Scanning the landscape of your topic

Until you know a bit about your topic, you can't narrow your focus. Try one of these strategies to get the big picture:

• Search Google (or another search engine) and see what turns up. While you may not find any sources that you actually use for your research it is one way to quickly put your finger on the pulse of contemporary popular culture. It does not work well for topics such as literary analysis, Biblical studies, psychology - or any other field of study in which popular approaches to questions diverge widely from scholarly approaches.
• Put your topic into Academic Search Premier, one of the library's databases. Again, the purpose isn't to find sources you will use, but should reveal different ways to think about a topic. This is particularly helpful if your topic is scholarly because this database indexes core journals in a variety of subjects as well as newspapers and popular magazines.
• Want a really good tip? Use the library's hidden treasures: specialized reference books. In far more depth than Encylopaedia Britannica or Wikipedia, these scholarly resources provide excellent and expert overviews of topics and - as a bonus - will tell you which sources are the most valuable ones. A few minutes browsing a reference work will give you lots of ideas. For example, the Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics includes overview articles on bioethics, animal rights, fetal research, and the right to die. To get a sense of what reference books are available, take a look at our Resources for Majors and Courses page - or swing by the reference desk for a personalized list of suggestions. There's gold in them thar stacks.

Browsing for sources

Serendipity plays a big role in research, so long as you put yourself where it's most likely to happen. When looking for books, you may want to start by searching the catalog - but once you find a book that looks promising, browse the section of shelves around it. Our library uses the Library of Congress system that, in the same way as the more familiar Dewey Decimal system, puts books on the same topic near each other. You may want to browse in more than one section: the general collection, oversized, reference, or for international studies the Hasselquist Room. Each of these sections has its own A-Z set of Library of Congress system call numbers.

Some topics are more easily browsed than others. For example, books by and about a particular writer are shelved together, but books on interdisciplinary subjects such as environmental science may be in several places. Check the Majors pages for a list of browsing areas by major.

Keep an eye out for current books as you scan the shelves. One easy tip for doing that is to look at the call number labels. In recent years, call numbers end with the year of publication. This makes it easy to see if a book is current without having to open it up and look at the back of the title page.

Browsing is trickier in the periodicals section on the lower level, because journals and magazines are shelved alphabetically by title rather than by subject. However, the Majors pages have lists of what journals we get by major if you want to flip through issues of core journals in the field. This works particularly well if you're in the "I'm still trying to decide what sort of topic I might tackle" phase. You might also take a browse through recent issues of a general magazine such as The New Yorker, Harper's, Mother Jones, The Atlantic, or New Scientist just to spark ideas.

As you decide which sources to look at more closely think about these ideas.

• Is it current enough? Use the year of publication on the call number or in a database to help narrow your options.
• Is it scholarly enough - but not too technical? When looking through articles with abstracts in a database, skim the abstract to see if at least some of the article is understandable. Focus first on the first and last lines of the abstract, then look more closely if it seems interesting. When looking at magazine and newspaper articles, check the length. If it's less than 400 words or one page or less, it may not be very helpful.
• Is at least part of the source of interest? When you see a book on the shelf that has potential, take it off the shelf and skim the table of contents. Or, if you have a specific enough subject, see if it's covered in the index. You don't have to read a book in its entirety to find the good bits.

Be sure you do some skimming before you print anything off or haul books back to your dorm room. Quite often, a source that seems to be exactly on your topic turns out to be not very helpful after all. You don't want to discover that when you're sitting down to write a paper that's due in a day or two.