Science Fiction essay

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Fatah

Basically what you have here are two starting points. In one case, you already know which book you want to write about, but may not be sure how you want to write about it. In the other, you may be intrigued by a central question of the course. If it turns out that you don’t find any productive direct discussion of your text, you may need to isolate what about that text interests you, and switch gears to the other approach. You will notice that you do not start with a claim, a statement, or anything that would be super specific. Research is like kayaking, and researching a claim instead of entering into an ongoing conversation is like trying to paddle upstream through rapids territory- not helpful, and damned near impossible. Float down the research stream, and your life will be much easier!

Either which way you start, you will want to go to Newhaven.edu, click “Library”, click “Databases” and then click “Subject Listing of Databases”. You’ll have to enter in your UNH login info at some point. Most often, your best bet when you begin searching is to start with the literature databases. Academic Search Premier and JSTOR will be the most useful for theory/critique/stuff like what we’ve read in class and will be writing ourselves. Literary Reference Center is more of an encyclopedia collection; useful for biographies and the like, but not so good for actual critique/theory.

If you don’t find what you need on the literature databases, you might find that you need to branch out to other subject databases. This could be stuff like psych and social sciences (good for those focusing on social constructs like empathy, religion, etc…) health, criminal justice, even science and engineering. I would stay away from the general/multidisciplinary options unless you are desperate. If you do go for those, Academic Search Premier, Google Scholar, History Reference Center, JSTOR, and Mainfile are your best bets. The reason these are less useful is because the databases grouped by subject listing have filters in place to narrow down what you get for search results.

Be flexible in the search terms you work with- sometimes you think you’re being clear, or you think you have the right term, but academia is very rigid in how it approaches discussing things when it comes to theory. This means that there is often a set of jargon that you may be unfamiliar with- at times, you may begin to skim one document, just to find that it doesn’t say what you want. However, there may be vocabulary terms that will lead you in the right direction. Don’t be afraid to google what different words mean as you work through the research process- there’s no shame in admitting you don’t have a doctorate in your chosen field of inquiry!