodical, nor will
it necessarily even list all the issues of the periodical which
are kept. There are other publications in the reference room
which will help you retrieve these individual items, but usually
not the library catalog (see Find out how to search for journals
and newspapers section, p. 23).
Most catalogs are searchable by author, title, subject and
keyword. Some of the important things you need to know about the
information in those fields is discussed below. An excellent
tutorial for using a typical academic library catalog system can
be found at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside Library. It's
intended for their students, so has some references to entering
"fill in numbers" from an answer booklet. Just ignore that part
and work through the tutorial, which is Unit 2-Using the Library
Catalog (http:// www. uwp. edu/ library/ unit2/) of the
library's "Information Skills and Literacy Workbook." The entire
series of Parkside's tutorial units and another outstanding
tutorial from the Houston Community College System are linked at
Library Tutorials
(http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksother. htm# library).
Searching the catalog by subject and keyword
The subject field of a catalog record contains only the words or
phrases used by the cataloguer when assigning a subject heading.
If the library is using Library of Congress Subject Headings
(LCSH), for example, the subject heading for a book about how
playing football affects the players' bodies would probably be
assigned the subject heading "Football--physiological aspects."
Unless you type in that entire phrase as your search term, you
won't find the book by searching the subject field.
Subject field searching can be very helpful, but you must find
out how the subject you're looking for is worded by using the
subject manuals or getting help from the reference librarian.
Once you zero in on an appropriate subject heading, a search in
the catalog will give you a list of all the items in the
library's collection categorized under that heading, so you can
browse the collection 22
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online. Note also that most items are classified under one or two
very specific subject headings, rather than under many subjects.
The keyword field of a library catalog generally searches several
fields in the database record--the author, title, and
description fields. The description is any information about the
catalogued item which may have been entered by the cataloguer.
This is not the full text of the book, nor is it an abstract
(summary) of the book but rather a short paragraph containing
information the cataloguer thought would be helpful to a user.
This is not like searching for keywords in an indexed database
like Alta Vista on the internet, where every word in a document
has been recorded.
For this reason, keyword searching alone could miss an item
pertinent to your research project if the keyword you use was
not included in the short paragraph written by the cataloguer.
It's best to use a combination of keyword searching and subject-
field searching to make a comprehensive search of the library
catalog.
Searching other libraries' catalogs
There are lots of library catalogs on the internet--but so what?
You can search the catalog of a library in Timbuktu, but that
doesn't get you the book. Remember that library catalogs do not
have full text of books and documents but are just a database
with descriptions of the library's holdings. There are a few,
and will be more, actual online libraries where you can go to
read or search full text documents. Just don't confuse these
special resources with a library catalog, which is very
different. See Reference Sources on the Web (p. 51) for links to
online books.
Find out how to search for journals and newspapers at your
library Most libraries have either print, CD-ROM, or online
(either in the library or sometimes on the Web) indexes of
magazine, journal and newspaper articles (referred to as
periodicals) available for users. Some of these are abstracts of
the articles, which are short summaries written to describe the
article's contents in enough detail so that a reader can decide
whether or not to seek out the full text. Some of these sources
may be in the form of full text, where the entire articles have
been entered into the database.
The databases will include particular periodicals published
within a span of time (for example, a popular newspaper index
goes back 36 months for certain major newspapers). Know what the
database you're searching contains and whether it's represented
as abstract or full text. Get some pointers from the reference
librarian about how to search that particular database, and build
on what you've learned about search syntax and search techniques
from Skills for Online Searching (p. 40).
23
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Note that these resources, whether print or digital, contain
information about periodicals which may not be held by your
library. If the database does not have full text articles, you
may find an article right on point to your topic, but that
particular newspaper or journal may not be in your library's
collection. There are ways to get these articles, the fastest
ways involving paying a fee to a company in the business of
providing articles to researchers! Check out your options with
the reference desk if you need an article that's not in your
library's collection.
Bibliography surfing
Web surfing is finding an interesting Web page and then using the
hyperlinks on that page to jump to other pages. If you find the
first page interesting, chances are you'll also be interested in
the pages the author has chosen to link to.
Librarians and researchers have been doing this for a long time,
in the print medium. It's a valuable tool for identifying
sources on your chosen topic.
What you do is use the bibliography provided at the end of an
encyclopedia article, journal article or book that you've found
particularly pertinent to your topic and follow the
bibliographic references much as you would hyperlinks on the
Web. Since you're locating items which influenced the author of
the original article and to which he or she referred, they're
likely to be "on point" to your topic. Then use the bibliography
at the end of those cited articles to find even more items, and
so on.
Consult the reference librarian for advice
Several times above, you've been advised to consult the reference
librarian. Reference librarians can help save you a lot of time
because they know their library's collection very well--both the
reference collection and the nonfiction collection--and can
often tell you "off the top of their heads" whether or not the
library has a particular item you're looking for. They are also
skilled searchers, both of the library's catalog and of online
resources such as CD-ROM, online databases and the internet. In
addition, they're trained in teaching others to use these
resources and are glad to do so.
Learn about search syntax and professional search techniques To
be successful at any kind of online searching, you need to know
something about how computer searching works. At this time, much
of the burden is on the user to intelligently construct a search
strategy, taking into account the peculiarities of the
particular database and search software. The section on Skills
for online searching (p. 40) will get you started.
24
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Dewey Decimal Classification System
000 Generalities 100 Philosophy and Psychology
010 Bibliography
020 Library & information sciences
030 General encyclopedic works
040 Unassigned
050 General serials & their indexes
060 General organizations & museology
070 News media, journalism, publishing
080 General collections
090 Manuscripts & rare books
110 Metaphysics
120 Epistemology, causation, humankind
130 Paranormal phenomena
140 Specific philosophical schools
150 Psychology
160 Logic
170 Ethics (moral philosophy)
180 Ancient, medieval, Oriental philosophy
190 Modern Western philosophy
200 Religion 300 Social sciences
210 Natural theology
220 Bible
230 Christian theology
240 Christian moral & devotional theology
250 Christian orders & local church
260 Christian social theology
270 Christian church history
280 Christian denominations & sects
290 Other & comparative religions
300 Sociology and anthropology
310 General statistics
320 Political science
330 Economics
340 Law
350 Public administration
360 Social services; associations
370 Education
380 Commerce, communications, transport
390 Customs, etiquette, folklore
400 Language 500 Natural sciences &
mathematics
410 Linguistics
420 English & Old English
430 Germanic languages German
440 Romance languages French
450 Italian, Romanian languages
460 Spanish & Portuguese languages
470 ltalic languages, Latin
480 Hellenic languages, Classical Greek
490 Other languages
510 Mathematics
520 Astronomy & allied sciences
530 Physics
540 Chemistry & allied sciences
550 Earth sciences
560 Paleontology, paleozoology
570 Life sciences
580 Botanical sciences
590 Zoological sciences
25
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Dewey Decimal Classification System (cont.)
600 Technology (Applied sciences) 700 The Arts
600 General technology
610 Medical sciences and medicine
620 Engineering & allied operations
630 Agriculture
640 Home economics & family living
650 Management & auxiliary services
660 Chemical engineering
670 Manufacturing
680 Manufacture for specific uses
690 Buildings
710 Civic & landscape art
720 Architecture
730 Plastic arts, sculpture
740 Drawing & decorative arts
750 Painting & paintings (museums)
760 Graphic arts, printmaking & prints,
postage stamps
770 Photography & photographs
780 Music
790 Recreational & performing arts
800 Literature & rhetoric 900 Geography & history
810 American literature
820 English & Old English literatures
830 Literatures of Germanic languages
840 Literatures of Romance languages
850 Italian, Romanian literatures
860 Spanish & Portuguese literatures
870 Italic literatures, Latin
880 Hellenic literatures, Classical Greek
890 Literatures of other languages
900 World History
910 Geography and travel
920 Biography, genealogy, insignia
930 History of the ancient world
940 General history of Europe
950 General history of Asia, Far East
960 General history of Africa
970 General history of North America
980 General history of South America
990 General history of other areas
26
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Library of Congress Classification System
A -General Works M -Music
AE -Encyclopedias
AI -Indexes
AN -Newspapers
AP -Periodicals
ML -Literature of Music
MT -Musical Instruction
B -Philosophy, Psychology N -Fine Arts
B-BD -Philosophy
BF -Psychology
BH -Esthetics
BJ -Ethics
BL-BX -Religions, Mythology
NA -Architecture
NB -Sculpture & Related Arts
NC -Graphic Arts
ND -Painting
NK -Applied Arts
NX -The arts in general
C -History (Auxiliary sciences:
archaeology, genealogy, etc.)
P -Language and Literature
(various) PA -Classical Philology
PB-PH -Modern European Languages
PJ-PL -Oriental Languages
PQ -Romance Literatures
PR -English Literature
PS -American Literature
PT -German Literature
D -History (except America) Q -Science
DA -Great Britain
DC -France
DD -Germany
DK -Russia
DS -Asia
DT -Africa
QA -Mathematics
QB -Astronomy
QC -Physics
QD -Chemistry
QE -Geology
QH -Natural History
QK -Botany
QL -Zoology
QM -Human Anatomy
QP -Physiology
QR -Bacteriology
27
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Library of Congress Classification System (cont.)
E-F -America and U. S. R -Medicine
F1-F970 -United States
F1201-F3899 -Latin America
(various)
G -Geography, Anthropology S -Agriculture
G-GF -Geography, Travel, Atlases
GN -Anthropology, Ethnography
GR -Folklore
GV -Sports
(various)
H -Social Sciences T -Technology & Engineering
HA-HJ -Economics
HM-HQ -Sociology
HX -Communism, Socialism, Anarchism
(various)
J -Political Science U -Military Science
K -Law V -Naval Science
L -Education Z -Bibliography & Library Science
28
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Reference Sources in Libraries Here are some resources typically
used by reference librarians and often found in library
reference rooms. If you don't find something in your library--
ask. Sometimes these are kept behind the reference desk if the
reference librarians tend to consult them frequently. Note that
many of these resources are available as both books and CD-ROMs.
Which version your library has will depend on budget, technology
and convenience decisions by the library. This listing is a very
small sample of many thousands of reference books.
Almanacs, yearbooks and handbooks
Almanacs, yearbooks and handbooks are often single volumes which
summarize large amounts of facts about things like people and
organizations, current and historical events, countries,
statistics, and popular culture items like sports,
entertainment, zip codes. They can frequently provide quick
answers to factual questions, but aren't useful for extensive
research. Yearbooks are issued by encyclopedia companies and
provide a quick update to events occurring during that year.
Handbooks usually are focused on a particular subject, while
almanacs are broader in scope.
Britannica Book of the Year.
Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1938-. Annual.
Issued every year, this update to Encyclopaedia Britannica has an
overview of the year's important events. Your library may
subscribe to E. B. online so that you can get the entire
encyclopedia and its current events coverage on the Web from the
library's computers.
Facts on File: World News Digest with Index.
New York: Facts on File, 1940-. Weekly.
Current events are indexed by person's name, place names and
subjects. Because it's issued weekly, you can often find very
up-to-date information, whereas yearbooks and almanacs are only
issued annually at most. May also be online on NEXUS or on CD-
ROM in your library.
Information Please Almanac: Atlas and Yearbook.
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1947-. Annual.
Facts, tables of statistics, information about popular culture
and events, with detailed table of contents and index.
McGraw-Hill Yearbook of Science and Technology.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962-. Annual.
Subject-based yearbook of current events in science and
technology.
The Oxford Companion to American Literature.
James D. Hart. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
896 p. 29
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This handbook serves as a comprehensive guide to American
literature, including historical aspects, writers' biographies,
awards, societies and trends.
The Statesman's Year Book.
Edited by John Paxton. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1864-.
Annual. A section on international organizations, then a listing
for individual countries containing statistical information and
facts about political and economic aspects of the country (like
welfare and education systems, financial institutions,
diplomatic missions and so on).
The World Almanac and Book of Facts.
New York: Funk & Wagnalls, World Almanac, 1868-1976, 1886-.
Annual.
Similar to Information Please Almanac but presented in a more
formal style -facts, tables of statistics, information about
popular culture and events, with detailed table of contents and
index. May also be on CD-ROM in your library.
Biographical sources
Reference sources with biographical information may provide a
brief summary of data about a person, fairly detailed
information about a person, or references (citations) to other
short or full-length biographies written about the person. Brief
summaries are usually found in biographical dictionaries, while
other biographical sources and some encyclopedias may have more
detailed information. Some cover living people and some dead
people, a few cover both.
Biography and Genealogy Master Index.
2d ed. Detroit: Gale, 1980-. Annual. [Also on CD-ROM]
There are no actual biographies here but citations telling where
to find biographies, whether short summaries or full-length
books.
McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Biography.
12 vols. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973.
Specifically designed to meet the needs of high school and
college students by choosing to cover people who are frequently
featured in the curriculum. Features people who are living as
well as dead, and the biographical information is quite
detailed. Study guides in the last volume identify important
people who were associated with particular historical events or
issues.
Webster's New Biographical Dictionary.
Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1988. 1130 p.
Summarized biographies of important people of the past, source
for quick facts.
30
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Who's Who, 1994.
London: Adam and Charles Black, 1994. 2120 p.
International version with brief biographical information for
living people.
Who's Who in America, 1995.
49th ed. 3 vols. New Providence, NJ: R. R. Bowker/ Reed Reference
Publishing, 1994.
One of many "Who's Who" and "Who Was Who" sources offered by
several different publishing houses. Some focus on ethnic groups,
some on historical figures, some on groups such as artists or
politicians. Check your library to see which sources are
available.
Dictionaries
Standard dictionaries give an alphabetical list of words and
their definitions, but there are several useful variations also
classified as dictionaries. Thesauri contain synonyms and
antonyms (opposites) but usually don't define the words. Dialect
and slang dictionaries present words and definitions not
necessarily found in standard dictionaries. There are also
dictionaries of abbreviations and acronyms and dictionaries of
quotations. We haven't listed specific examples here, because
you'll probably just want to browse your library's collection.
These general dictionaries are usually shelved near each other
in the reference room. There are also quite a few dictionaries
available in CD-ROM and on the Web.
Encyclopedias
Encyclopedias traditionally provide comprehensive coverage of an
entire area of knowledge. There are general encyclopedias and
subject encyclopedias, and they differ as to the level of detail
provided and the complexity of the writing. Encyclopedias are
good for fact-finding, getting general background information
about a subject or starting a research project. The many CD-ROM
encyclopedias contain much of the same information as the print
volumes, as well as being searchable and giving you the ability
to print out text and pictures. The CD-ROM versions and the many
subject-based encyclopedias are not separately listed here--
check with your library's reference department to see what they
have available. At this writing, complete encyclopedias are not
available for free on the Web.
Academic American Encyclopedia.
21 vols. Danbury, Conn.: Grolier, 1993.
Presents fairly brief articles on specific topics, with a clear,
concise writing style. More factual information than broad
overviews of large subject areas.
Collier's Encyclopedia.
24 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1993.
31
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One of the "big three" adult encyclopedias typically found in
public and academic libraries. Scholarly and comprehensive
coverage.
Encyclopedia Americana.
International ed. 30 vols. Danbury, Conn.: Grolier, 1993.
Another of the "big three" mixes shorter articles with long
articles broad in scope. In length and scholarship, compares to
Britannica.
New Encyclopaedia Britannica.
15th ed. 32 vols. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1993.
Considered by many to be the premier English-language general
encyclopedia. The writing is scholarly and therefore sometimes
difficult to understand in a subject area with which you're
unfamiliar. Articles in the Micropaedia are short and fact-
filled, while the Macropaedia has long articles surveying broad
aspects of a topic. Very extensive list of bibliographic
references at the end of each article so you can find additional
information.
World Book Encyclopedia.
22 vols. Chicago: World Book, 1993.
Aimed at students, this is very widely used in both public and
school libraries. Coverage is provided for all subjects in the
U. S. school curriculum, and articles have lots of cross-
references to other articles within the encyclopedia and to
outside sources. Study guides help to organize research on
various topics. This is an excellent place to start when you're
totally unfamiliar with a subject area.
Indexes and abstracts
Indexes and abstracts supplement the library catalog as described
by Bopp and Smith (1995):
Users may come into a library, consult the main catalog, and
falsely assume they have searched the entire contents of the
library. The catalog may confirm the holdings of a periodical
[magazine or journal] but not its contents; a poetry collection
but not individual poems; the title of an author's collected
works but not the individual work; newspapers but not individual
news stories. Indexes and abstracts are created and become
extremely useful tools to more fully reveal detailed resources
not covered in the more general catalog.
For most research papers at the college level, you'll want to
look for scholarly journal articles about your chosen topic.
Indexes are the tools you'll use for this purpose, and if you're
lucky, your library will have some indexes either loaded in the
online library catalog or available on CD-ROM. Searching indexes
is different than searching the library catalog, however,
because indexes don't use the same subject classifications as
the library catalog. Some indexes provide 32
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books of "descriptors" to help you search for key words and key
concepts by which the items have been indexed.
Be aware that indexes will contain items not held at your
library, because they are prepared by commercial companies that
index a particular group of periodicals or works regardless of
where they may be held. A periodical index is most useful if it
contains abstracts--brief summaries of the articles. Abstracts
make it easier to tell if the article is relevant to the subject
of your research.
Other reference tools
Statistics and Government documents
Government documents are available free of copyright and certain
publishers compile and index them for use by libraries and other
researchers. The volume of documents produced every day by the
U. S. government is almost beyond imagining, and the system of
numbering documents is unique and unlike the rest of the
library's classification system. In addition to laws, regulations
and agency documents, the government produces a lot of
statistics for public release.
Many academic and public libraries have a lot of government
documents and statistics and the various indexing tools you need
to be able to locate and retrieve them. A lot of these are
available on CD-ROM or in online databases within the library.
Quite of bit of this information is being made available on the
Web as well. Finding both government documents and statistical
information can be a real challenge. A trip to the reference
desk is probably the quickest way to zero in on what you need.
Geographic information
Atlases and maps are the main sources of geographical information
in libraries, though many encyclopedias and dictionaries have
maps which may be sufficient for your purpose. There are
different kinds of specialized atlases much as there are
different kinds of dictionaries. Some atlases contain statistics
such as population, economic factors, weather, and other facts.
There are historical or thematic atlases which show the world at
certain dates or during certain events, such as wars.
Bibliographies
Bibliographies are lists of works--books or shorter works--which
help identify sources where information can be found. You might
want to find additional works by a certain author or works on a
certain subject. There are hundreds of different kinds of
bibliographies compiled for different purposes, and your
reference librarian can let you know which ones might be useful
in the topic area of your research. Remember that a bibliography
will tell you a work exists, but it 33
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may not be held by your library. If you find an interesting item
in a bibliography, consult your library's catalog to see if it's
available in the collection. 34
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Learning to research on the Web
Cyberspace is not like your library
Librarians have a weird sense of humor. This is now an old joke:
The internet is like a library with no catalog where all the
books get up and move themselves every night... This was the
state of the internet up until 1995 or
thereabouts. Finding anything on the internet required comic
strip characters like Archie, Veronica and Jughead, and
generally you were the one who ended up feeling like a jughead
when you rooted around for hours and still came up dry.
The new joke is: The internet is like a library with a thousand
catalogs, none of which contains all the books and all of which
classify the books in different categories--and the books still
move around every night. The problem now is not that of "finding
anything" but finding a particular thing. When your search term
in one of the popular search engines brings back 130,000 hits,
you still wonder if the one thing you're looking for will be
among them.
This can be an enormous problem when you're trying to do serious
research on the internet. Too much information is almost worse
than too little, because it takes so much time to sort through
it to see if there's anything useful. The rest of this section
will give you some pointers to help you become an effective
internet researcher.
Get to know the reference sources on the internet
Finding reference material on the Web can be a lot more difficult
than walking into the Reference Room in your local library.
The subject-classified Web directories described below will
provide you with your main source of links to reference
materials on the Web. In addition, many public and academic
libraries, like the Internet Public Library, have put together
lists of links to Web sites, categorized by subject. The
difficulty is finding Web sites that contain the same kind of
substantive content you'd find in a library. See the links to
Reference Sources on the Web (p. 51) for a list of some Web-based
reference materials, but please read Information found--and not
found--on the Web (p. 43) to understand why it's different from
using the library.
Understand how search engines work
Search engines are software tools that allow a user to ask for a
list of Web pages containing certain words or phrases from an
automated search index. The automated search index is a database
containing some or all of the words appearing on the Web pages
that have been indexed. The search engines send out a software
program known as a spider, crawler or robot. The spider follows
hyperlinks from page to page around the Web, gathering and
bringing information back to the search engine to be indexed.
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Most search engines index all the text found on a Web page,
except for words too common to index, such as "a, and, in, to,
the" and so on. When a user submits a query, the search engine
looks for Web pages containing the words, combinations, or
phrases asked for by the user. Engines may be programmed to look
for an exact match or a close match (for example, the plural of
the word submitted by the user). They may rank the hits as to
how close the match is to the words submitted by the user.
One important thing to remember about search engines is this:
once the engine and the spider have been programmed, the process
is totally automated. No human being examines the information
returned by the spider to see what subject it might be about or
whether the words on the Web page adequately reflect the actual
main point of the page.
Another important fact is that all the search engines are
different. They each index differently and treat users' queries
differently (how nice!). The burden is on the searcher to learn
how to use the features of each search engine. See the links to
Search Engines (p. 51) and to sources which have done evaluations
of the various features of Web directories and search engines
(http:// www. ipl. org/ -teen/ aplus/ linksother. htm#
interpret).
Read an excellent article about search engines:
"Searching the Internet Part I: Some Basic Considerations and
Automated Search Indexes" in InterNIC News, September 1996, by
Jack Solock (Solock 1996 A) at:
http:// rs. internic. net/ nic-support/ nicnews/ archive/
september96/ enduser. html Also see the Web and internet
tutorials (http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ -linksother. htm#
web) for additional online articles.
Know the difference between a search engine and a directory A
search engine lets you seek out specific words and phrases in Web
pages. A directory is more like a subject catalog in the
library--a human being has determined the main point of a Web
page and has categorized it based on a classification scheme of
topics and subtopics used by that directory. Many of the search
engines have also developed browsable subject catalogues, and
most of the directories also have a search engine, so the
distinction between them is blurring.
Jack Solock, Special Librarian at InterNIC Net Scout, classifies
Web directories into categories based on the amount of human
intervention. The categories he uses are subject catalogs,
annotated directories and subject guides.
A subject catalog classifies Web pages into subject categories
and uses excerpts from the Web page as a short description. An
annotated directory divides sites by subject but also contains
analysis of the site by an editor, librarian or subject 36
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specialist, who writes a description to assist the user. A
subject guide attempts to provide a selection of sites relating
to a particular subject which represent high quality resources,
thus representing the highest level of human intervention of the
three types because it involves building a collection of sites to
represent a subject area.
Mr. Solock categorizes the following resources:
Yahoo, BUBL and Galaxy as subject catalogs,
Magellan, Lycos Top 5%, and InterNIC Directory of Directories as
annotated directories and
Argus Clearinghouse and the WWW Virtual Library as subject
guides. Read his article, "Searching the Internet Part II:
Subject Catalogs, Annotated Directories, and Subject Guides" at
http:// rs. internic. net/ nic-support/ nicnews/ -oct96/
enduser. html for more good information about directories (Solock
1996 B).
See the links to Web directories (p. 51) and to sources which
have done evaluations of the various features of Web directories
and search engines (http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/
linksother. htm# interpret).
Consult the reference librarian for advice
Reference librarians can often be of great help in planning your
internet research. Just as they know their library's collection,
they probably have done a lot of research on the internet and
know its resources pretty well. They're also skilled at
constructing search terms and using search engines, and they're
trained to teach others how to search.
Learn about search syntax and professional search techniques To
be successful at any kind of online searching, you need to know
something about how computer searching works. At this time, much
of the burden is on the user to intelligently construct a search
strategy, taking into account the peculiarities of the
particular database and search software. The section on Skills
for online searching (p. 40) will help.
Learn some essential browser skills
Know how to use your browser for finding your way around, finding
your way back to places you've been before and for "note-taking"
as you gather information for your paper. A large part of
effective research on the Web is figuring out how to stay on
track and not waste time--the "browsing" and "surfing" metaphors
are fine for leisure time spent on the Web, but not when you're
under time pressure to finish your research paper. Lots of
colleges have Netscape tutorials -see Web and internet tutorials
(http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/-37
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aplus/ linksother. htm# web) for links which will supplement the
information below.
URLs
Understand the construction of a URL. Sometimes a hyperlink will
take you to a URL such as http:// www. sampleurl. com/ files/
howto. html. You should know that the page "howto. html" is part
of a site called "www. sampleurl. com." If this page turns out
to be a "not found" error, or doesn't have a link to the site's
home page, you can try typing in the location box "http:// www.
sampleurl. com/" or "http:// www. sampleurl. com/ files/" to see
if you can find a menu or table of contents. Sometimes a file
has been moved or its name has changed, but the site itself
still has content useful to you--this is a way to find out.
If there's a tilde (~) in the URL, you're probably looking at
someone's personal page on a larger site. For example "http://
www. bigsite. com/~ jonesj/ home. html" refers to a page at www.
bigsite. com where J. Jones has some server space in which to
post Web pages.
Navigation
Be sure you can use your browser's "Go" list, "History" list,
"Back" button and "Location" box where the URL can be typed in.
In Web research, you're constantly following links through to
other pages then wanting to jump back a few steps to start off
in a different direction. If you're using a computer at home
rather than sharing one at school, check the settings in your
"Cache" or "History list" to see how long the places you've
visited will be retained in history. This will determine how
long the links will show as having been visited before (i. e.,
purple in Netscape, green in the A+ site). Usually, you want to
set this period of time to cover the full time frame of your
research project so you'll be able to tell which Web sites
you've been to before.
Bookmarks or favorites
Before you start a research session, make a new folder in your
bookmarks or favorites area and set that folder as the one to
receive new bookmark additions. You might name it with the
current date, so you later can identify in which research
session the bookmarks were made. Remember you can make a
bookmark for a page you haven't yet visited by holding the mouse
over the link and getting the popup menu (by either pressing the
mouse button or right clicking, depending on what flavor
computer you have) to "Add bookmark" or "Add to favorites."
Before you sign off your research session, go back and weed out
any bookmarks which turned out to be uninteresting so you don't
have a bunch of irrelevant material to deal with later. Later
you can move these bookmarks around into different folders as
you organize information for writing your paper--find out how to
do that in your browser.
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Printing from the browser
Sometimes you'll want to print information from a Web site. The
main thing to remember is to make sure the Page Setup is set to
print out the page title, URL, and the date. You'll be unable to
use the material if you can't remember later where it came from.
"Saving as" a file
Know how to temporarily save the contents of a Web page as a file
on your hard drive or a floppy disk and later open it in your
browser by using the "file open" feature. You can save the page
you're currently viewing or one which is hyperlinked from that
page, from the "File" menu or the popup menu accessed by the
mouse held over the hyperlink.
Copying and pasting to a word processor
You can take quotes from Web pages by opening up a word
processing document and keeping it open while you use your
browser. When you find text you want to save, drag the mouse
over it and "copy" it, then open up your word processing
document and "paste" it. Be sure to also copy and paste the URL
and page title, and to record the date, so you know where the
information came from.
Be prepared to cite your Web references
Find out what form of bibliographic references your instructor
requires. Both the MLA and APA bibliographic formats have
developed rules for citing sources on CD-ROM and the internet.
Instructions for citing electronic sources are available at many
libraries, including the Purdue University Online Writing Lab
(http:// owl. english. purdue. edu/ Files/ 110. html).
39
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Skills for Online Searching There are many sources on the Web to
help you learn search skills. Many of the concepts for using Web
search engines also apply to searching online library catalogs
and CD-ROMs. This section of the manual will get you started and
point you to other online sources where you can learn more.
Learn how search syntax works
Search syntax is a set of rules describing how users can query
the database being searched. Sophisticated syntax makes for a
better search, one where the items retrieved are mostly relevant
to the searcher's need and important items are not missed. It
allows a user to look for combinations of terms, exclude other
terms, look for various forms of a word, include synonyms,
search for phrases rather than single words. The main tools of
search syntax are these:
Boolean logic
Boolean logic allows the use of AND, OR and NOT to search for
items containing both terms, either term, or a term only if not
accompanied by another term. The links below and all the Web
search engines "search help" have a lot of good examples of
Boolean logic. Tip: NOT can be dangerous. Let's say you want to
search for items about Mexico, but not New Mexico, so you use NOT
to exclude the word New from your retrieved set. This would
prevent you from retrieving an article about New regulations in
Mexico because it contained the word New, though that wasn't
what you intended.
Wildcards and truncation
This involves substituting symbols for certain letters of a word
so that the search engine will retrieve items with any letter in
that spot in the word. The syntax may allow a symbol in the
middle of a word (wildcard) or only at the end of the word
(truncation). This feature makes it easier to search for related
word groups, like woman and women by using a wildcard such as
wom* n" Truncation can be useful to search for a group of words
like invest, investor, investors, investing, investment,
investments by submitting invest" rather than typing in all those
terms separated by OR's. The only problem is that invest* will
also retrieve investigate, investigated, investigator,
investigation, investigating. The trick, then is to combine
terms with an AND such as invest* AND stock* or bond* or financ*
or money to try and narrow your retrieved set to the kind of
documents you're looking for.
Phrase searching
Many concepts are represented by a phrase rather than a single
word. In order to successfully search for a term like library
school it's important that the search engine allow syntax for
phrase searching. Otherwise, instead of getting 40
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documents about library schools you could be getting documents
about school libraries or documents where the word library and
school both appear but have nothing to do with a library school.
Proximity
This allows the user to find documents only if the search terms
appear near each other, within so many words or paragraphs, or
adjacent to each other. It's a pretty sophisticated tool and can
be tricky to use skillfully. Many times you can accomplish about
the same result using phrase searching.
Capitalization
When searching for proper names, search syntax that will
distinguish capital from lower case letters will help narrow the
search. In other cases, you would want to make sure the search
engine isn't looking for a particular pattern of capitalization,
and many search engines let you choose which of these options to
use.
Field searching
All database records are divided up into fields. Almost all
search engines in CD-ROM or online library products and the more
sophisticated Web search engines allow users to search for terms
appearing in a particular field. This can help immensely when
you're looking for a very specific item. Say that you're looking
for a psychology paper by a professor from the University of
Michigan and all you remember about the paper is that it had
something about Freud and Jung in its title. If you think it may
be on the Web, you can do a search in Alta Vista, searching for
Freud AND Jung and limit your search to the umich. edu domain,
which gives you a pretty good chance of finding it, if it's
there.
Make sure you know what content you're searching
The content of the database will affect your search strategy and
the search syntax you use to retrieve documents. Some of the
different databases you'll encounter in your library and online
research are:
Representation or summary of a document
If a document has been summarized, like a library catalog entry
where certain features like title and author have been recorded
along with a sentence or two of description, don't expect to
retrieve the document by looking for keywords in the text. A
search is only searching what's in the database--the
representation, not the document itself. Consult the section on
searching the library catalog (p. 22) for further details.
Index and abstract of a document
When a document like a journal article has been indexed and an
abstract written, a human indexer has helped organize the
document for easy retrieval. He or she 41
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chosen some words, phrases and concepts which represent the
subject matter of the document and has attached those to the
database record as "descriptors." The specific terms usually
come from a book of terms used by that database producer, to
promote consistency between indexers.
The indexer, or possibly the author of the article, has written
an abstract or summary of the article's content which is
included in the database. Again, it's important to realize that
you're not searching the entire text of the document but
someone's representation of the document. If you can zero in on
some of the database's descriptors which accurately describe the
topic you're looking for, you can easily retrieve all the
articles with the same descriptors. If you do a keyword search
in this type of database without checking the permissible
descriptors, you're hoping that the indexer will have used your
keyword in the summary or that the author will have used it in
the title of the article.
Full text of a document
Searching full text documents gives you a good chance of
retrieving the document you want, provided you can think of some
key words and phrases which would have been included in the
text. The problem is retrieving too many documents when you're
looking for something particular, because common words and
concepts can appear in documents irrelevant to your topic. This
is one of the problems with internet search engines which index
the full text of Web pages. The more skilled you can become in
your use of search syntax, the greater will be your success in
finding relevant information in a full text database.
Online resources for learning search skills
Most of what you need to know is covered by several online
tutorials listed at Web and internet tutorials (http:// www.
ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksother. htm# web). There is a lot of
specific help with search syntax published by each of the search
engines, since they all differ in their syntax. See the Links for
Research--Search Engines (p. 51) for links to the search help
pages.
42
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Information found--and not found--on the Web The dream behind the
creation of the Internet [is] the possibility of universal
access in a digital age--where any author's work could be
available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. The experience of most
people, however, is not that the Net contains great works and
crucial research information. Instead most of what is there is
perceived to be of low value.
The root of the problem is that authors and publishers cannot
make a living giving away their work.
Mark Stefik in "Trusted Systems," Scientific American, vol. 276,
no. 3, March 1997.
How does information get onto the Web anyway?
Until 1994 or 1995, most of the information on the internet
(which then migrated to the Web) was posted by scientists,
educators, students and the government. Since then, commercial
use of the Web has exploded and so has the posting of hobby
pages or personal home pages, many of which are posted by the
same people who also use the Web for their work at universities
or business enterprises.
Scholarly or informative material which might be useful to a
researcher gets posted on the Web in a number of ways.
A lot of information is posted by educators as part of their
teaching or sharing information with colleagues.
An educator or student with an interest in sharing information
may write an article and post it as part of his or her personal
web site. Generally, these are unpublished articles--if an
article is going to be or has been published in a scholarly
journal, the journal may own the copyright and the author can't
post it without permission. College professors also post
information that they're using for a class. Sometimes if they've
authored a textbook, you can find chapters or portions of
chapters on a class web site.
College students and, increasingly, high school students post
information about projects they've done for classes. If part of
the assignment was designing a Website for the information, the
information and the site may be quite sophisticated and useful.
Personal pages, pages that people post for their own personal
satisfaction, can have surprising value.
This includes hobby pages, home pages, "fan" pages and any other
pages posted out of the goodness of someone's heart. The
internet has traditionally been a 43
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place for people to share what they know with other interested
people, without looking for personal gain. Though there's a lot
of commercial activity on the Web now, the tradition of sharing
continues among individuals.
There are some outstanding personal pages with good information
on such things as astronomy, cooking, ethnic history, medical
conditions, auto leasing, you name it. There are "fan" pages
with volumes of information on someone's "favorite author" or
"favorite movie star." A lot of these are frivolous, but many
people are "fans" of classic authors like Edgar Allen Poe or Jane
Austen and have posted terrific information about those people
and their works.
Since the Web became a hot advertising and public relations
medium, many businesses have established sites to promote their
company and its products.
These commercial sites provide a lot of good information, because
it helps interest people in visiting their site and keeps them
coming back. For example, some of the investment companies which
sell mutual funds have a lot of general investor-education
materials available at their sites, including interactive
calculators for computing your retirement needs or college
savings needs.
More and more magazines and newspapers are providing excerpts
from their current and past issues online,
and some magazines provide additional content related to the
current issue which isn't in the print version. (Clever--when
you buy the print version and find out there's more at the Web
site, you have to go there, and then you get zapped with the
advertising banners!) Ok, there's a pattern here. The commercial
sites will post information that they think will enhance their
online or real world business, build their public relations
goodwill, or will draw people to the Web site where they can
either make money from advertising or deliver another sales
pitch for a product. It's usually pretty interesting stuff,
because it's meant to be, and some of it can be useful to a
researcher.
It's actually pretty amazing to see some of the huge commercial
databases such as phone directories, yellow pages, business
locators (complete with door to door directions), stock tickers,
and news update services which are available free on the Web.
Only time will tell if the companies providing those services
feel they are getting enough "bang for the buck" to keep going--
no one knows for sure if anybody is making a profit on the Web
or getting enough PR value for what they're spending.
There's also a growing list of free e-zines and e-journals, which
are published only online, and many of these have excellent
information for research. 44
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The government posts a large volume of information,
some statistical, some educational or informative. One of
government's most important functions is dissemination of
information, and the Web has become a way to get information to
those who need it--state and local governments, businesses,
taxpayers, educators. The results of government-funded studies
are increasingly disseminated via the Web as well as in print,
and these are often a great source for research material. The
National Park Service, Library of Congress and many other
government agencies are using the Web both to fulfill the
functions for which they were formed and to promote their
agencies' work. For example, a quick search for John Wilkes
Booth turns up several nice pages of information from the Park
Service at Fords' Theater in Washington, D. C. This information
is comparable in scope and reliability to the information you'd
get at a library.
Nonprofit organizations provide information relevant to their key
issues. Nonprofits were slower than commercial ventures in
upgrading technology and therefore slower to come online with
information, but now there's a lot of good material being
posted.
Full-text versions of works . . .
whose copyright has expired are being digitized and posted to the
Web for public use by some libraries and academic institutions,
and many are available online. Many of these are fiction,
poetry, drama.
So what's missing? Why can it be so difficult to do comprehensive
research on the Web?
What's not on the Web--at least not for free--are most of the
comprehensive reference works you'd find in a library reference
room and nonfiction collection. Why? It costs publishers a lot
of money to put together that information and they're in
business to sell it--they have nothing else to sell. They're not
in the same position as an investment company who can author and
publish some free information about investing techniques and
then make money by selling you a mutual fund. These book
publishers are in the business of selling the information they
write or compile and they're not about to give it away by posting
it on the Web. The exceptions to this are some dictionaries,
almanacs and other single-volume reference works that are easily
digitized and where sales of the print product are not seen as
threatened by the Web.
Things you're not likely to find on the Web for free:
· encyclopedias (the CD-ROM versions are selling too well) 45
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· index and abstract services (very labor-intensive to produce
but are essential to a scholarly researcher looking for journal
articles and therefore very profitable to sell to libraries)
· books that are still under copyright
· full-text nonfiction books on scholarly topics
· most scholarly journal articles (this is changing)
· pre-1994 (pre-Web) magazine and newspaper articles (this may
change) If you look at the list of what's not on the Web, it
covers about 90% of the contents of a college library's
collection, both the reference and the circulating collection.
It's apparent that researchers still have to spend a good portion
of their research time in the library rather than on the Web.
46
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Search strategy: Getting a broad overview of a subject
In the library To get a broad overview of a subject in the
library, you'll read and browse general sources of information
discovered using three strategies: reference room browsing,
catalog browsing and shelf-browsing.
Let's say you're making your first trip to the library to get
ideas for your research paper topic. You've probably thumbed
through your course syllabus and coursepack, so you have some
references to particular authors, issues or topics which will be
covered.
Start in the reference room, with some general sources. For a
literature course, you may be reading encyclopedia articles
about various authors or looking at biographical dictionaries.
For a history or science course, you'll be reading a general
encyclopedia or a special subject encyclopedia. To find out what
current issues are important in your subject, browse current
periodicals. Ask the reference librarian for a recommendation of
sources to use for general reading in your subject area.
Search the library's catalog after getting some advice about
specific subject headings to use (see Searching the catalog by
subject and keyword for details, p 22). Browse the list of books
and materials held by the library within several different
subject headings related to your course. Note how many items are
held and whether they are look interesting to you. Are they
general or specific? Are they current? Are there any periodicals
listed? Are there interesting items other than books?
Look at the subcategories used in the catalog. You can learn a
lot about a subject simply by looking at how the it's broken
down into subcategories. This will show you what issues the
experts who work in this field consider important enough to
treat separately.
Last, take a trip to "the stacks" and browse the shelves in your
subject area to see what titles are available. The shelf
arrangement usually comes from either the Dewey Decimal system
(p. 25) or Library of Congress (p. 27) and will be somewhat
different from the subject headings used in the library catalog.
On the shelves, books with similar subjects should be located
near each other. Use the call numbers of several of the books
you found in the catalog to direct you to a particular shelf in
the library. Look at the books around that book, even going into
different call numbers. Pull some books off the shelf and look
through the table of contents and index to get an idea of topics
covered and how the topics are organized. Do a little skimming
and look for interesting issues or ideas. 47
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On the internet To get a broad overview of a subject on the
internet, browse the subject-classified "Web directories" such
as Yahoo, BUBL and Magellan (see Links for Research -Web
directories, p. 51, for links to these and others).
Note how the subject is broken down into subcategories, to see
how information in that subject is organized and what some of
the issues are. Be sure to spend some time following the links
to examine the pages and sites which have been listed.
Often, it is difficult to determine just how comprehensively a
subject is covered by looking at the number of sites. Many
thousands of Web pages have little actual content and are mainly
links to other pages, which may be links to other pages, and so
on ad infinitum. Following the links through to actual pages is
like browsing the library shelves and pulling books off the
shelf to skim the contents.
Run a quick search using one of the search engines. Once you feel
you're familiar enough with the subject that you've identified
some key words or concepts, use them to do a test search to see
what kind of result you get. Look at both the quantity and the
quality of the first few pages of hits to get some idea of how
easy or difficult it may be to research that subject in more
depth on the internet if you choose it as your topic. (See Links
for Research -Search Engines, p. 51, for links to a number of
search engines.)
48
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Search strategy: Finding specific information
In the library Arrange a consultation with a reference librarian.
Once you have done your general reading in a subject area and
have chosen a topic for your paper, you need to do some in-depth
reading to look for a focus. You need to become informed about
the topic. A reference librarian, especially a subject
specialist, can point you toward good reading materials, some of
which may be reference materials and others of which can be
checked out. The search strategy you follow at this stage can
then be used for gathering information once you've formed a
focus for your research.
Find out what specific subject headings pertain to your topic
(there may be several), so you can search the library catalog
effectively (see Searching the catalog by subject and keyword
for details, p. 22).
Ask the reference librarian to recommend journals or periodicals
held in the library's collection which are likely to cover your
topic the best. You can often use search syntax to restrict your
search in a periodical index to certain journals. That way, the
articles you find should be in your library's collection and
available to you. If you don't find enough material, you may also
want to search the periodical index without limiting it to
journals in your library, then find out how to get copies of the
articles you need.
Search one of the index tools to discover essays or other "less
than book length" works on your topic which are included in
collections but won't be catalogued individually in the library
catalog. There are resources appropriate to specific subjects
(i. e., history, literature, science).
Don't overlook non-book materials such as videos, CD-ROMs, films,
audio tapes, maps, brochures. These items should be recorded in
the library's online catalog.
On the internet Ask your reference librarian how he/ she would
approach a search for your topic on the internet. Most reference
librarians, especially subject specialists, have done a lot of
internet research and may have a pretty good idea of how
successful you'll be in researching your particular topic there.
Consult a subject-oriented directory on the internet. Now that
you've zeroed on a specific topic, you can find out whether it
falls in the categories identified by the people (like Yahoo)
who classify sources on the internet. If your topic happens to
fit neatly into one of the subcategories used by a directory, you
may be able to find links to information simply by browsing the
directory. 49
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Choose a search engine and make sure you know its search syntax
(see Skills for Online Searching, p. 40). Do a couple of quick,
preliminary searches to test how easy or tough it's going to be
to get quality information on your topic. Construct an
appropriate search term or phrase and try it. Let the engine
search the whole Web and see how many hits you get, then quickly
scan the first few pages of hits. Try adjusting your search term
using Boolean operators, synonyms or truncation and run it
again--count the hits and look at the first few pages.
Evaluate your quick searches. If you get many thousands of hits
with the terms you used, and the first few pages of hits have a
lot of items unrelated to your topic, then look at the advanced
search features of the engine you're using to see if you can
focus the search better. In the search engines which also include
subject classifications, you may be able to limit your search to
a particular subject area. Review your search terms in light of
the irrelevant hits to see if you can revise your search terms
for a better result.
Redo your search until you've done the best you can. Then start
browsing the pages of hits and following the interesting ones.
Often if you can find at least one good page that's on point to
your topic, it will contain some links to other, similar pages
and you'll be off and running.
If you decide to switch search engines, remember to change
syntax. Each search engine has its own syntax, so what worked in
one won't necessarily work in the others (more details in Skills
for Online Searching, p. 40). 50
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Links to Online Resources
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ links. htm
Go online to link to over a hundred Web pages that will help you
with your research and writing project.
Links for Research
Reference sources on the Web
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ referenceweb. htm
A chart of some of the online reference books available free on
the Web
Web directories and subject-classified resources
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksdirect. htm
Yahoo, Argus, IPL et al
Search engines and their "search help" pages
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksengines. htm
Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos et al
Other links for learning to research
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksother. htm
Online articles, online library and research instruction
Links for Writing
OWLs on the Web
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksowls. htm
Links to Online Writing Labs (OWLs) "handouts"
OWL Handouts by Topic:
Common types of papers
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linkscommon. htm
Research papers --persuasive essays --narrative essays --cause/
effect essays --how to write summaries --and more
Papers on special subjects
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksspecial. htm
Film, drama and book reviews --writing about poetry --scientific
and lab reports --abstracts --and others
51
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Planning and starting the writing assignment
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksplanning. htm
The writing process --ideas --journal writing --overcoming
obstacles
The topic
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linkstopic. htm
Several articles from the OWLs
Title, introduction and conclusion
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linkstitle. htm
Several articles from the OWLs
Thesis statement
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksthesis. htm
Articles from many points of view
Organizing information
http:/// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksorganizing. htm
Taking notes --outlining --organizing by cubing, mapping and more
Writing style and technique
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linkswritingstyle. htm
Audience and tone --logic and developing arguments --sentences,
words and phrases --paragraphs --coherence, clarity, conciseness
--transitions --gender-fair writing --writing on the computer --
other style and technique issues
Citing Sources
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linkciting. htm
Paraphrasing, summarizing and plagiarism --using quotations --
styles of citation
Grammar and punctuation
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksgrammar. htm
Links to grammar handbooks
Revising and rewriting
http:// www. ipl. org/ teen/ aplus/ linksrevising. htm
How to proofread, edit and revise --short proofreading and
editing checklists --critiques and peer review
52
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Bibliography -Sources
Bopp, Richard E. and Linda C. Smith (1995).
Reference and Information Services: An Introduction. 2nd ed.
Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited.
Henley, Jennifer-Jordan (1996 A).
"Writing a General Research Paper." Roane State Community College
Online Writing Lab [Online], available at
http:// www2. rscc. cc. tn. us/~ jordan_ jj/ OWL/ Research. html.
Hord, Bill (1995 A).
"The Research Center." Houston Community College Systems Library
[Online], available at http:// www. hccs. cc. tx. us/ Library/
Center. html.
Hord, Bill (1995 B).
"Steps in the Research Process." Houston Community College
Systems Library [Online], available at
http:// www. hccs. cc. tx. us/ Library/ Center/ Lobby/ Steps.
html.
Kuhlthau, Carol Collier (1993).
Seeking meaning: A process approach to library and information
services. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing.
Kuhlthau, Carol Collier (1994).
Teaching the library research process (2d ed.). Metuchen, NJ: The
Scarecrow Press.
Lamm, Kathryn (1995).
10,000 Ideas for Term Papers, Projects, Reports & Speeches. New
York: Macmillan.
Solock, Jack (1996 A).
"Searching the Internet Part I: Some Basic Considerations and
Automated Search Indexes," InterNIC News, September 1996,
available at http:// rs. internic. net/ nic-support/
nicnews/ archive/ september96/ enduser. html.
Solock, Jack (1996 B).
"Searching the Internet Part II: Subject Catalogs, Annotated
Directories, and Subject Guides," InterNIC News, October 1996,
available at http:// rs. internic. net/ nic-support/ nicnews/
oct96/ enduser. html.
Williams, Sharon and Laura Reidy.
"Introductions and Thesis Statements." Hamilton College, Nesbitt-
Johnson Writing Center [Online], available at
http:// www. hamilton. edu/ academic/ Resource/ WC/ Intro_
Thesis. html. 53
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