Photos and written by Amy Bridges
With big projects and essay due dates rolling in I thought I would give some of my research tips. After going to Durham College for Journalism and being an Anthropology major, I have done a lot of research so I thought I would share what I have learned.
1 – Start broad and then get detailed
As much as I would love for it to be as easy as just typing in “The best textile location for the Ancient Maya” into a search engine and have it populate the exact thing that I am looking for it doesn’t always work that way. I first type in Maya and textiles in the search bars and then go from there. Look at the tags that are being used in the different articles and search with those. Sometimes you might find an interesting word to search that you wouldn’t have though of before like Maya Fibers or Maya fabric patterns. Once you have the basis for your searches then you can get more detailed. You might get more results by doing the big search because of those new tags you didn’t think about.
2 – Vet your sources
Don’t just use any source and if you must use Wikipedia use their sources not the information. Use the bibliography or works cited to find peer reviewed papers that are relevant to your research. Make sure that the years aren’t too old. You don’t want to be using something that is 2 decades old and has outdated information that has been reevaluated and changed. That would defeat the purpose. Also, while you are vetting your sources make sure they are coming from reputable places and from experts and not just someone on the internet. If you aren’t finding things in one resource area, try another search engine. The Trent Library website lists many different resources that you can choose from either for physical books or for digital papers. I always use multiple searches because you will get different articles for the most part. Also don’t discount Google Scholar it has helped too!
3- Use your research as a source list
Once you find an article you like go to its bibliography section and look through their sources, you might find something interesting or a new source that you wouldn’t have thought of before such as a chemistry article. Thinking about Maya textiles you may find a chemist did a paper on the makeup of the dyes used in the textiles. This could help you figure out the different qualities of the pieces with a finer tooth comb!
4- Stay Organized
Now that you have all of this research don’t lose it or get it confused with other sources. The one thing that has saved me many headaches and has made my essay writing a lot easier and faster is using a dendritic outline. I input my research and the works cited or bibliography information with it. That way everything is organized you have the tedious bibliography information ready and you just need to write it. It also helps to keep your papers more organized and less jumbled like mine used to be. I do this for every writing assignment now. It is also a good indicator of how many pages you have.
A dendritic outline works like a tree, there are the main branches and then off shoots of those branches that you put more information under. There is a main heading, and then sub headings and mini headings under the sub headings. You can see an actual example from my Maya textile paper right under this paragraph.
5 – Use Searching tools
If you are still having issues researching use searching tools or the library to help you narrow down or find what you are looking for. Here are some of the searching tools I have used
- Use quotations around the words that have to be in the search or have to be together “Maya Textile” or “Maya Blue” this will stop them from giving you results that just have the word textile or the word blue in it. It should keep things more relevant to what you want
- If you want a synonym to appear you can put a ~ between the words such as Maya ~ fabric and you will get fabric, textiles, clothes etc.
- You can put 2 periods between years to get a range 250AD..900AD if you only want Classic Maya results
- You can also make the search results location based by adding location: and the place such as Maya Textiles location:Belize
6 – Start Early
Even if its just a couple of searches here and there you will be thankful! I normally start by researching and getting a bulk number of papers at the beginning and just save them for when I am ready to read them. I will have a folder that is labelled research and, in that folder, it will have the articles and two folders. There is one that says Used and one that is labelled Nope. That way when I go to read through them, I can put them in the proper folders and none of them will get missed or read twice by accident. Even just getting some articles to look at a month or two will help you when you start to really work on it because you can start reading already and then move from there. You can start getting more detailed. It will also help you to realize if there is enough research for the topic you are looking for incase you need to change your topic.
I hope these have helped and if you have any other research tips feel free to comment them down below!!
THE STUDENT LIFE BLOG 