research 101 for writers
advice from a professional librarian
You may or may not know this about me, but I am a librarian by trade! I have been wanting to use my librarian brain write this post for a long time, and it seems more apt than ever in the age of Gen AI. Every time I see someone use ChatGPT for research I feel it in my solar plexus, and not in a good way.
I’m going to mostly be focusing on easily accessible and searchable open-access (free) resources that lean towards humanities and social sciences. There’s a variety of open-access search engines (Digital Commons Network, Core, etc) that I personally find overwhelming if I’m just looking for basic research. There’s a ton of search engines out there that you could look at, but I’m going to focus on how I personally do research in a way that maintains my sanity.
Wikipedia;
I think that gone are the days where researchers malign Wikipedia. Yes, it comes with caveats, because anyone can edit it and therefore is not entirely reliable, but I use Wikipedia for two things:
Finding vocabulary around a topic. Sometimes I don’t even know what to search because I’m that clueless about a topic! Wikipedia is great for picking up keywords.
References and further reading. Wikipedia is full of citations for the things it’s saying, and often, these citations are open-access and link directly to the full text! I’ve found a wealth of resources by just going through the citations of a topic. In library school we had an assignment where we needed to choose six random facts off Wikipedia and prove whether they were true or not, and it was a really interesting way to note the difference between what is rooted in cited fact and what is simply editorial paraphrasing. That is to say, citations, citation, citations! Pay attention to the superscript numbers at the end of Wikipedia sentences!
Encyclopedias (that are not crowdsourced);
Encyclopedia Britannica: Not everything is free, but there’s a lot of content you can access.
Encyclopedia.com: Not as comprehensive as Britannica or Wikipedia, but it’s there if you want overviews of broad topics.
Google (with a .edu twist);
You can tell Google what kind of domain you would like it to search. So, for example, I can do the following search:
islamic hospital site:.edu
That site:.edu bit tells Google to only show results that end in the .edu domain, which means you’ll get mostly university websites. Now, sometimes this means you’ll just see pages for books from university presses, university events, and paywalled articles, but sometimes you can find yourself in a random repository of information buried deep within a university website, totally inaccessible via the landing page. I’ve found gems this way, like unpublished research, exhibit write-ups, and old course archives. Often this can be a way to go down really great research rabbit holes.
Another limiter you can use is filetype:pdf which means your results will only be PDFs, which tend to be articles and reports. (Use this with a grain of salt, because anyone can upload anything as a PDF and that doesn’t mean it’s reliable.)
Google Scholar;
A favorite of university students everywhere, Google Scholar gives you the ease of Google searching, but with scholarly articles and books as your results! A lot of the content you find on Google Scholar is paywalled, but a lot of it isn’t, and that is usually fairly obvious from the search results page.
Dissertations;
Dissertations can sometimes be unwieldy because they’re so long (book length, usually) and not always freely accessible, but I loooooooove dissertations for research. They’re fascinating because they contain a lot of niche information. If you’re struggling to find information about a topic, I bet someone has already done a dissertation on it. When I worked on the Alamaxa Duology, a bulk of my research came from a dissertation someone had written on Doria Shafik.
JSTOR;
JSTOR is not technically free; however, if you make a free account with them, they will let you read 100 articles per month, which is a lot of articles (not every single article is eligible for this, but a great many are)! Now, you will not be able to download these articles in PDF format, but you’ll still be able to read them.
A JSTOR tip: Go to Advanced Search and make use of the Field drop-down menu, which tells JSTOR where to search for whatever keyword you are feeding it. Personally, I like to limit to Item Title, because chances are if a keyword is in the title of the article, then that article is heavily focusing on that keyword/topic. Plenty of other databases (ProQuest, EBSCO, etc) give you this option as well.
A Small Selection of Niche Open-Access Resources of Which I Am Fond;
Encyclopedia Mythica: an encyclopedia about worldwide mythology and folklore
The Victorian Web: everything to do with the victorian era
The Victorian Society’s Nineteenth Century Magazine: a magazine about the victorian era in the united states
The Anarchist Library: a collection of books and articles on anarchy
RAWI: a magazine about niche bits of egyptian history and culture
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: an encyclopedia of philosophers and philosophy
Old Maps Online: see what the world’s borders and territories looked like at various points in history
I hope you’ve found something here that will be helpful to you!
cheers,
hadeer
I love this. I think you just gave us a map index for world building research. Thank you!