General Research Strategies
When you have to do research for a class, you're generally going to have the same 5 steps: Planning/defining your project, searching, evaluating sources, synthesizing your information in writing, citing your sources, and revising. If you get stuck on any of these steps or just want some extra guidance, check out some of these great websites (and also remember to talk with your professor, a tutor, and/or a nearby archivist or librarian).
Planning/Defining Your Project
General Research Tutorials
- Research Assistant-Homepage -- Arts & Sciences Libraries, UB Libraries
- CORE: Comprehensive Online Research Education
- HBLL: Library Instruction and Tests
- Ohio State University Libraries: net.TUTOR
1) Planning/Defining Your Project
- Developing a Research Question (at the Bedford Reader)
- UCLA College Library: How To Narrow or Broaden Your Topic
- UNC Libraries - Library Tutor
- Gigablast Search Engine - Offers "Gigabits" to help you refine your search
2) Searching (& Finding)
- Selecting the Right Search Engine, from Noodle
- Search Engine Chart, from Infopeople
- Finding Information on the Internet, great guide for Internet searching, from Berkeley
- Power Keyword Searching, helpful guidelines on what terms to use in a search, from Duke University Libraries
- RedLightGreen: Great search engine of scholarly material (and you can automatically check availability in your library)
- Google Scholar Search - Note: this has a lot, but not everything, so be sure to look at school databases too
3) Evaluating Sources
It's often difficult to tell if a source is reliable, especially on the Internet. Here are three good sources of help evaluating sources.
- Critical Thinking and the Internet
- UCLA College Library Hoax? You decide
- UCLA Guide to Judging Quality on the Web
4) Writing
5) Citing Sources
- Style Manuals
- Noodle: free web-based bibliography building tool
- RedLightGreen: If you search with RedLightGreen, they'll automatically create your bibliography
Instead of creating bibliographies paper by paper, you can save time and effort by creating a database of the sources you use throughout all your courses and automatically generate a bibliography at the push of a button. Several reference management applications will do this for you. Check out:
RefWorks: You don't have to download anything for this; it's just all stored on the web (and your school probably subscribes, so it will be free!)
Bibliographix: If you're more comfortable maintaining a database offline, the free version of this application is good and has a great note-taking function
If you're thinking about a longer academic career, you should check out the other reference management options here.
When your work also involves primary research:
The first two tasks, planning/defining your project and searching itself take considerably more time and effort because of the need to develop sufficient background information in your area to recognize likely access points through which to find the archival information you need.- For example, if you are interested in conducting research on your family history in a particular town, you will need to conduct enough background information about signficant world, national, and local events that might be documented in archives that could include information about your family.
- Given what you know about archival organization, you should also begin to formulate your research question in terms of records.
- You might ask what kinds of documents (birth certificates, census data, voter rolls, etc.) likely to be found in archival collections might the lives of your ancestors have produced?
- You might also think about the various institutions (national and local government, military, religious, social organizations, medical institutions, schools, etc.) with which your family came in contact that might retain archival records.
When citing archival material, pay special attention to the information included on finding aids and archives websites. Most archives and manuscript repositories have special copyright notices and acknowledgements of the archives that must be included in your citations.
Examples of Teaching/Researching with Archives and Other Primers on Primary/Archival Research
