HOW TO RESEARCH A PAPER: READING WRITTEN SOURCES
Determining Whether a Book Will Be Useful
Once you have a book in your hand, you can now find out if it contains the kind of information on your topic that you are looking for. Up to this point you have been relying on titles. Now you can go through the book's table of contents and the index at the end. These are much better guides to the book's contents. After all, titles can be misleading. The Election of Woodrow Wilson may turn out to be about the inner workings of the Democratic Party. If you are preparing a paper on Wilson, this book may not be of much use to you, despite its title. Even when a book deals specifically with your topic, its handling of the subject may make it less than satisfactory. For example, a book that is written for less advanced students, even though it is on your topic, will not make a good source. Its coverage will be too general, and it will also likely gloss over or omit important facts or interpretations that your research should include. You should avoid textbooks or works that seem to be written more for entertainment than information. If the author does not include footnotes and a bibliography, the book may not be a proper source for a research paper. A glance at the introduction should help you determine the kind of reader for whom the book was written. (A primary source, however, is good regardless of its form or intended audience.)
Understanding an author's bias
Using the table of contents
Using the index
The introduction, conclusion, and bibliography
If the book has no index, or if you wish to get the flavor of the work as a whole before selecting it as a source for your paper, the introduction, conclusion, and bibliography may be of help. Authors often explain some of their purposes and conclusions in the introduction, and a look at the bibliography (if one is included) will give clues as to what sources the author felt were important and how extensive his or her own research was. Skimming
How to Read Your Sources
Tackling Academic Vocabulary and Prose
The best thing to do is to reread such a sentence slowly and look up any words unfamiliar to you. Don’t be intimidated by references to "balkanization," "corporativism," "Hegelianism," "Mandate of Heaven," "negritude," "neomercantilism," "Pan-Slavism," "Pax Romana," "popular front," "primogeniture," "Reconquista," "shogunate," "Trotskyism," "utilitarianism," "White Terror," or "Zoroastrianism." As you become familiar with your topic, you will learn the meanings of the terms used by scholars. The way to get through the complex prose and vocabulary is to have a good command of English grammar and a familiarity with the subject being discussed. It is also best to ease into your topic gradually by reading the least specialized works first.
Understanding the author's arguments
If you wish to understand a particular author's interpretation of an event, you must know:
Only a careful reading of the entire work and close attention to the book's main arguments can give you such knowledge. Remember, history books are a selection of certain facts and interpretations constructed to explain a particular writer's understanding of a historical subject. If your own research relies heavily on a particular book, you will need to know its theme and bias.
Guidelines for Reading Your Sources
Another problem you may encounter is the author's viewpoint or bias. For example, a history of World War I by a French author is likely to have a different viewpoint from one written by a German author, especially if the books were written close to the time of the war. It is very important for you to understand the point of view from which a book was written. Many historical events and their interpretation are the centers of profound controversy. It is almost impossible for a historian to investigate one of these controversial areas without the involvement of certain biases. A particular attitude toward the topic is not necessarily bad, however. Historical problems are immensely complex, and without a sense of which things are important, the historian will not be able to choose from among those facts that can give some clear meaning to the larger questions involved. In any event, it is important for you to become familiar with the biases of the authors you read so that you will not unknowingly accept their viewpoints. If you agree with an author's bias, it is natural that you will favor his or her work in your research. But unless you understand the biases of the authors you read, and your own as well, you will not know why you agree with some authors more than others. Furthermore, you won’t be able to make a logical presentation in your research paper of the varying points of view.
The first place to check for determining the usefulness and emphasis of a book is its table of contents. Although some chapter titles are vague, most will give you a clearer picture of the contents than the work's title. If your topic is the Caribbean policy of Theodore Roosevelt, and you have come upon a book entitled The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, you will be pleased to find a chapter called "Hemisphere Diplomacy." Though the entire work may be of value to you, it is this chapter that will contain the most material on your topic. On the other hand, if the chapter headings are all concerned with Roosevelt's domestic policies or the cultural, scientific, and intellectual trends of the early 1900s, there may be little in the book on foreign policy.
If the chapter headings are not clear enough for you to determine the book's usefulness, read the index. Not every book has an index, but when one does, it is an invaluable tool. The index lists in alphabetical order the pages on which different persons or subjects are discussed. The index in a book on the Progressive Party in Wisconsin will list each of the pages on which Robert M. LaFollette is mentioned. It may even break this down and tell you which pages discuss LaFollette's early career, which discuss his campaigns for the presidency, and so on. When the scope of a book is very broad, the index is the best guide to finding that portion of it that is closest to your topic. Remember, however, that unless you read more of the book than just those pages that deal with your topic, you will not know the author's biases or conclusions, and these may be of great importance. Although you may want to select only small portions of a book to use in your research, if any of your own conclusions are drawn from a particular work, you will need to know its overall contents.
Perhaps the best way to gain an overall impression of a work is to skim its contents by reading the introductory paragraph of each chapter and perhaps the introductory sentence to each paragraph in those parts of the book that seem most important. Once you have chosen a book for your research, of course, there is no substitute for careful reading.
Reading books may sound easy, but, unless you have had experience in reading serious historical studies, you may have problems. First of all, some of the vocabulary may be new to you. A book on the French Revolution will contain such words as "Jacobin," "Thermidor," and "Girondin." A study of the atom bomb will talk about implosion and fission and such places as Tinian and Eniwetok. It is best to have a good dictionary handy. Another problem will be the academic or scholarly style of writing often found in specialized works. You will come across sentences like this:
Despite the innumerable, and often contradictory, themes reflected in the ideological stance of the right wing of the movement, it nevertheless managed, despite the defection of a small fascist element, to maintain the loyalty of the land-owning peasantry of the Central Highlands as well as the professional and shopowners associations of the capital, not to mention that of several union organizations that still maintained a craft orientation.
As you become familiar with the style and terminology used in a work, your main task will be to understand the points the author is trying to establish. All good works of history do more than just lay out a series of historical events and then combine them to form an understandable story of what occurred. Good historians want to prove a point, to show that a series of historical events means one thing rather than another. A history of the rise of Adolf Hitler won’t merely tell you that the National Socialist Party, which he led, increased the number of its representatives in the German Reichstag (parliament) from 12 to 107 in the election of 1930. It will attempt to describe the conditions that led to such an outcome and to explain the impact of the election on later events. Perhaps the author will discuss unemployment, German nationalism, the cartelization of German industry, the Treaty of Versailles, the growth of the German Communist Party, anti-Semitism, the structure of the German family, the philosophy of Nietzsche, or the insecurity of the lower middle class. The author will probably deal with some of these more extensively than others, and will attempt to show how the emphasized factors offer a better explanation of the subject than any others. Although almost all historians will agree on the number of National Socialist members of the 1930 Reichstag, each will construct the causes and effects of that fact in different ways—sometimes in very different ways.
To summarize the ways of determining the usefulness of a book, following is a short checklist.