Doing Research

From Ideas to Models to Drafts

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Googling is not Research

• In the digital age, there is an abundance of information. However, not all sources made equal—Googling something does not guarantee that what you get back in your search results will be valid, credible, relevant, or correct.

• Knowing how to find sources and evaluate them can help constrain the way you conduct your research, and ensure you get what you need from reliable authorities with good information.

• You can’t know everything about a topic. According to the Purude OWL’s introduction to evaluating sources, “anyone attempting to research what's known about depression would have to read over 100,000 studies on the subject.” Let’s be realistic. To focus on the task and the goal, good sources speed the process along.

Finding Reliable Materials

• Doing research means finding credible, factual sources that contribute to the ongoing dialogue of scholarship on a subject. To do that, it helps to start by looking in a place that will produce reliable sources.

• Most schools include the cost of materials in tuition, meaning that you are paying to have access to a wealth of information resources accessible through the library. Many of those are databases and journals that have search engines with the option to select “scholarly” or “peer reviewed.” This means that when you search, you are guaranteed to get vetted research material from credible, scholarly publications. This constraint is far more reliable than trusting a general search engine from the web. Plus, you’re already paying to have access. Why not use it?

Evaluating Sources

• When you find a source, you have to consider the validity of what it says before you decide to use it or take it for its word. Not all sources tell the truth, and many are politically or morally biased, written with a specific agenda in mind.

• To avoid falling into the trap of relying on what seems like good data, only to find out it is skewed, false, or fallacious and thus invalidates your argument, you have to critically challenge your research materials. If you take everything at face value, you may end up using something that supports your position, but which actually ends up hurting your argument by being bad information. Even sources that appear legit can often be designed that way on purpose, to trick those who don’t know better. Don’t end up with egg on your face or losing the argument to bad research.

Evaluating Sources

To guarantee that your source is credible and relevant, consider the rhetorical situation—the external information surrounding the argument:

• Author(s) – what is his/are their credentials? Are they area specialists?

• Audience – who is he/are they trying to convince? Is the argument biased or skewed to try and win the audience over, even if it misrepresents the facts?

• Argument – what mode of discourse is it? Is it a logos dominant text? What are the claim, grounds, warrant, limitations, backing, and refutation? Are they logically sound?

• Publisher – where is the text published? Is it in a reputable journal or from a credible publishing house like a university press?

• Context – what is at stake? What is the problem? What motivates the author to write in the first place?

• Recency – how old is the text? Is the information outdated? Is it too new: preliminary and thus unconfirmed?

Originality & Relevance

• You have to have some kind of working familiarity with the existing arguments to formulate your own. That is where you begin to discover your own findings—familiarizing yourself with what has been said to find out what hasn’t, what needs revision, what needs clarification, or what may be obsolete.

• To avoid saying what has already been said, you have to know what that is. The goal of research is to say something that is new; this is how you contribute to the long, ongoing scholarly conversation. It is also how you ensure that whatever you spend time on is relevant to the topic you pick.

• Sometimes what seems like a good idea has already been ruled out by findings you’re not familiar with. Research helps to clarify and define those boundaries.

Asking a Question to Get Answers

• Once you have good sources and have a general sense of how the experts see your topic, formulating a question will help to direct further research. A general sense of the discussion in a field is not the same as knowing the subject. To know something, you have to approach it critically, questioning it until you have mulled it over on all sides, examined all its parts so you have a picture of the whole in mind.

• Formulating a good research question to guide your research and writing is the best way to ensure you are testing an objective inquiry, rather than just trying to support a claim that reflects what you want to be true. An open ended question, no less, allows for new findings to direct the answer, instead of starting with a conclusion and fitting the evidence to those ends.

Fair & Balanced Argument

• A scholarly research paper aims to examine a problem that warrants further

investigation. That means that its not yet resolved and thus has at least two

strong but opposing viewpoints.

• A good examination, which is what objective research is, addresses both sides

of the argument to weigh them out. Evidence is collected on either side, but

the side that has the most evidence, then, is the most supportable and thus

the most sound, as far as the evidence allows at that time. As such, it should

serve as the grounds upon which a working thesis is formed.

Toulmin Model

• Once a tentative claim is developed, based on an objective evaluation of

what the evidence suggests is the most supportable answer to your research

question, you need to outline the logic of your claim.

• Using the Toulmin model, you should be able to state the key tenets of your

proposition and how your conclusion is grounded, backed up, and what

warrants it. You also need to address the limitations of your claim to ensure

you are not overgeneralizing or oversimplifying, and then address the

refutations, which means you have to predict and counter your critics.

Toulmin Model

• Claim

• Grounds

• Warrant

• Backing

• Refutation

• Qualifiers

Drafting the Discussion

• Once you’ve outlined the logic of your argument, you can then begin to outline your ideas and how you intend to lay out the case you’ll present.

• You have to plan your essay. No clean or successful court case is ever made without planning, research, organizing ideas, and then refining and practicing. So to, in writing an argument, you have to get your thoughts together, plan the development of ideas from point to point, and then make sure they are all relevant, unfold in a logical and coherent manner, and all lead logically to the conclusion your evidence adds up to. If you don’t organize your evidence into a memorable and understandable way, even if you have good, sound evidence, you could still lose the case. Thus, you need to try to put key points in appropriate places to sell the case.

Order of Operations

• Introduction

• Support for claim

• Refutation of opposition

• Argumentative analysis

• Restating logic clearly

• Larger implications

Filling in the Gaps

• Once you have an outline of points, break the paper down paragraph by paragraph—point by point. Taking it one section at a time makes it more approachable too.

• Each part of the equation deserves its own section and/or paragraph. Don’t over burden the reader—make it easy for them to digest. Each paragraph should only accomplish one goal, and that is to prove its supporting claim with concrete evidence.

• Your research fills in the gaps between the points you set up. That evidence should clearly illustrate each point, so each paragraph should have some solid, imagable, evident proof that backs up the topic sentence.