Senior Essay Research Guide 

What is Zotero?

Zotero is a free, open access extension that runs in the Firefox broswer. It combines the citation management features of programs such as Refworks and Endnote with a number of other features helpful to researchers, including:

• the ability to save webpages and attachments in your Zotero account
• the ability to annotate saved web documents
• the ability to tag items your Zotero items for future retrieval.
  

Who made it?

Zotero was designed by historians at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

How can you try it?

• Everything you need to download and get started with Zotero is here.

• Also check out these helpful online tutorials.
  

What is RefWorks?

RefWorks is freely available to current Yale students, faculty, and staff, although you must register to use it.

It is special software that helps you to organize your bibliographic references and easily create footnotes, citations, and formatted bibliographies. The four basic functions of bibliographic software are:

• save references from research databases, or create new references
• add value to references with notes and keywords
• insert citations into a document
• format a bibliography for that document in a selected style (Chicago for historians).

Online guide at: RefWorks. Good tutorial inside the program

Foreign Language Dictionaries

Lexibase Online Collins Bilingual Dictionaries

WordReference.com

Writing a Senior Essay?: Get Started in Three Steps

Okay, so you have to write a senior essay. Assuming you've already lined up an adviser and have some idea of a topic, then you're ready to begin your research. But how do you begin? Follow these three steps and you should be well on your way to writing a fabulous senior essay.

GTE

Step One: Understand the Literature Review

Finding secondary source materials relevant to your project - what is called conducting a "literature review" - is an essential part of the senior essay. Unfortunately, senior essayists often pay too little attention to this crucial step. The importance of locating secondary sources is not simply to find background information for your project, though this is undoubtedly important. The purpose of the literature review is to identify a scholarly conversation in which you are going to situate your research. This is called positioning your argument.  Remember, historical scholarship is an ongoing conversation among scholars and your senior essay is an effort to participate in a scholarly conversation.

Here's a test: when you think you have formulated a research topic, ask yourself this question: "Who cares?" If your answer is that you found a collection of documents that nobody has used before for research, you still don't understand the full purpose of the literature review. You need to know what scholars have been debating about your topic and what kind of question/problem you want to investigate in order to contribute to this ongoing debate.

Unsure of what I just said or its relevance to your senior essay project? Then read these chapters from two of my favorite books. Actually, read them even if you did understand what I said:

• Read Chapter 8, "Why Johnny Can't Argue." in Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (Yale University Press, 2003). [Those of you considering graduate school will also want to read Chapter 10, "The Application Guessing Game."]

• Read Chapter 3, "From Topics to Questions" and Chapter 4, "From Questions to Problems," in The Craft of Research (3rd edition, Chicago, 2008)

Have I convinced you that you need to conduct a literature review? Good. Proceed to step 2.

GTE

Step Two: Getting Started on your Literature Review

Putting together a high-quality list of books and journal articles on a subject can be tricky. Literature reviews usually start with a book recommendation from an adviser, something you came across on a syllabus, searching amazon.com, talking with friends, or searching google. All of this is great, and you'll have to do a lot of it. But there are more systematic things you can do to supplement this organic and unwieldy process.

• Use Reference Sources

One thing you can do is to find a high-quality reference book on the topic you are researching. Lucky for you, the Yale University Library subscribes to several reference databases that allow you to search hundreds of reference books at once to find relevant articles. Remember, when you find relevant entries in encyclopedias, handbooks, dictionaries, or any other reference book, you are interested in the pointers to further reading in the entries every bit as much as you are interested in the article itself. The best databases for historians are:

• Blackwell Reference Online
  

This database contains nearly all of the volumes in Blackwell's excellent Companion to . . . series. Having it in a database is fabulous, though, because it not only allows you to view entries online, but it allows you to search the entire Blackwell collection at once. To give you an idea of the quality of essays in this database, consider this Matthew Frye Jacobson essay on ethnicity from A Companion to Post-1945 America (edited by Professor Jean-Christophe Agnew). Blackwell publishes companion books on nearly every period and subfield of history. Outstanding resource.

• Gale Virtual Reference Library

This database provides access to a number of high-quality reference books, and allows you to search the entire database at once. It contains more reference sources for European and international history than Blackwell.  Again, what you're looking for are not just articles, but articles with pointers to further reading.  Some articles treat "Scholarly interpretations and debates."

• Oxford Reference Online

The works just like the Gale Virtual Reference Library above, but includes access to the whole range of reference books published by Oxford University Press.

• Cambridge Histories Online

The Cambridge Histories Online offers up-to-date, authoritative, and fully searchable histories in fifteen academic subject areas.

• Search Journal Literature

Additionally, you will want to search some other databases in order to find scholarly articles relevant to your research:

• JSTOR

You probably already know and love JSTOR. It's great; it provides full-text access to hundreds of important journals. But it's always out-of-date (on an average of five years) and you'll want to supplement JSTOR searches with . . .

• America History and Life
  

American History and Life is fabulous. It indexes far more journals than JSTOR, and also includes books and dissertations. It's the essential database for historical literature reviews for North American history.

• Historical Abstracts

Historical Abstracts is also excellent and essential;  it covers world history, 1450-present. It indexes over 2,000 journals from around the world in many languages, providing coverage of articles, dissertations, and books. The abstracts are a particularly good way to get a handle on the historiography of your topic.

• History of Science, Technology, and Medicine  

HSTM indexes journal articles, conference proceedings, books, book reviews, and dissertations in the history of science and technology and allied historical fields. The file comprises four bibliographies: the Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science (HSS) (1975-Present), the Current Bibliography in the History of Technology (Technology and Culture) (1987-Present), and the Bibliografia Italiana di Storia della Scienza, and Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine.

• Academic Search

Academic Search goes through a number of current periodicals, scholarly, popular, and trade. Worth a look.

After you have completed these steps, you should have at your fingertips a fairly good literature review. If you still want more, however, come see one of us for a chat!

GTE, SFR

Step Three:  Find Primary Sources

[Note:  This section corresponds with Chapter Five: From Problems to Sources, in The Craft of Research.]

Assuming you have done your literature review and have found books related to your topic, you should have some idea as to what primary sources materials should be available to you. That is to say, chasing down footnotes and looking at bibliographies in the back of books to see what other authors have used is a great way to find primary source collections. That said, here are some more ideas for when you don't know where else to turn.

A good overview of the types of tools to find primary source material, both at Yale and beyond, is found on this Primary Sources at Yale website. All of the sources listed have their relative strengths and weaknesses. Here are my favorites:

• Orbis is the best tool for finding materials at Yale, though it's not a complete catalog for archival holdings at Yale.

• Worldcat is the most complete source for finding collections around the world.

• Archive Grid is also a great tool for finding collections, both at Yale and beyond, though it's not as complete as Worldcat.

Keep in mind that a very good - and often overlooked - source of primary source material at Yale can be found in the Microfilm Reading Room in the basement of Sterling Memorial Library. This link brings you to a list of major microfilm collections available in the Microfilm Reading Room.  Also useful, though not pretty, is our ancient database Newspapers on Microform.

GTE, SFR