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makoyi(Part 1) (Part 2)
Okay great, you say, but my topic is so tricky that even these tips haven’t helped. Am I just out of luck?
No! Buckle your seatbelts intrepid researchers, because here are my advanced research tips.
The first of those tips is: try locating class materials, syllabi, and reading lists from university classes that cover your topic. This not only makes your list of potential sources larger, it also makes sure you get the really important ones, the ones that professors just couldn't teach the subject without and that you probably shouldn't be writing on the subject without reading.
• Add [syllabus] or [reading list] to the end of a keyword web search.
University websites can also have pages where departments, research groups, and individuals post information about their work including reports, articles, powerpoint presentations, and data sets. Evaluate each resource to make sure it is authoritative (some universities host student's personal webpages, the quality of which varies).
• Add [+ .edu] or [university] to the end of your keywords for a web search.
On Google, you can also use a tilda (~) before a search term to get some similar terms as well - so [~college] will search both college and university.
Government websites are also a wealth of authoritative information on various subjects. In the US, government websites have the .gov domain name so to find them:
• Add [+ .gov] to the end of your keywords for a web search.
Another source of citeable information is any non-profit organization that focuses on issues related to your topic. Many non-profits conduct studies and publish reports about their issue areas to support their advocacy, assess the current state of affairs in their issue areas, plan their projects, and measure the success of their previous works.
• Add [+ .org] to the end of the keywords in your web search.
These can be valuable sources of types of information, especially very recent information, that doesn't normally appear in academic journals. However, sometimes these reports can be biased by the social or political views of the organization so you should be careful to evaluate these sources and make sure they are impartial enough for you to trust.
If your keyword searches identify websites for government agencies, non-profits, think tanks, or research groups, specialized libraries, archives, or museums but do not take you directly to any articles…
• Browse their site and look for words that might lead to factual, citeable articles: like “our work”, “reference”, “research”, “resources”, “teacher”, “statistics”, “papers”, “reports”, “publications”, or "collections".
You can also try some keywords on the site search for each site.
Ex: Say you're researching the number of bills introduced in Congress versus the number of bills passed, compared over time. You're looking for data sets, or records you can turn into data sets for statistical analysis. But searching for [+ "data set"] or [+ statistics] may not get the information you need because it may be archived on pages that just don't describe it in that way. Instead, you could search the Senate's website or browse it looking for “reference”, “resources” and “teacher”, or “statistics” headings. You could try the Congressional Research Service and search through their reports which include statistical analyses. The Library of Congress and the National Archives could help. Also, some civil society groups like Project VoteSmart might keep track of that kind of information or have links to others who would.
• You can also try adding a keyword for a file format, if the information you're looking for is likely to be posted as a particular file type.
Don't limit yourself only to that file type, but consider it as one option to try among many. For some subjects, tacking [+pdf] to the end of your keywords in a regular web search will help return more serious results.
On Google, you can use the filetype limiter: [filetype:pdf].
Ex: if you're looking for information about international public health campaigns, many international aid organizations publish reports, posters, even medical advice books on their sites in pdf format.
Other subjects may use other file formats you could search.
Searching for organizations is also important when you're looking for a specialized type of information, which a general web search may not help find.
Ex: If you were looking for primary sources, often needed for history papers, you'd want to search for archives of primary sources first and then search within those archives for primary sources related to your specific topic. Consider any historical societies, local archives, and local museums near you, even if they don't have collections online. The National Archives, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, the Daughters of the American Revolution and various other national organizations also maintain archives including some sources that are online and searchable so search on their websites too.
Searching for [primary sources history] turns up various other archives as well.
Ex: If you're looking for a disappeared webpage: try The Internet Archive aka “The Wayback Machine”.
• You can also consider non-print media.
You can also consider non-print media. You can find audio files at Memory.loc.gov (especially the Slave Narratives archive and the American Folklife recordings, StoryCorps.org (mostly recounts events in living memory), the Library of Congress' National Jukebox, and Sounds at the British Library. For radio documentaries, try the BBC IPlayer, National Public Radio, and Public Radio International.
Video files can also be good resources. While you can certainly find documentaries on the usual video sites like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, PBS, Biography Channel, and History Channel, you can also check out Media at the (British) National Archives.
If you have an image that you need to identify a source, a name, or further background on, you can try TinEye and Google Reverse Image Search. If you're looking for images that are free to use to illustrate a project or presentation, try Wiki Commons and Flikr Commons. For music that is free to use in presentations, try the Creative Commons Music list.
And lastly, there's a trick to using Google Books where you can find really old texts that have been digitized. Just use the search filters by clicking Search Tools, then Any Time, then Select Date Range and you can choose a very old date range to see if there are any digitized books from that period. For example, you can view anatomy texts written in the 1700s by searching [anatomy] and setting the date to before 1800.
• When you're working with historical documents, it's important to know how to perform a wildcard search.
This is important in history research because of the old “our name was changed at Ellis Island” phenomenon – basically, there's all sorts of transcription and transliteration errors that occur when someone writes down what they hear or types in something handwritten in unclear script. Many different types of search engines are set up to accept wildcard searches but the character to use is sometimes different.
Wildcards are non-alphanumeric characters used in place of one or more letters in a word that tell the computer to return results with any latter at that position.
On Google, use a * in place of one or more letters or in place of whole words in a phrase.
Ex: [Wil*m] will return hits for Wilhelm, Wiliam, William, Willem, and Willam
Ex: [“American Girls * League” + baseball] will get hits for all the various names of the actual women's baseball league depicted in A League of their Own including All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, All-American Girls Softball League, All-American Girls Baseball League, All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and American Girls' Baseball League.
On Ancestry.com, a subscription-based source of primary source documents such as personal accounts and military unit histories as well as census records, military service records, and other genealogy information, use the # character for a single letter wild and a ? for where any number of letters may be inserted.
• Be creative as you try to guess possible misspellings. Say the name out loud and think about how different people with different accents might hear it and represent it in writing.
You can't possibly guess them all (I've seen some very, very creative misspellings in my research) but try to catch as many as possible.
• Look at the letters when written in cursive and think about what letters might be mis-taken for other letters or what letters might get lost in a sea of loops and humps.
So far, these kinds of information have been pretty easy to find – you probably could have located these and similar archives in just a couple of minutes of searching for them. Now though, I'll get a little more obscure and a little trickier.
Finding diplomatic cables and other original government documents can be hard but you may need them for papers in history, political science, or international relations. Keyword searches tend to turn up pages and pages of hits of news articles and discussion about Wikileaks (which itself may not cover the subject you're researching) and even using [NOT Wikileaks] doesn't necessarily cut through enough chatter. The obvious place to look, therefore, is to head straight for the National Archives website. But there's also the National Security Archive based at George Washington University in DC which also has digitized documents. I know about this one because my Diplomatic History professor told us to use it to find the documents we would need for the paper he assigned. You might not know about this archive or be able to find it online just by searching, but if you...
• Ask your professor, TA, department advisor, or a subject librarian at a university library. They may be able to point you to specialized archives when you need specific kinds of information.
Or how about another tricky query... what if you need to write a paper for a literature class about archetypes in fiction? How would you go about finding one or more works of fiction which use your chosen archetype?
Well, you could start by googling [archetypes + fiction]. The first few pages are mostly blog posts which might or might not help you identify examples of the archetype you're interested in.
Sometimes you can use blog pages and similar unciteable sources to locate their sources and begin working back to something you can cite... especially if they all seem to reference the same place.
TV Tropes is a wiki which catalogs archetypes and their use in fiction. You can't cite it as a source but you can use it to find examples of a particular archetype and trace related archetypes and their use in different media types at different times. For example, if you were writing a paper about a ghost story and wanted to look at ghost lore in fiction, you could use their site search to find TV Tropes’ "Our Ghosts Are Different" page which would give you a lot of examples of various ghost stories with a brief analysis of how the lore in each compares so you could then search for them by title on worldcat.org and check out copies of the ones you want to discuss from your local library.
Okay great, you say, but my topic is so tricky that even these tips haven’t helped. Am I just out of luck?
No! Buckle your seatbelts intrepid researchers, because here are my advanced research tips.
The first of those tips is: try locating class materials, syllabi, and reading lists from university classes that cover your topic. This not only makes your list of potential sources larger, it also makes sure you get the really important ones, the ones that professors just couldn't teach the subject without and that you probably shouldn't be writing on the subject without reading.
• Add [syllabus] or [reading list] to the end of a keyword web search.
University websites can also have pages where departments, research groups, and individuals post information about their work including reports, articles, powerpoint presentations, and data sets. Evaluate each resource to make sure it is authoritative (some universities host student's personal webpages, the quality of which varies).
• Add [+ .edu] or [university] to the end of your keywords for a web search.
On Google, you can also use a tilda (~) before a search term to get some similar terms as well - so [~college] will search both college and university.
Government websites are also a wealth of authoritative information on various subjects. In the US, government websites have the .gov domain name so to find them:
• Add [+ .gov] to the end of your keywords for a web search.
Another source of citeable information is any non-profit organization that focuses on issues related to your topic. Many non-profits conduct studies and publish reports about their issue areas to support their advocacy, assess the current state of affairs in their issue areas, plan their projects, and measure the success of their previous works.
• Add [+ .org] to the end of the keywords in your web search.
These can be valuable sources of types of information, especially very recent information, that doesn't normally appear in academic journals. However, sometimes these reports can be biased by the social or political views of the organization so you should be careful to evaluate these sources and make sure they are impartial enough for you to trust.
If your keyword searches identify websites for government agencies, non-profits, think tanks, or research groups, specialized libraries, archives, or museums but do not take you directly to any articles…
• Browse their site and look for words that might lead to factual, citeable articles: like “our work”, “reference”, “research”, “resources”, “teacher”, “statistics”, “papers”, “reports”, “publications”, or "collections".
You can also try some keywords on the site search for each site.
Ex: If you're looking for very early books online, a good place to start might be the British Library where browsing to collections and then following a link for Renaissance Festival Books brings up a specialized archive of digitized texts you can search or browse. The Endangered Archives Programme link could also be helpful as it includes such collections as Medieval and early modern archival material (14th to 17th c.) of Brasov/Kronstadt and the Burzenland region (central Romania) alongside other photographic, historic, and ethnographic archives.
Ex: Say you're researching the number of bills introduced in Congress versus the number of bills passed, compared over time. You're looking for data sets, or records you can turn into data sets for statistical analysis. But searching for [+ "data set"] or [+ statistics] may not get the information you need because it may be archived on pages that just don't describe it in that way. Instead, you could search the Senate's website or browse it looking for “reference”, “resources” and “teacher”, or “statistics” headings. You could try the Congressional Research Service and search through their reports which include statistical analyses. The Library of Congress and the National Archives could help. Also, some civil society groups like Project VoteSmart might keep track of that kind of information or have links to others who would.
• You can also try adding a keyword for a file format, if the information you're looking for is likely to be posted as a particular file type.
Don't limit yourself only to that file type, but consider it as one option to try among many. For some subjects, tacking [+pdf] to the end of your keywords in a regular web search will help return more serious results.
On Google, you can use the filetype limiter: [filetype:pdf].
Ex: if you're looking for information about international public health campaigns, many international aid organizations publish reports, posters, even medical advice books on their sites in pdf format.
Other subjects may use other file formats you could search.
Searching for organizations is also important when you're looking for a specialized type of information, which a general web search may not help find.
Ex: If you were looking for primary sources, often needed for history papers, you'd want to search for archives of primary sources first and then search within those archives for primary sources related to your specific topic. Consider any historical societies, local archives, and local museums near you, even if they don't have collections online. The National Archives, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, the Daughters of the American Revolution and various other national organizations also maintain archives including some sources that are online and searchable so search on their websites too.
Searching for [primary sources history] turns up various other archives as well.
Ex: If you're looking for a disappeared webpage: try The Internet Archive aka “The Wayback Machine”.
• You can also consider non-print media.
You can also consider non-print media. You can find audio files at Memory.loc.gov (especially the Slave Narratives archive and the American Folklife recordings, StoryCorps.org (mostly recounts events in living memory), the Library of Congress' National Jukebox, and Sounds at the British Library. For radio documentaries, try the BBC IPlayer, National Public Radio, and Public Radio International.
Video files can also be good resources. While you can certainly find documentaries on the usual video sites like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, PBS, Biography Channel, and History Channel, you can also check out Media at the (British) National Archives.
If you have an image that you need to identify a source, a name, or further background on, you can try TinEye and Google Reverse Image Search. If you're looking for images that are free to use to illustrate a project or presentation, try Wiki Commons and Flikr Commons. For music that is free to use in presentations, try the Creative Commons Music list.
And lastly, there's a trick to using Google Books where you can find really old texts that have been digitized. Just use the search filters by clicking Search Tools, then Any Time, then Select Date Range and you can choose a very old date range to see if there are any digitized books from that period. For example, you can view anatomy texts written in the 1700s by searching [anatomy] and setting the date to before 1800.
• When you're working with historical documents, it's important to know how to perform a wildcard search.
This is important in history research because of the old “our name was changed at Ellis Island” phenomenon – basically, there's all sorts of transcription and transliteration errors that occur when someone writes down what they hear or types in something handwritten in unclear script. Many different types of search engines are set up to accept wildcard searches but the character to use is sometimes different.
Wildcards are non-alphanumeric characters used in place of one or more letters in a word that tell the computer to return results with any latter at that position.
On Google, use a * in place of one or more letters or in place of whole words in a phrase.
Ex: [Wil*m] will return hits for Wilhelm, Wiliam, William, Willem, and Willam
Ex: [“American Girls * League” + baseball] will get hits for all the various names of the actual women's baseball league depicted in A League of their Own including All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, All-American Girls Softball League, All-American Girls Baseball League, All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and American Girls' Baseball League.
On Ancestry.com, a subscription-based source of primary source documents such as personal accounts and military unit histories as well as census records, military service records, and other genealogy information, use the # character for a single letter wild and a ? for where any number of letters may be inserted.
• Be creative as you try to guess possible misspellings. Say the name out loud and think about how different people with different accents might hear it and represent it in writing.
You can't possibly guess them all (I've seen some very, very creative misspellings in my research) but try to catch as many as possible.
• Look at the letters when written in cursive and think about what letters might be mis-taken for other letters or what letters might get lost in a sea of loops and humps.
So far, these kinds of information have been pretty easy to find – you probably could have located these and similar archives in just a couple of minutes of searching for them. Now though, I'll get a little more obscure and a little trickier.
Finding diplomatic cables and other original government documents can be hard but you may need them for papers in history, political science, or international relations. Keyword searches tend to turn up pages and pages of hits of news articles and discussion about Wikileaks (which itself may not cover the subject you're researching) and even using [NOT Wikileaks] doesn't necessarily cut through enough chatter. The obvious place to look, therefore, is to head straight for the National Archives website. But there's also the National Security Archive based at George Washington University in DC which also has digitized documents. I know about this one because my Diplomatic History professor told us to use it to find the documents we would need for the paper he assigned. You might not know about this archive or be able to find it online just by searching, but if you...
• Ask your professor, TA, department advisor, or a subject librarian at a university library. They may be able to point you to specialized archives when you need specific kinds of information.
Or how about another tricky query... what if you need to write a paper for a literature class about archetypes in fiction? How would you go about finding one or more works of fiction which use your chosen archetype?
Well, you could start by googling [archetypes + fiction]. The first few pages are mostly blog posts which might or might not help you identify examples of the archetype you're interested in.
Sometimes you can use blog pages and similar unciteable sources to locate their sources and begin working back to something you can cite... especially if they all seem to reference the same place.
If you read a few blog posts about archetypes in fiction, you might notice that many of them link to the same website: TV Tropes*.
TV Tropes is a wiki which catalogs archetypes and their use in fiction. You can't cite it as a source but you can use it to find examples of a particular archetype and trace related archetypes and their use in different media types at different times. For example, if you were writing a paper about a ghost story and wanted to look at ghost lore in fiction, you could use their site search to find TV Tropes’ "Our Ghosts Are Different" page which would give you a lot of examples of various ghost stories with a brief analysis of how the lore in each compares so you could then search for them by title on worldcat.org and check out copies of the ones you want to discuss from your local library.
(This series continues in Part 4: here)