Where to begin?

If you don't know yet what you want to research, the books, articles, and other resources that you've already looked at for your class are a good place to start. They might include something you want to explore further, or you might realize that they don't include something that you want to find more about.

It's important to find a topic that's relevant to the class and within the parameters of the assignment—but you know that already. The trickier part is probably going to be finding the sweet spot between too broad and too narrow.

You need to narrow your topic down to a manageable size, but there has to be enough to write about. How do you do that? A good way to begin is to start searching for relevant sources in a database like Historical Abstracts. Even if you already have an idea about your topic, it can be useful to use the broadest search terms relating to that topic at first to see what's out there. Once you have some search results in front of you, take some time to explore what you see. Articles that don't have the exact keywords you're looking for might still have useful information, or they might point you in a new direction. You can always narrow your scope based on what you find.

Focus on making this a history research paper, as opposed to, say, a political science or sociology paper. Here are some tips:

a.     Define and research a specific historical period. It is often a good idea to include the date range covered in the title of the paper.

b.     Write about continuity and/or change over time, not the situation as it is now. In other words, what movement/conflict/party began, continued, ended, developed, etc. during this defined period. How did the representation of a particular group in the press change between the years X and Y? How did women influence a resistance movement when it emerged? Do not use the body of the paper to describe the present moment and/or offer speculations for the future. If you wish to offer some thoughts about the current moment, save it for the conclusion.

c.     Try to focus on something specific enough to get into some detail about. You may start by looking at a period and topic more broadly, but it's important to narrow your focus. You will probably do some broader reading on a time period and context before identifying your focus and possibly the sources you'll use for your project.

From questions to a problem

You may find it helpful to work with this formula as you develop your topic and gather material:

1. Topic: I am studying ____________________________

    2. Question: because I want to find out what/why/how ____________________________

        3. Significance: in order to help my audience understand ____________________________

For further suggestions on planning, researching, and writing a research paper, see The Craft of Research, by Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb, Joseph Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William Fitzgerald. University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Research is an iterative process

You will likely go through the search process a number of times, performing different searches with different keyword combinations, to address the different components of your topic and reflect your evolving questions.

You need to narrow your topic down to a manageable size, but there has to be enough to write about. How do you do that? A good way to begin is to start searching for relevant sources in a database like Historical Abstracts. Even if you already have an idea about your topic, it can be useful to use the broadest search terms relating to that topic at first to see what's out there. Once you have some search results in front of you, take some time to explore what you see. Articles that don't have the exact key words you're looking for might still have useful information, or they might point you in a new direction. You can always narrow your scope based on what you find.

If you don't know yet what you want to research, the books, articles, and other resources that you've already looked at for this class are a good place to start. They might include something you want to explore further, or you might realize that they don't include something that you want to find more about.

Some ways to get started:

• Use the bibliography of a source you've read in class to find further sources on a topic of interest to you. If the bibliography doesn't have links to full text, you can search for article or book titles in "library search" on the front page of the library website. You can also use the Journal Search on the library website to find out if we have the full text of a particular journal, and in some cases, link to a search within that journal.

• In the library database Historical Abstracts, do a fairly general keyword search (eg plantation and Ireland) and specify the historical period/years you're researching (eg 1500-1699). After reading through your initial results, you might adjust your search ([colonization or colonisation] AND [Ireland or Ulster]. It's important to use HistAbs in addition to the Library Search because although Library Search contains the records from many of our databases, it doesn't contain the records from Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life, two of the important indexes of scholarship in history. As you read through your first set of articles, make notes about new keywords and related terms, names and events, as well as specific questions that interest you to use when you go back and search again.

• Do a search in Social Science Citation Index. Try doing a broad keyword search and then in the results page, use the "Web of Science Categories" to filter the results to those in the field of History. The Social Science Citation Index, part of the multidisciplinary database called Web of Science, contains records from a selected group of journals. The records contain links to related records- articles citing the article in the record, the sources cited in the article, and articles that cite some of the same sources, making it an especially useful way to find the scholarly conversation about a particular topic, as well as seminal articles and emerging scholarship.

• If you're at the stage of casting around for a topic, you might want to look at the most recent issues of a journal in the field of Middle Eastern history to see what some of the trends in recent scholarship are. Using the list of journals in the Scholarship section of this guide, see what sparks your interest and find threads and questions you're interested in exploring, and then do some further searching using keywords gleaned from those articles.

Some Starting Points for Identifying and Locating Primary Sources

• Check bibliographies and footnotes for other sources on your topic. Reference works have helpful bibliographies as well as reliable contextual information. Consider what available primary sources will support the research questions you are asking and how.
• A good resource to use first in your research: C19 database, an umbrella database including multiple British (and American) archive databases, some full text, some citation only, for books, pamphlets and periodicals.
• Vassar Library is a member of HathiTrust, a digitization project of print book and periodical collections from a group of college and university libraries. All materials published prior to 1929 are available in full-text open access.  Books and journals published later are not available in full text, but they are searchable there. 

Worldcat is the union catalog of the hundreds of libraries that participate in interlibrary loan. Results are listed with the books in Vassar's collection at the top, and as you move down the list, you'll find books that aren't available in our collection but are available through interlibrary loan. When you open the full record of a WorldCat record, there is a link for ILLiad (Interlibrary Loan). 

You can find a lot of useful journals, databases, and other places to look for sources at the tabs on the left of this page. Spend some time exploring them! 

Tips for Searching:

• Use asterisks in your search terms to truncate words so that you'll find variations. For example, a search for "monarch*" will return results with monarch or monarchy, and a search for "revolution* finds revolution, revolutionary, and revolutionaries.
• Use operators such as OR, AND, and NOT. For example, "goals OR objectives OR aims"  
• If you find an article on a journal website or google scholar and you get to a paywall, see if we subscribe to the journal it's published in by checking the Journal Search. If we don't, you can always request it through interlibrary loan. 
• If you know what your topic is but need help finding search terms, look through the index of a book you were assigned in class or one that you've determined is relevant. This is a good way to find out which words researchers tend to use to describe various subjects. You can also look to see if an article you've found online has subject headings or keywords listed—if it does, you can search using these terms.
• Look at the footnotes and bibliographies of the resources that you find to get to more resources, especially in order to identify primary sources that might be available to you. This is called citation tracing.
• Using AI tools like ChatGPT to find sources is generally not a good idea, as they often will come up with plausible-sounding titles that do not actually exist.
• Check out the Vassar Libraries' Evaluating Sources guide for more general tips and strategies for working with sources.

What is peer review?

In academic publishing, the goal of peer review is to assess the quality of articles submitted for publication in a scholarly journal. Before an article is deemed appropriate to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, it must undergo the following process:

• The author of the article must submit it to the journal editor who forwards the article to experts in the field. Because the reviewers specialize in the same scholarly area as the author, they are considered the author’s peers (hence “peer review”).
• These impartial reviewers are charged with carefully evaluating the quality of the submitted manuscript.
• The peer reviewers check the manuscript for accuracy and assess the validity of the research methodology and procedures.
• If appropriate, they suggest revisions. If they find the article lacking in scholarly validity and rigor, they reject it.

Because a peer-reviewed journal will not publish articles that fail to meet the standards established for a given discipline, peer-reviewed articles that are accepted for publication exemplify the best research practices in a field.

Types of scholarly sources

Original Research Article - Most often published in peer reviewed journals, original research articles report on original research with primary documents and/or archival sources.

Review articles - Published in peer reviewed journals, but seek to synthesize and summarize the work of a particular sub-field, rather than report on original research. Can provide helpful background information. 

Editorials/Opinion/Commentary/Perspectives – An article expressing the author's view about a particular issue. These articles can be well researched and include a lot of citations to the peer reviewed literature, or simple items without citations, but are not themselves peer reviewed.

Brief Communications or News – News articles can be found in a wide variety of publications.  Popular newspapers and magazines, trade publications and scholarly publications can all contain news articles.  These articles often will refer to a recent study, event, discovery, or controversy. These articles are typically short and written in language a general audience can understand.

Questions to ask to determine whether an article is peer reviewed/refereed

• Does the article have an abstract?
• Are there references? Are they cited in the article?
• Is the article written for readers with some prior knowledge of the subject?
• What are the author’s/authors’ credentials and association?
• Does the article present original research or is it a review?
• Does the article indicate when it was submitted for publication and when it was accepted?

Also consider

• Is the journal in which you found the article published or sponsored by a professional scholarly society, professional association, or university academic department? Does it describe itself as a peer-reviewed publication? (To know that, check the journal's website). 
• Did you find a citation for it in one of the  databases that includes scholarly publications? (Historical Abstracts, Social Science Citation Index, etc.)?  Read the database description to see if it includes scholarly publications.
• In the database, did you limit your search to scholarly or peer-reviewed publications? 
• Is the topic of the article narrowly focused and explored in depth?
• Is the article based on either original research or authorities in the field (as opposed to personal opinion)?

Clues that a journal uses peer review/is refereed

One of the best places to find out if a journal is peer-reviewed is the journal's website (just Google the journal title).

Most publishers have websites for their journals that tell you about the journal, how authors can submit an article, and what the process is for getting published.

On the journal's website, look for a link that says "about this journal," "information for authors," "instructions for authors," "submitting an article" or something similar. Then look for the term "peer-reviewed" or "refereed" in the description of the journal.

Scholarly journals usually have an editorial board, with the members and their home academic institutions/affiliations listed on the journal website.

Acknowledgements: “BHS 110 Orientation: Types Of Scholarly Sources” by Oregon State University Libraries & Press, used under CC BY-NC 4.0. 

"Evaluating Information Sources: What Is A Peer-Reviewed Article?" by Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice,  used under CC BY-NC 4.0.