1) Understand Your Assignment
- Read through your assignment as soon as you receive it.
- Highlight important details, for example: due date, format for submission, and the types of sources required.
- Ask your instructor right away if there is anything you do not understand. Sometimes it is hard to ask for help but it is a normal part of university life and it will save you time and lead to better results!
2) Formulate Your Research Question
- Unless your instructor has already given you a research question, you will have to create one.
- Start with a topic that interests you – and follows the guidelines of your assignment – then refine it until it is a workable question. For example, if your general topic is the theme of responsibility in the novel Frankenstein, then your research question might be "Who is responsible for the monster's violent behavior?".
- If you are having trouble developing a research question, or even deciding on a topic, talk with your instructor as soon as possible.
3) Select Keywords to Use as Search Terms
- Identify the major concepts of your research question and turn them into searchable keywords. Using our example, good keywords would be: Responsibility, Violence, Frankenstein. Leave out words like "who" and "is" as those words do not represent the main concepts.
- Read these Tips for Selecting and Developing Keywords and make a list of possible keywords to search with.
- As you learn more about your topic, you will discover new keywords. Use these to do more searches and find even better results.
4) Get background information
- It can be difficult to research something we know very little about to begin with. First, get some basic background information about the text, author, and main concepts involved in your assignment.
- Try searching Bloom's Literature. Log in with your CUE email & password to open this database, then use the title, author, or main concepts as your search terms. When your results come up, click on the Reference, Criticism, or Video tabs to see different kinds of sources.
- Consult your course notes, your assignment, a literary dictionary or encyclopedia to start with then connect with library staff, your instructor, or your classmates for help. You can also search the web to find this sort of background information and build your list of keywords.
- As you learn more about your topic, you might adjust your research question and keywords. This is a normal part of the research process.
5) Find Scholarly Sources
Although we like to start with Google, because we feel comfortable using it, most scholarly information is held by libraries and not freely available on the web. It is worth learning how to use the library's search tools because Google tends to retrieve non-scholarly and commercial sources that are not appropriate for a university assignment. Here's how to start.
- Watch Searching for Books then search the CUE Library Catalogue using the keywords you have gathered so far. You can use the checkboxes on the left hand side to limit your sources to books, ebooks, articles, and other formats.
- Watch Searching the MLA International Bibliography database and Searching JSTOR then search one of the English Literature Databases. Log in with your CUE email & password to open the database then begin your search. Try one of these databases:
- Start with simple searches, using only a few keywords. You can always add or change the keywords in future searches after you look over the results.
- Use the checkboxes on the left to limit your searches to peer-reviewed articles, academic journals, or by other factors.
- You can also search Google Scholar and if you discover an article or book that isn't freely available online, check with the library to get the full text.
- If you have questions, library staff are happy to help. Ask Us! by chat, text, email, telephone or in person. Helping you is our favorite thing to do!
The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by