Week 2RESEARCH TOPICS, SCHOLARLY SOURCES, AND SYNTHESIS

Class Overview

In-class writing assignment

Research Topic Guidelines

How to Develop a Research Topic

Scholarly Sources

How to Find Scholarly Sources

Discussion of in-class writing assignment (maybe)

Synthesis

In-Class Writing Assignment

Please answer all questions briefly with thoughtful responses and good grammar. Please work in groups of two. Put both names at the top of the paper.

1. What does it mean to synthesize information? Why do we synthesize?

2. What is a literature review?

3. At this point, what are your and your partner’s tentative topic ideas? The keyword here is “tentative.” Pair the topic with the student name so that I know whose idea it is.

Research topic guidelines

Pick a topic that is interesting to you, preferably one that is in your major field of study.

You must be able to find scholarly research on your topic. A majority (90%) of your research will have to come from scholarly sources.

The topic must be one that you can have a debate/argument about.

Your contribution to the topic must be original. In other words, your goal is to say something relatively unique and insightful about your research topic.

How to Develop a Research Topic

How to Research Topic

Research topics start with a topic (duh).

Example from my own graduate work: hip-hop and the media.

How to Research Topic

Once you figure out your topic, you need to narrow it down and formulate a question.

Example from my own graduate work: How does the hip hop group The Roots portray the media in their music?

How to Research Topic

Once you have your question, conduct research to answer that question. The answer to that question then becomes your argument.

Example from my own graduate work: I argue that the political commentary and social critiques of The Roots has its own roots in the Black Arts Movements of the 1960s and 70s and the conscious hip-hop of the late 80s and 90s. Even though we might be living in a “post-black” world, The Roots’ political commentary shows that there are still some consistencies in black aesthetics that range from the 1960s and 70s to the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Pro tip: Your argument is never final until you submit the essay for grading.

How to Research Topic

Chain of events

Topic idea Research Question Tentative researched argument Refined Researched Argument

I have uploaded several of my graduate-level research essays on the support site. Feel free to read them to see how I write and how I develop my researched argument.

What is a scholarly source?

What is a scholarly source?

A scholarly source is a source that is peer reviewed and published in a recognized academic publication, such as a journal or a book.

How do I know that what I am looking at is a scholarly source?

1. Is the journal or article or book published by a scholarly association like a university or some other scholarly publisher?

Sample Academic Publishers in the United States

Cornell University Press

Fordham University Press

MIT Press

Moody Publishers

Baylor University Press

This is just a tiny example of U.S. academic publishers. You do not necessarily need to restrict yourself to American publishers only. To see a more comprehensive list of academic publishers, visit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_university_presses

How do I know that what I am looking at is a scholarly source?

2. Are the articles reviewed in some way? The website of the academic publisher will indicate this.

How do I know that what I am looking at is a scholarly source?

3. What are the tone and diction of the sources like? Are they written for an academic audience or for a popular audience? Are the citations clear and abundant?

What about encyclopedias?

Encyclopedia Britannica is not a scholarly source.

Even though it has a real editorial staff and high quality articles, the Encyclopedia Britannica is a general encyclopedia. Its purpose is to meet the needs of a general audience, not a specialist audience.

In other words, the Encyclopedia Britannica likely will not provide you with an insight about debated topics in your subject area.

Instead, you can find an encyclopedia that is subject specific

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Oxford Companion to Beer

The Charles Dickens Encyclopedia

Encyclopedia of Aerospace Engineering

Wiley Encyclopedia of Forensic Sciences

Encyclopedia of Virtual Communities and Technologies

Of course, this is a very brief list. To get a handle on your subject’s discussion topics, I recommend that you look at a subject-specific encyclopedia. You can most likely find the name of these encyclopedias via a simple Google search.

Is a textbook a scholarly source?

Is a textbook a scholarly source?

The short answer is no.

However, you can use the reference section in a textbook to find more scholarly sources on your topic.

What about internet sources?

Wikipedia is not a scholarly source.

What about internet sources?

You can use Wikipedia for topic ideas.

You can also use Wikipedia to find possible links to other scholarly source.

If you think that you have come across a scholarly source from Wikipedia, use the guidelines from earlier to ensure that they are in fact scholarly. If you’re in doubt, ASK ME!

What about internet sources?

Many scholarly journals are publishing their content exclusively on the internet, so if you find one of these journals and it meets the criteria for “scholarly” that we just discussed, then it will be a scholarly internet source.

Articles published on CNN, Yahoo, Fox News, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal, etc. are not scholarly sources.

Sample List of Online-Only Publications from Oxford

Bulletin London Mathematical Society

Alcohol and Alcoholism

Integrative and Comparative Biology

Forestry

Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health

For a complete list of online publications from Oxford, please visit www.oxfordjournals.org

Oxford is not the only publisher of online-only publications.

Wait, don’t those journals cost money? Do you expect me to pay for the research that I want to use for the course assignments?

Wait, don’t those journals cost money? Do you expect me to pay for the research that I want to use for the course assignments?

Of course not!

How to find scholarly journal articles for free

1. Go library.ttu.edu

2. Hover your mouse cursor over Electronic Resources

3. Click “Find Databases”

4. I personally use the MLA Database for my research because it is a humanities and literature driven database. Do not use this database if you are writing on a topic that is outside of the humanities and/or English.

5. Click on the letter that is the first letter of the subject you are interested in.

6. Click on the name of the database that is useful for your research.

Wait, I used the TTU Database to find an article, but I can only preview it. What do I do?!

Wait, I used the TTU Database to find an article, but I can only preview it. What do I do?!

1. Go to the Interlibrary Loan website: http://library.ttu.edu/docdel/

2. Click on Journal/Article.

3. Fill in the information with an asterisk next to it (Journal Title, Year, Inclusive Pages, Article Title, Not Wanted After Date)

4. The library loan service will give you a FREE copy of the journal article in PDF format, meaning that you can use it for as long as you like. It can take up to two weeks for them to process your request.

5. You can use this service for academic books, too. However, you can only keep these books for two weeks in most cases.

How to find books in the TTU library

1. Go to library.ttu.edu

2. Click on Library Catalog

3. Search for the topic you are interested in. Try playing around with the drop down menu to find more specific, narrow results.

4. Click on the book that you think will be useful in your research paper. Scroll down and find the “Location/Call no.” (i.e. PR6039.032)

5. The call number will tell you which floor in the stacks you can find the book as well as the shelf section of that floor.

Google Scholar

Like the TTU database, Google Scholar will allow you to search for scholarly research articles on your topic.

Most of the time, you will not be able to access the full article on Google Scholar.

You can use Google Scholar, then, to find the names of those articles that you want to read. Once you have the names, use the TTU databases to find the full-text articles, or request them from ILLIAD.

In-Class Writing Discussion

Synthesis

What is synthesis?

Drawing together particular themes or traits that you observe in texts and organizing the material from each text according to those themes or traits.

Synthesis

Why is synthesis important for research? What does it accomplish?