“Drilling Down”: English 105.015 Independent Research Project Workshop

1)  “Look back in time”: Find recent single-author books on the topic in OLLI, and investigate their authors’ previous article-length work using an AUTHOR search in the right search engine pointed at an appropriate academic database (e.g., EbscoàMLA Bibliography).

2)  “Look back in time and laterally in a community of scholars”: Find recent multiple-author essay collections on the topic in OLLI, and investigate individual chapter authors’ previous article-length work using an AUTHOR search in the right search engine pointed at an appropriate academic database.

3)  “Look laterally at an individual publication’s sources”: Read the References or Works Cited section of articles you have found and look for titles of articles which seem like better sources.  Search for them using a TITLE search in an appropriate academic database.  Remember that exact-word searches easily can turn up no hits if even one character is wrong.  If you get no hits, make absolutely sure you are typing the correct title, truncate the title to a key phrase and use a TITLE PHRASE or KEYWORD search, and/or change the database you are searching in, possibly using the library’s “Serial Journal List” to seek the journal first.

4)  “Look forward after publication”: Read scholarly reviews of book-length sources using a SUBJECT (=title and again =author) search AND the KEYWORD “Review” on the next line in the search engine.  Scholarly reviews contain original interpretive information that will help your paper.  They also point out the issues currently being debated about the books’ topics, and if the books have weaknesses, they usually will suggest what could be done next time to create a better analysis of the evidence or to get better evidence to analyze.  This will help you generate theses.