- Choose a Topic
At some point in a history class, you’re going to have to write a research paper. If you’re a lower-level history student (college freshman or lower), you may have a topic assigned to you. If you’re an upper-level student, you will likely get to choose your own topic. Choosing a topic can be daunting, but there are a few tricks to make the process manageable. First, describe your topic in one word, say, “warfare.” That’s way too broad a topic to be able to research, but it can easily be narrowed down by specifying a time and place. For example, “warfare in France in the Middle Ages.” That’s narrow enough you can start searching for secondary sources and find useful information, not just random facts.
- Search for Secondary Sources
Once you have a topic pinned down, you can look for secondary sources. Secondary sources are scholarly books or articles on your topic. They are written within the last fifty years. (Some topics may have major works of scholarship still in use that are older, but it is unusual to need a secondary source that was written before 1950.) The #1 place to search for secondary sources is your library’s catalog. All of the books on the same topic are grouped together in a library, so physically going to the library and browsing the shelves adjacent to where you’ve located a potential source is highly recommended. You will almost certainly find other books related to your research.
When searching your library’s catalog, don’t forget to also search the journal databases applicable for your topic. In history, this means using JSTOR, plus any topic-specific databases. For example, if you’re looking for information on how warfare in France was viewed from a religious perspective, you will also want to search ATLA database, which focuses on religious and theological studies. These speciality databases often include smaller speciality journals that are not included in JSTOR or (potentially) even available electronically, but are still useful!
Don’t be discouraged if a promising source isn’t available in your library. Libraries can borrow things from other libraries using a system called Interlibrary Loan [link to discussion of ILL].
Also remember to evaluate your sources for scholarship. Do your secondary sources have footnotes or endnotes? Scholarly sources will always tell you where you can find the information they use. You can find that information in the notes, either at the bottom of the page (footnotes) or at the end of the book (endnotes). It is unlikely that you will find sources that are not scholarly in your library, but it is possible. Journal databases like JSTOR only include peer-reviewed journals, so the editors of the journal have already done this step for you. Not sure what qualifies as a scholarly source? Click here to learn more [link to How Do I Know If My Source is Good?].
- Search for Primary Sources
Searching for primary sources is a bit like a treasure hunt. You can start from any point on the map, but end up in the same location. I generally recommend students look for primary sources in three places: secondary sources, sourcebooks, and ye olde interweb.
Looking at the footnotes or endnotes of your secondary sources are a great place to find primary sources. After all, they had to get their information from somewhere, right? While secondary sources occasionally include large portions of primary sources, it’s more common for them to cite a story or quote a few lines here and there. That’s why you need to look at the footnotes or endnotes, where the author tells you all the information you need to find the full primary source: author, title, where it was published, who published it and when.
Sourcebooks are good for finding primary sources that weren’t originally written in English. Sourcebooks (also called readers) are a collection of primary sources on related topics and usually from a specific time and place. An example of a sourcebook you might want to check for material on warfare in France in the Middle Ages from a religious perspective is Medieval Popular Religion in Europe, 1000-1500: A Reader. Another advantage of using sourcebooks for primary sources is that they usually include an introduction which provides important information about the source, and are annotated. This means the translator or editor has added explanatory notes that help modern readers understand the source more fully.
The final place to search for primary sources is the internet. There are many, many websites that are dedicated to primary source collections from all around the world. They may be operated by libraries, literary organizations, national history museums, universities, or private individuals. When using online sources, you should always pay careful attention to see if they provide any information about publication or translation. They may not, especially if the source is ancient, but many do. Lots of primary sources online come from out-of-copyright secondary sources. This means the secondary source was published before 1923 in the US. Old isn’t necessarily bad, but you might have more difficulty understanding a source that was translated into English in 1875, for example.
- Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Don’t think that all your research is done now! There will come at least one point when writing a research paper where every student will realize they need to do more research. Maybe you decided to include something that wasn’t originally part of your research plan or need to know more about a specific detail to be confident before making a new claim. The truth is that until you finish the final draft of your paper, you’re always going to be doing a little more research on some aspect of your topic. Take a deep breath and remember, the process for finding sources is the same whether you’re doing it for the first time or the fiftieth. You’ve got this.
- For the More Advanced Student: Crafting a Research Question
If you’re taking the intro to the major course (sometimes also called “research methods” or “methodology for majors”), you’ll be asked to come up with a research question. A research question is more specific than just a topic. It has to be significant, debatable, and researchable. Significant means it has had some notable effect on the development of an important idea or technology, a culture or history as a whole. Debatable means you can argue about what the answer is or which answer is more important than the others. You can even argue that one answer hasn’t received any attention or that past research put too much emphasis on certain answers. The key is that your research question is not a statement of fact. Researchable just means that it is narrow enough in scope that you can actually research it. Going back to the example of “warfare in France during the Middle Ages,” it’s researchable as is, but it needs additional details to be significant and debatable. What is it that you hope to find out about warfare in France in the Middle Ages? How it changed French society or how it was different from warfare in France during the Roman period? And just how are you defining “Middle Ages”? Do you intend to cover the entire period between 800 and 1500? 500-1500? 800-1350? Being specific about the who, what, and how of your topic are great ways to create a research question.
If this seems overwhelming, take a step back to the very beginning. What drew you to the topic in the first place? Often, the answer is something like, “It seems like there were a lot of wars in France then.” That’s fine. You can easily turn that into a research question by adding why: “Why were there lots of wars in France in the Middle Ages?” Voila! A working research question. It points your research in a clear direction and is debatable. You will still have to refine your question after some research to show why it is significant, but it’s enough to get started.
Related: [Insert link to Traps to Avoid When Creating a Research Question]
- Extra Credit: Working Backwards from Primary Sources
It is possible to reverse the research process by choosing your primary sources BEFORE you have a research question. Maybe you became familiar with Mary Chestnut’s diary while learning about the American Civil War in a different class and want to understand how it fits within the larger history of women’s writings in the Antebellum South. Perhaps after the assigned readings for World History, you want to compare the Roman and Han legal codes. In this case, you get to skip the choosing a topic and finding primary source steps and proceed straight to crafting a research question. This is more likely to happen with advanced students, but there’s no reason for beginners to avoid it.
How to Do History 