Advanced Research for the Social Sciences and Humanities

One of my more jarring experiences as a graduate TA was meeting a student who was setting foot in the library for the first time. . . As a junior. This person had somehow gotten through nearly three years of courses without performing any significant research and was now having to catch up.

Other students had their rude awakening a little earlier. Entirely too much of my time teaching in a freshman-level course was spent repeatedly explaining why you cannot cite Wikipedia as a source on your term paper. These are skills that high schools are supposed to teach their students, but clearly not enough resources are being dedicated to research skills.

If you are a science major, your research will probably be conducted in a lab. You will have a pretty good sense of where to get your data. Social scientists and humanities majors, on the other hand, have to use some other methods.

So, here are some things you should know about research before you ever set foot in a social science or humanities class. Using these methods will save you, your instructor, and your TA a huge headache.

1.)    Use books. It’s ok to have a few online resources or newspaper articles in your paper, but the bulk of the research should be from books. To begin with, more research goes into a book than an article, so it is likely to contain much more information. In addition, the quality of information found on a website can be difficult to determine; books, on the other hand, have been thoroughly edited and peer-reviewed prior to publication.

2.)    Go to the library. Ok, so you followed my advice on step one, browsed through the library’s online catalogue, and had the books you need placed on the hold shelf. Why bother with more than that? Well, keyword searches can be tricky and may leave out some books that will still be relevant to your topic. Unless you managed to search for every possible related term, odds are you missed something. One way to remedy this is to find some books relevant to your research and locate that call number’s shelf. There will probably be several other books nearby that could be helpful. This approach will also allow you to quickly flip through books without checking them out.

3.)    Use academic journals. They look intimidating and can be hard to follow if you’re not familiar with the topic, but academic journal articles can sometimes make or break your argument. They are usually best for providing detail about some small aspect of your paper. Journal articles can also be good for narrow or obscure topics for which there isn’t really enough material for an entire book. Your university probably has a subscription to JSTOR or Project Muse, so take advantage of it.

4.)    Don’t use encyclopedias. Just don’t. That includes Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, or any other encyclopedia. It’s not that the information in encyclopedias is wrong, it’s just that it’s cobbled together from several secondary sources. You should be reading those primary and secondary sources, not the summary provided in the encyclopedia. There is one exception to this rule and one situation in which looking at an encyclopedia might be helpful, which brings me to suggestion 5.

5.)    Let one source lead to another. While it is never ok to cite Wikipedia, it is ok to go to a Wikipedia page and find the sources it used. The same goes for journal articles and books; pay attention to footnotes and other citations mentioning alternative sources. Then track down those sources and see what they use, and then what those sources use, and so on and so forth until you have assembled the information you need to write your paper.

Specific requirements are going to vary depending on course and discipline, but these broad guidelines should help you get off to a good start in any class that requires research. Remember that, while high school essentially asked you to read about something and then summarize it, college courses demand that you come up with original questions and use your research materials to answer them. This is going to require some practice, but with each paper you write you will get a little more competent and creative with your use of sources. Just make sure you are willing to work hard to get the information you need.