In our Getting Ready for Research Guide, we taught you how to discover a good topic, and formulate some good avenues to take to begin the research process. This guide is a little different as it serves as a follow-up of sorts.
I will go through the research process and break it down step-by-step:
Through this guide I will actually be researching and writing a research paper, then breaking down how each step works within that process. The topic of the sample paper will be how the TV Show Franchise Twin Peaks remains popular. Twin Peaks is my favorite thing so I must entertain myself somehow, and also I know that there is quite a bit of writing on this on various fronts, whether about the history of the show or the symbolic nature of some of the story arcs and everything in between. For a TV show, it's surprisingly well represented in academic writing.
My method:
The first thing I do is simply search Twin Peaks in the library.
What You may want to do:
Now I have a results list pretty much only about the TV series. I am are exclusively dealing with the material that deals with the popularity of the show. So I can do one of two things.
I can automatically take out the DVDS and tie-in novels and ignore them as potential sources.
You can also read the article titles and abstracts to determine what you can ignore and what you can't.
With that whole list, there are ways to read the articles titles and other information prior to reading the actual article to determine which are really good for you. You don't have to read every single article that turns up. You could look for certain signal words that could lead you to believe this article could be what you're looking for. Make a physical and mental list of those words, or just keep an eye out for them.
I focused my attention on these keywords found in article titles, summaries, subject headings.
I also focused my attention on articles with publication dates from 1990-1991 and 2017 when the show was running, because that will have more relevant information when it comes to it's popularity, instead of articles that focus on other topics.
So that's something you may want to do. You may want to form a list of words that you want to hone in on. To do that, you should form some research questions covering various subtopics that will help you expand on that. Then once you've formed research questions, find the most important words in those and they can help you form that list of what kind of articles will work for you.
Therefore I can weed out articles entitled:
All of these really deal with the content of the show, as it's a heavily symbolic series. You can tell with the keywords on this list fit none of my parameters. I do not need to talk about the fantasy or surreal elements of the show, nor how nature plays a big symbolic part, nor the roles of Cooper and Laura Palmer in the show.
I also don't need a lot on the making of the series, like "'Doing Weird Things for the Sake of Being Weird:' Directing Twin Peaks" nor other articles about music, cinematography, editing, etc. Nor do we need obituaries or interviews of actors/contributors (unless you think that person could contribute information on the topic...for example an interview with Mark Frost, the co-creator, could contribute a lot, but perhaps not the show's composer Angelo Badalamenti.)
So this is what you should do with your topic. You need to let your eyes "forget" the articles that don't work; pretend they're invisible.
Remember: Use those research questions and ask whether that article title could answer that question.
So let me list sources that will actually work. Open up the PDF file below and see what was really available.
When you're organizing sources it's best to have all of the articles that could possibly work in a more formal bibliographic list, so you don't exclude anything possible. It's also a time for you to format your source information into whatever citation style required. In this college it's typical to use MLA or APA style guides. Because I am writing about something in the humanities, I've chosen MLA for this bibliography.
It's important to have a bibliography fully formed before you begin combing through the sources to find your research information for two reasons:
