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Doing Research In doing research, you might want to start at home and look at whatever encyclopedias, reference books, old textbooks, magazines, and other materials might be available. The problem with old sources is that they may be out of date. More and more people use the internet when they seek information. The problem with the internet is that it has too much information and that there is no quality control on what pops up on your screen. Unless you already know how to do research, you may end up with information that is false, biased, and misleading. So, I suggest you start at your local library, the Union County College Kenneth C. MacKay Library, and ask the reference librarian for help. But before you do, I would also suggest that you read the paragraph or two in your textbook that deals with the subject of your initial choice. The next step would be go to to an encyclopedia and read a bit more about the topic. The encyclopedia article should give you some preliminary knowledge on your topic, determine whether the topic holds any interest to you, and provide you with additional sources to look at. Articles in both popular magazines and scholarly journals might be a next step in your research. If you have found a big book on your topic, rather than reading 500 pages, it might be useful to look at a book review of the book you are about to look at. Keep notes on what you are reading, create a fact file of information, and, most important, keep a full citation of your sources. This includes the bibliographic information, the page in the book or article from which you got the information, and the exact quotation if you are copying word for word. Encyclopedias I suggest that you start your research with a basic encyclopedia that is up to date. See if it carries an article on your subject. The most important encyclopedias, which almost every library has, are the Encyclopedia Americana, Encyclopedia Brittanica, World Book Encyclopedia, and Grolier's Encyclopedia. The Card Catalog In the antediluvian library, before the digital revolution, there used to be an actual card catalog, where all the books in a given library were listed by author, title of book, and subject matter. Some small libraries may actually still have a paper, card catalog. But most libraries now have a computer system which is searchable. Using the subject index is a way to start your research. Browsing the Stacks Books are usually classified either according to the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress Classification System. In either case, books are placed on the shelves in the library according to subject matter as organized by these two classification systems. Browsing through the stacks will give you a quick overview of what books your library has on a given subject. Checking the Reference Section of Your Library There are all sorts of Reference Tools in the Reference Section of Your Library. There are even specialized Reference Librarians to help you use these tools. There are Bibliographies on Bibliographies which help you to find specialized collections. Journals, Popular Magazines, and Daily Newspapers For really up-to-date information, and for a lot of events that did not get included in a book, the daily newspaper, weekly newsmagazines, monthly periodicals, and scholarly journals fill the gap between events and their incorporation in a book. Browsing the periodicals section of your library is a good idea. Look at magazines that are unfamiliar to you. Back issues of periodicals used to be bound in annual volumes and kept on shelves somewhere in the bowels of the library's stacks. Increasingly, libraries do not subscribe to as many journals as they used to be the case and they do not maintain back issues. More and more information is maintained in electronic data bases. While the actual article may be in a given data base, the journal from which it was taken is not there in its physical form. The information required in a bibliography, including volume number, issue number, and date (months and year) of issue, was necessary in those pre-electronic days. I would suggest that you look at bound volumes of scholarly journals to get a feel for them. Electronic Research Increasingly students research information electronically. This creates both opportunities and liabilities. One way to start is with an Internet Search Engine. If you do a Google search for "Napoleon", there are 2,720.000 responses. How do you decide the most important links from those that are irrelevant? Choosing the top ten responses does not guarantee that you have found the most important links. There is also the problem of determining whose WEB pages you have accessed and how to cite them appropriately. Some help in how to do this is given elsewhere in these pages. Electronic research can be grouped into three initial categories. A starting point for someone with little or no information on a given subject can be 1. an online encyclopdia; 2. a general WEB search with an internet search engine like Google; 3. searches through online data bases such as Lexus/Nexus, Jstor, and Academic Research Premier. Web Encyclopedias While I am discouraging you from starting your research with the World Wide Web, sooner or later you end up checking out the Web. There are some major encyclopedias on the Web. If you use these sites, then document the resource as if you had looked at the entry in its actual print version. Then add, the Web citation. Encyclopaedia Brittanica Available online at http://search.eb.com/ World News Digest, The Complete Text of Facts on File World News Digest: 1980 - 2003. Available online at http://www.2facts.com/stories/mainmenu.asp A free, user-created, and not copyright protected encyclopedia is Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Available online at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Wikipedia provides the following information about it policies: "Welcome to Wikipedia, a collaborative project to produce a free and complete encyclopedia in every language. We started in January 2001 and are already working on 87098 articles in the English version, with more being added and improved all the time. Anyone can edit any article right now, without even having to log in. You can copyedit, expand an article, write a little or write a lot. See the Wikipedia FAQ for more background information about the project, and the help page for information on how to use and contribute to Wikipedia. " "The content of Wikipedia is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that it is free and will remain so forever. See wikipedia:copyrights for the details and open content and free content for background." WEB Search Engines
My favorite search engine is http:www.google.com.
Also, check out the Union County College Library's Web Search
Directory at http://www.ucc.edu/library/search.htm.
Major search engines besides Google are: Data Bases Rather than buying books and subscribing to many magazines and journals, which then need to be stored on shelves in the library, more and more libraries are subscribing to Data Bases. A Data Base is really an electronic library. Rather than having a book or magazine in its physical form, data bases make information electronically on your monitor. This information may then be printed out to give you a paper copy. This saves libraries money and space. Unfortunately, data bases do not give students a physical sense of the context within which the article originally appeared. The electronic library may in some senses be more convenient and provide more information, but it also distorts the learning process. Articles which may have been written over decades in a multiplicity of journals appear grouped together in one batch print out. Most data bases simply provide access to a large amount of information found in a large number of journals and books. You must cite these journals and books as if you had actually held them in your hand. The name and URL of the data base is the secondary information that must be added. Often the way that the data base provides the article hides the fact from where the information came. Thus students who do not know how to cite a scholarly journal (or recognize a scholarly journal) have problems with data bases. There is also too much information. Below is the generic form for an article within a scholarly journal found in a data base. This is the format that I want you to follow for citing data bases. Name of Author or Authors (last name
first, but for first author only). Name of Article (in quotation Data bases are no fun when they have to be cited in a bibliography. The Main Page for Union County College is: http://www.ucc.edu/default.htm The main page for the Union County College
Kenneth C. MacKay Library is: An Alphabetical List of all UCC Databases
on: A Listing of UCC Databases by Subject is
found on: Some of the databases for subjects taught by Prof. Damerow are:
History & Philosophy Law /
Legal Research News,
Current Events & Social Issues
Political Science & Government Accessed
Updated December 3, 2007 |