Finding Sources and Reading
Once you have picked a topic, you enter the reading phase. You should begin by finding secondary literature: texts that others have written and published about your topic or its context. This will provide an overall answer to two questions: What is your topic comprised of? And what is known about it up to this point? It is important to realize that your search for literature is completed in phases. The more you discover about your topic, the more you can narrow down your search and find relevant sources. The best advice is to start reading right away; it will be the first of many explorations into source material. This process will hone your skills at searching for, and pinpointing, relevant literature.
The Internet
Practically every research project starts with an Internet search. The Internet is unbeatable for obtaining publications in digital format, for locating publications (in the University Library, for instance) and obviously, for consulting online sources like Wikipedia. Before you start searching, make a list of keywords, names and topics that are relevant to your research. Make sure your search terms include alternative spellings, translations and synonyms.
Many bibliographical tools are structured using keywords. Based on your topic, try to formulate a list of search terms and keywords that can be used to look for literature. In drawing up this list, try to be systematic and use the following aspects of your topic:
- timeframe (when: which period are you dealing with?)
- geography (where: which country, state, city?)
- people (who: who are likely to be the main actors?)
- societal sector (which sectors of society, institutions, organizations, level(s) of government are relevant to your topic?)
- concepts (which key concepts did you come across in the literature?)
It is important that you use the right search engines to find academic publications. The Utrecht University Library website (www.library.uu.nl) provides an overview of the search engines that are useful for finding various types of sources. To begin with, there is the Utrecht version of Worldcat and the e-Journals database, which will lead you to all the sources available at Utrecht University. In addition, search engines like Google Scholar, Scopusand Web of Science can help you find articles, books and PhD theses. PiCarta gives access to articles, books and journal subscriptions in the public libraries of the Netherlands. World cat (the general version) does the same worldwide.
The University Library (UB) has created a large number of what it calls ‘libguides’ to make it easier for students to search for and find sources, and to use the search system. Libguides provide tips, background information and training in searching for and dealing with academic sources. More specifically, these guides explain how to find a book or article, which medium to use, how to get your hands on a publication if it is unavailable through the university library, and how to come up with relevant search strategies or search terms. For an overview of available libguides, click here.
The Library
Aside from searching in digital systems, it is wise to acquaint yourself with the university library’s collection. The library is an important hub of information. Students have access to the university’s entire physical collection and any digital subscriptions it is licensed for. Therefore, students should know what books and journals are part of the university collection and how the library classification system works. They need to know what materials are available, and where they are located. The library also houses catalogues and bibliographies with overviews of academic publications on a particular topic.
Found literature. Now what?
Once you have found some relevant books and articles, you need to scan through them. Start with the most recent publications. Read the abstracts or browse through the tables of contents, and read the introductions and conclusions. Your aim is to get a quick impression of what each publication is about and whether it could be helpful to you. You do not need to read them thoroughly at this point. Pay special attention to the notes and the bibliographies. These can point you to other literature (the famous, or infamous, snowball method).
A common way to find good reference works is known in Dutch academia as the snowball method. This is a top-down searching method, meaning you start at the most general level of literature, such as an encyclopedia or compendium, to get a broad idea of what is known about your topic. Then you start delving deeper into the subject, by consulting the sources listed as references in the general-level literature that you began with. Each book and article you find there will in turn contain its own bibliography that you can consult. And so on.
The snowball method is effective, but it has some drawbacks:
- You are completely dependent on some else’s references.
- Any literature published later than the bibliographies you draw sources from is automatically excluded from your research.
- There is no end to it; you can keep snowballing from reference to reference ad infinitum.
These drawbacks can be mitigated by relying on more than one work and including a few very recent publications.
Once you have gathered a good amount of literature, make a selection. Determine which publications are the most important and start by reading these. Take care to write down the title, author, date of publication and publisher of every publication you have found, including those you consider less important. After a while you might forget whether you have seen something before, or an article you thought was not important might turn out to be relevant after all.
When you find a publication, you have to decide whether it is relevant to your research. The following checklist can help you to determine this:
- What is the publication about exactly?
- Before you start reading, look at the table of contents, introduction and conclusion. Does the publication contain information you need?
- Check the index for topics you are interested in.
- Check the notes and the bibliography to see if they refer to other interesting publications.
- Check the appendices for interesting tables, images, maps and the like.
- Is your copy the most recent edition? Has it been revised over the course of time? Has it been translated into other languages?
- Do others frequently refer to this publication?
- Check whether the tone of the publication is overly populistic or jargonistic.
When is enough enough?
It is impossible to be exhaustive in your literature research when studying a historical topic. Through reading you will continually gain more knowledge and this will prompt new questions, which you might be able to answer if you consulted more literature. This process can continue indefinitely, so you need to remain pragmatic as you search and try to define the scope of your research, that is, to determine which questions you are and are not going to answer.
Take care not to skip any key publications. These are publications that provide indispensable information about your topic or a particular aspect thereof. A key publication can take many shapes; it could a monograph, a compilation, a journal article, a special edition of a journal, conference proceedings and so on.
Bibliographical and historiographical reviews tend to discuss the most up-to-date historical research on a particular topic, so these will often steer you toward key publications.
Key publications need not be recent. To identify them, pay close attention to other researcher’s references.
If you keep coming across citations of the same work, this is what you should do:
- Check the index of the books you have already selected for your research to see if it includes the name of this author and check whether the work in question is mentioned in a historiographical introduction or some other chapter.
- If this confirms your impression that it is a key publication, get hold of a copy and scan through it yourself.
- Try to find reviews of the publication from authoritative writers.
As you read, all sorts of questions will crop up. These questions are your first steps toward the core of your research: your research question. That is why you should take notes, both about the contents (facts, places, people) and their location (author, page numbers, etc.). The latter will be of crucial importance to your research at a later stage, when writing footnotes or endnotes and creating a bibliography.