This guide has been created to help students who are working on research projects in 19th-20th century American history. If you have suggestions or questions, please contact Gretchen Lieb, History and Multidisciplinary Librarian.
You can chat with the librarians online through our website anytime from 10-4 on weekdays. You can also email us at researchhelp@vassar.edu or text us at 845-412-8926 and we'll reply during normal business hours. This is a great option if you have quick questions about things like accessing an online database, using interlibrary loan, or connecting with library resources from off campus.
For more in-depth questions, we recommend setting up a research consultation with a librarian. You can do this at our Ask a Librarian page. To make an appointment with Gretchen Lieb, History and Multidisciplinary Librarian, you can schedule directly on her calendar by using this link.
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.
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 America: History & Life. 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.
Your goal is to create a research question that is:
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 a movement or cause become more powerful between the years X and Y? How did women influence a resistance movement when it emerged in 19XX? 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. “Women in the Workplace” or “Sexuality in the Late 20th Century” would be a bit too broad.
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.
Secondary sources help to situate your thesis in the framework of larger scholarly conversations. Identify scholars whose work you will engage with early on in your research process.
As you search through library catalogs and databases, take note (literally, make lists) of the keywords and terms that you find useful, as well as the Library of Congress Subject Headings associated with your topic. The subject headings will be the same in other library catalogs and databases, and that language provides crucial keyword searching terms.
When you are searching in library catalogs for book length studies about your topic, remember to search broader than your topic as well as in narrower related sub-topics. Many book-length secondary sources will not require reading in entirety. Use tables of contents and indexes effectively to identify crucial chapters and passages.
Peruse the bibliographies and footnotes in your secondary sources; this will help you find additional relevant secondary sources and may direct you to primary sources in archives, published sourcebooks, databases of primary source collections, and elsewhere. Also take note of dates/events, organization names, personal names, names of particular policies, laws or initiatives etc.; all of these are potential keywords for finding primary sources.
Research tip: Visualize your topic. Make a grid and label the top row (headings) with what you consider to be the BIG subtopics of your topic. In each column, brainstorm relevant synonyms, people's names, organizations, concepts, ideas, places. Looking at this layout can sometimes reveal possibilities for a thread that runs across the columns, or a different way of organizing what the main ideas are. This grid will change and evolve as you do your research.
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 America: History & Life. 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:
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!
PRO TIPS:
• Use an asterisk (*) at the end of a root word to find multiple variations of that root
Example: environment*
• Use quotation marks (“__”) around a phrase to search for the words together in that order:
Example: “climate change”
• Use the multiple search fields on database search pages or parentheses to help organize more complex searches:
Example: ("climate change" OR "global warming") AND (agricultur* OR environment*)
• 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 citations of the resources that you find to get to more resources. 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
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:
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.
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.
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.
