1) Pick a topic. Preferably something you’re interested in.
2) Review your current knowledge of the topic. Write a journal, perhaps, describing everything you already know about the topic. Determine what areas you’re ignorant in and decide whether those gaps in your knowledge should be filled in.
3) Conduct a literature review from 30,000 feet. Google your topic. Read the first ten results thoroughly. The goal is to augment your own understanding of the topic and to discover current areas of controversy, not to find concrete facts/information. Record any questions that occur to you during this cursory search.
4) Find, and read, a seminal source. It’s been said that all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Oftentimes, a subject area will develop or at least progress under the shadow of one or a few significant scholarly works, so that, at least implicitly, all further scholarly contributions must either rely upon them or answer them. Find one of these seminal works for your topic (likely discoverable through your cursory research in step 3), read it, and reflect upon it in a journal.
5) Focus your inquiry. At this point, you should have chosen a topic, reflected upon why the topic is important to you, conducted a cursory literature review, and read one of the landmark scholarly works in the subject area. You should have an idea of where the gaps in the field’s knowledge are, where the points of controversy are, and what some of the applications of the subject knowledge are. Pick an area that intrigues you more than other areas and list some questions that will guide your inquiry. Journal about your choice.
6) Work through some current sources. Find 3 or 4 substantive sources (scholarly books or articles). These sources should be fairly recent: no more than 8-10 years old.
a) Read and Analyze Texts. Engage with the texts as you read them. Annotate. Underline. Ask questions. Make connections. This should take significantly more time than you’re used to. You should be able to get at least 2 journals out of each text.
i) Don’t underline everything. There will be a lot of information in these sources. Most of it should be left untouched. Only underline/take notes on the information you need, information that is new and novel, sentences that summarize ideas that the author spends pages explaining, information that you think you’ll use in your own project. There is unlikely to be more than one line per page worth underlining. Come see a research coordinator if you struggle with this.
ii) Don’t uncritically accept the author’s assertions. There is a tendency for young researchers to, when encountering new theories comprehensively set forth, as in scholarly books or journals, to accept them as authoritatively true. Fight this tendency. The author will be very convincing with his writing; he himself believes what he’s saying. But you should maintain a degree of skepticism. There’s no guarantee that even his statistical data is accurate. Continuous questioning of the author’s claims is very important.
b) Mine footnotes. I often find that the best way to find good sources that you might not find otherwise is to looks at other sources’ footnotes. This is essentially taking advantage of an expert’s familiarity of the literature, and often yields better results than a keyword search in a scholarly database, at least for broad research.
c) Reflect on the text. Once you’ve finished reading a text, write about it. Try to summarize the main point or contribution that the author makes. Record any startling facts that you learned, list any questions that you still have, and reflect on what relevance the information you’ve gained from the source will have on your project. How has your own thinking on the subject changed? Try to limit this reflection to 500-750 words.
7) Work through more sources. After reading 3 or 4 current texts, further focus your line of inquiry and find some more texts to read and analyze, perhaps from the footnotes of previous sources. Just 4 or 5 sources should be sufficient, but try to ensure that conflicting viewpoints are present. These sources don’t have to be as recent; oftentimes, the older writings will contain more useful truth than the newer ones.
8) Write. At this point, you’ve done quite a bit of research. You should also have done quite a bit of writing. But take some time now to really write. Use all of the information you’ve gained, all the thinking you’ve done, and write a substantive essay to elucidate everything you know and think about your subject of study. It’s important that you put a good faith effort into making this as complete as possible. From this essay you’ll be able to see what you still don’t know (and hence what you still need to study), and you should be able to see what you want your own contribution to be. Writing this essay should make your “so what?” clear, and give you a better idea of what your final product will be and what you need to do to build it.
9) Assess and plan. Much should be made clear to you through the process of writing your essay in step 8. Read what you’ve written, and sketch out what your next steps will be. More research will be required, but the next set of sources should be chosen much more purposefully. You should have an outline of what information you need to build your final product and you should be searching for that specific information (critically).
10) Audentior Ito.
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