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HowtoDoResearch.docxResearch Basics
Robert Lunday
This is a brief introduction to Research. Specifically, this lecture is about the ways to find information, and the ways to synthesize that information with your own ideas and observations in an essay. My emphasis is on the latter issue. Finding research is a complex process; integrating material in the form of quotations and paraphrases, as well as attribution or citation of your sources, is a bit simpler. It is also very important, for reasons I will explain.
To my mind, almost all writing is research-based writing. It’s just that some of that “research” is primary research: information based on your own observations, actions, experiences, experiments, surveys, interviews, and so forth. Secondary research is mainly what we’re going to look at here – basically, information you read in a book, a journal, a magazine, or (in our era) on the Internet. But as you know, information is conveyed by many media: audio and video documents, as well as real people you have spoken or written to, are sources of information as well.
In academic or professional writing, you will usually use a specific kind of resource materials. Different fields use different indexes, databases, bibliographic sources, references materials, key publications, key organizations, and other standard sources. For example, in literary studies (which is itself divided into many sub-disciplines), you will often work with the MLA International Bibliography. This is an online index, but it began over 100 years ago as a periodical publication with annual compilations. If you wanted to find information on literary topics (or other modern-language related topics), let’s say, criticism of a certain poem by Robert Frost, you would use this index, which is now available as an electronic database –although only the past forty years are electronically available. If you wanted to find articles or books published prior to 1962, you’d need to look through the annual indexes one at a time, in print. Electronically, you search by keywords: the author’s name, the title of the work, thematic terms, or (if you already know them) the names or titles of specific critics and works. Usually, in the beginning of a research project, you only have subject keywords.
In this case, let’s say, “Directive” by Robert Frost, you have a title, a primary author, and – if you’ve read the poem, and have some critical purpose – some thematic keywords. You might want to write about the “quest” as a “symbol” in the poem, for example. When you search using one or more of these terms, you get a return of citations that have your key term(s) in the title, author, or subject fields. What have you got, more precisely? Mostly, you will be looking at citations for articles published in academic journals. You will also see articles published in anthologies, or monographs (whole books by one author). You now have specific titles, authors, and publications to look for. The next step is to see if the library you’re using carries the publications or monographs you see listed in the database; that requires a search in the library catalog, trying to find call numbers or other indications of the physical location of the source. For journals, you also need to know volume and issue (and/or date) information, and page numbers. Then, you find your material and consult it.
I am staying with one particular kind of research – finding critical and interpretive writing on literature. But more broadly, you might need information for a business report, or a news article, a political analysis, or any sort of project. You won’t always be looking for other articles or books; information comes in a variety of forms, including charts, directories, brochures, pictures, interviews (transcribed on recorded), and so on.
As you probably know, a lot of information is available over the Internet. The MLA Bibliography is a comprehensive, but by no means complete, list in the academic disciplines that organization covers. But you only get citations – not
the sources themselves. However, several other electronic databases provide you with citations that, when clicked, lead you to the full text of the article; many books are available electronically as well. The open Internet, searchable through a search engine like Google, has articles (often previously published in print), but also web sites that sometimes fit the same general format of an “essay” or “article” – and sometimes not. Web pages are not always easy to categorize; they are often visual, even multi-media, rather than straightforward textual documents.
When you are a student, or someone else affiliated with an institution, you have access to subscription databases of many kinds (public libraries also provide access to many). If we stay with literary studies, you would use Academic Search Premiere, JSTOR, Gale’s Literature Resource Center, Proquest, and several other databases. These provide many, and sometimes all, of their citations as full-text articles that you can read online, save, or print out. You can also electronically search them, which is very convenient. So, I could find critical articles on Frost’s poem, and have access to them without needing to search the library physically. Even when I don’t find full-text articles, these databases often provide abstracts, or brief descriptions of the articles. But remember – as convenient as electronic sources are, they still provide only a small amount of the information that’s out there. The library is full of much that isn’t electronically indexed. And for books, most of them, you still need to use the catalogue (although mostly, that’s electronic itself). It all depends on your research needs and purposes, which you should define clearly before you get too deep in your searching (although often, you need to ground yourself by simply browsing).
Usually, you are trying to build a working bibliography – a tentative list of sources that, from the citations themselves (the description in the title, or the abstract), seem potentially useful to you. You will want to keep accurate, consistent bibliographic information from the start, to avoid doing extra work later if you lose or don’t keep track of the information. As you start consulting sources, you also want to keep accurate notes that include page numbers for print sources, paragraph numbers for web sites, names of authors, titles, dates, and other publication information. When you do a formal (academic or professional) report or essay, you usually need to follow a particular stylesheet; in English, we follow MLA guidelines in documentation. Basically, you will need to follow specific guidelines for presenting the information you quote, paraphrase, or summarize in your essay; and another set of guidelines for the full bibliographic information you provide your reader, either in a “Works Cited” page (as in the MLA system), or perhaps in endnotes or footnotes. Business, social sciences, and the various sciences all use different stylesheets. The main thing is to know what your readers, as professionals knowledgeable of convention, will expect. All stylesheets, different as they are, aim for clarity, relevance, and consistency. So, if you understand those qualities in their essence, you will have much less trouble with the arcane details of the system.
You want to write; what are you doing? You’re taking part in a discourse community – people, reading today and at any point in the future, who might find what you have to say of interest, and wish to use it or respond to it in some way. There are many discourse communities. You read something of interest; you want to respond to it, so you quote from or paraphrase the original; your readers might very well want to respond to you, or leapfrog backwards past your writing to go into your sources. Thus, the discourse community moves through time as well as across the communicative field. The stylesheets are ways to ensure the flow of communication is clear and trustworthy.
In academic writing, we usually are careful to cite all material that is not the writing or thinking of the author. Even when one follows strict rules for attribution, however, it is not always easy to distinguish between your ideas and someone else’s. In more general writing – articles in magazines, for example – the rules are not as strict; you can cite information of a factual nature without provided any citation at all, or perhaps only with a brief tag line: “According to so-and-so….” Still, in all serious forms of public writing, the general rule is to cite any words – phrases, sentences, and beyond – that are not your own; and to cite opinions, interpretations, observations, arguments, insights, and so forth – information that is not merely factual or statistical, in other words.
A lot of information is just “out there.” Not everything needs to be cited when you write. General information, like the basics of history or current events, doesn’t usually warrant formal citation or bibliographic attribution. Also, it is not so easy to distinguish between your ideas and others’, because we have ideas socially as well as in isolation; that is, someone can say something in class, or at a meaning, and it causes an idea to germinate in my head…how much of that “belongs” to the person whose words (perhaps silly or asinine themselves – much greatness comes of stupidity, after all!) sparked my thinking? Stylistically, sometimes you can simply frame the attribution rhetorically – for example, you can introduce your idea by say: “After considering other thoughts on the issue, I concluded that…” and perhaps that is enough, or even more than enough. It’s a hard judgment call; the main thing is to be frank and honest with your readers, and with yourself. Take your position in the discourse communities that matter to you, and discover the culture that has taken shape; follow its conventions, and also make your contributions to them, in constructive ways.
Plagiarism is considered a kind of theft. But it is a complicated issue. In some cultures over time, ideas or words were not seen as authorial property. In fact, many texts were presented as the work of one person, but where in fact copies of something already in existence; in the Classical view, it was not even possible to do much more than
faithfully pass on the wisdom of the Ancients. Also, a kind of “reverse” plagiarism was common: the Pseudo St. Dionysius was an unknown fellow in the Dark Ages who wrote an interesting work that he wanted his fellow Christian to take very seriously – so instead of putting his own name on the work, he put the name of a long-dead saint on it, expecting people to value it mainly because they would take it for the work of someone already esteemed (in this case, the reverse plagiarism was hugely successful). So, these things are culturally and historically determined. But our age is different, and it is best to respect the ideals of intellectual property. Attribute the words and ideas you synthesize into your own writing, to be fair and respectful to those whose work you are using, and to allow the reader of your work to go back and consult those materials himself or herself. (Often, I read an article (or scan it), finding nothing of use except for the bibliographic citations that point me back to other, potentially more useful, resources.)
I have two more concerns today. First, I want to talk about the mechanics of citation and documentation. You will get more of this in Engl 1302, but we need a little of it now. Let’s say you’ve read an interesting article on “physiognomy” (as some of you recently did); in this article, the author, George Orwell let’s say, observes: “at fifty, everyone has the face he deserves.” You like the wit and pith of this statement; you also, perhaps, find it partly true by your own experience, and partly not – perhaps too general (many “witty” statements are only figuratively “true”), and not entirely clear in terms of cause and effect, anyway. But this statement might serve as a good “seed” quote – my term for a bit of research that can get your own writing underway. Sometimes, you can base an entire essay on your response to one brief statement – especially if you don’t agree with it. But other opinions, facts, and so forth will be used to illustrate, back up, extend, or contrast with more detailed analysis you’re engaging in further on in the essay. For now, we’ll pretend that we’re writing the first paragraph for an essay on the face (as some of you did). We don’t know exactly what we want to say (in a good essay, you often look for your idea while you write, not before – “essayer” means “to try” in French), but we have the notion that people work hard, even when they’re much below fifty, to make their faces look a particular way; in other words, the face is a kind of mask, even before we put on a real mask. Here’s how we might start:
People have control over their facial expressions, but are often unaware of the looks they project. We have, seemingly, less control over our physical features, or physiognomy, but that does not stop people from trying to change what nature gave them. Hairstyle, cosmetics (for women), facial hair (for men), earrings (for women, but increasingly for men), and even spectacles can be part of this manipulation, but plastic surgery is growing in popularity as well – even men are trying it. Though we can alter our appearance, can we change our countenance without also taking stock of the character behind the mask? George Orwell, in one of his last jottings, judged that “at fifty, everyone has the face he deserves” (515). Experience and attitude give each of us a particular visage. When we are young, we seem to get away with many mistakes; we are supple, flexible, and bounce back when we fall. But gradually, our skin takes on the marks of our deeds. Orwell’s observation seems pessimistic (he was soon to die after all, and not yet fifty), but for people still short of that moment of truth, it can serve as a healthy admonition: your face is a map of where you’ve been, physically and emotionally.
Well, I don’t know where that would go, but let’s just look at the mechanics. (1) I have introduced the quotation, or provided it with a context; another way to look at it is that the sentence of my own (“Though we can alter our appearance…”) is supported by the quotation. In any case, I then elaborate or reiterate the basic idea. I do this by being just a bit more specific, but also by characterizingOrwell’s statement rhetorically (noting that it seems “pessimistic” and serves as an “admonition”). Sometimes, you would need a more specific framing context, or more elaborate, detailed response to a quotation or paraphrase. You might use research to illustrate you own ideas, or you might take a statement from an author and devote some or all of your essay to illustrating that observation – or torefuting it, or explicating it. Of course, I could begin with Orwell, or end with him as well – it’s a matter of stylistic choice, determined greatly by the form and direction of the essay this will be a part of.
More specifically, though, I have punctuated the quotation a certain way – judged that “at fifty…”. The most important points about formatting quotations are: (1) it must fit grammatically into your framing sentence; and (2) you shouldn’t change the original, except perhaps by shortening it in a way that leaves the meaning intact. You can quote parts of a sentence, a whole sentence, or a longer passage, but when you take elements out of a sentence, use ellipses (…) to show where you have removed the phrase; if you remove a concluding phrase, use four dots. If, on the other hand, you need to add an editorial element to clarify the cited words or make them work grammatically with your framing sentence, put the addition in brackets.
For example:
According to Smith, Frost wrote “Directive” partly in response to the personal tragedies he had endured; Frost, Smith continues, “felt such pain after losing his daughter…that he couldn’t sleep for weeks on end” (456).
In the “original” (I’m making this material up, actually), let’s say it reads: “Frost felt such pain after losing his daughter, even after decades of a remarkable career, that he couldn’t sleep for weeks on end.” I might feel that omitting the nonrestrictive phrase about Frost’s career is acceptable, if my focus is on family matters; but often, such changes are a judgment call – that is, you have to make the best decision you can. There are times when economy and your own purposes must be balanced with fidelity to the precise words – but don’t change the sense of the original.
Or, if the original were:
“Frost felt pain at the loss of his daughter, and couldn’t sleep for weeks on end” we might make the following addition:
Smith observes that Frost “felt [such] pain at the loss of his daughter” that he “couldn’t sleep for weeks on end” (456).
The brackets show that I am inserting a word so that I can use a correlative construction in citing the information.
There are many ways to punctuate your framing clause, which will include a signal verb, or a “tag line” (“according to,” “he stated,” “he observes,” “she argues…”) Here are some examples:
According to Jones, “Frost’s first book was also his best” (45).
Or:
“Frost’s first book,” according to Jones, “was also his best” (45).
Or:
Jones observed: “Frost’s first book was also his best….”
There are other possibilities, but the main thing is that you consider the quoted material as grammatically consistent with your framing material. Look at how writers in our Norton essay frame their quotations.
Last, notice the parenthetical citation. Instead of footnotes or endnotes with bibliographic material, MLA style calls for in-text citations, with a full bibliographic entry on a “Works Cited” page at the end of the paper. If you include the source’s name in your tag line, you only need a page reference at the end .If you’re using an Internet source, you provide the paragraph – (par. 6) for example. Notice you don’t abbreviate “page” as “p.” or “pp.” Just put the number itself. And (except for long quotes) you put the period at the very end, after the closing parenthesis. You don’t need a parenthetical at all if there is no page or paragraph number, and you’ve given the source’s name in the tag line – but you need to use transitional expressions that make it clear you are moving on from your borrowed material to your own words, or another source. For example:
According to Professor Jones in a recent class lecture, “Frost’s first book was also his best.” Other critics would strongly disagree…
I’ve been talking about quotations. You should directly quote when the expression itself seems worth presenting; or, when the information is important enough to highlight as such. At other times, you can paraphrase (or, if you are getting the main part of a longer passage, you summarize). When you paraphrase, you capture the idea of the original, but express it in your own words. It is good to read, re-read, and ponder your source, then close the book before you actually write; that way, you will be more inclined to think of your own way of phrasing the idea. Then, look back at the original, to make sure you haven’t changed too much. Paraphrasing can be less intrusive, and is fine when the idea or information, and not the expression, is what’s important.
Often, writers combine a paraphrase of part of the source material with a partial direct quote. For example:
Smith considers Frost’s A Boy’s Will, the poet’s first book, to be the best of them all. However, the critic goes on to argue that “Frost wrote better at eighty then most poets do at twenty” (67).
Again, look at what other authors do, and practice a variety of forms.
I mentioned the bibliographic citation. There isn’t time or room here to go into the many details of bibliographic form, but essentially, in essays for English courses, you will need to provide a “Works Cited” page listing all sources you cite. There are many possible parameters, depending on the type of material. Orwell’s statement is taken from a collection of Orwell’s writings (however, it appears in many other works, because it is oft-quoted). Along with any other sources, I would include this entry on my “Works Cited” page:
Orwell, George. Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (vol. IV). Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt, 1968.
To do bibliographic entries properly, you really need to have an online or print reference tool to consult, regularly. MLA publishes a guidebook, but there are many, many other guidebooks and online resources that show how to cite various kinds of materials.
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