As Stephen Jay Gould states, good research opens up avenues for more research

Stephen Jay Gould states, good research opens up avenues for more research

Paper 5 – Research Project

 As Stephen Jay Gould states, good research opens up avenues for more research. Rather than simply posing and answering an interesting question or summing up what has already been written, good research stems from a deeper curiosity which leads to multilayered analysis. Such analysis inevitably results in new questions that require the researcher to go further into the subject, consider more viewpoints, and synthesize their own thoughts with what they have discovered. Good research begets more research.

 

For your final project, you will be need to research a topic of your choosing. This project contains multiple parts to help you with the research process at the college level. To get started, you’ll need to consider what, out of all we have read and discussed, interests you. There are many ways to approach this question. You might:

 

• explore a theme brought to light by one of the authors we have read, such as:
  • socio-economic class or foodways in Wallace
  • survival or humans reactions to the extraordinary in Michaels or Tuchman
  • grace or epiphany in Alexie and/or Hughes
  • the relations of humans to nature in Pollan, Dillard, or Hearne
• investigate how some aspect of your major, or what drew your to your major, connects with one of the readings, for example:
  • the role of politics
  • the history or social imaginary of the “immigrant” or the “Indian”
  • cognition
  • ethics – medical, psychological, or otherwise
  • gendered experience
  • the meaning of race or ethnicity as explored by one of the authors we’ve read
• use one of your earlier papers as a jumping off place.
  • the role of storytelling in identity formation
  • how Aristotelian logic is supported or undermined in contemporary writing, assuming you go back to Aristotle himself as a source

 

These are only a few suggestions to get you thinking, and most will need substantial narrowing to work well. The important thing is to choose something that you are interested in enough to spend the rest of the semester with it. So with all of that in mind, here are the two rules for this paper:

 

1. Your research paper topic must be based in one of the course readings.
2. Your research paper must include at least four sources, including one primary source.

 

 

Research Prospectus:

2-3 pages

 

At every level of academia and in business, we write prospecti to help us pose our research questions and offer some ideas about how we will proceed to answer them. In academia and scientific research, these documents help secure grants and funding. In business, they let you pitch new ideas or sell your products.

 

• Your prospectus should include a full description of the narrowed question you plan to explore. You should assume that the first draft of your prospectus will probably be too broad of a topic. Use it as a starting point for the prospectus you eventually hand in.

 

• You should have done enough preliminary research to have an idea of what kinds of texts you will be reading (historical, political, medical, etc.) and where to begin looking for information. For example, what journals (note that this is much more specific than database) will you use? Are you more likely to find information in books or journals? You must have one primary source, either a text from our class or another text. What will that primary source be? What will you need to know before you can attempt to explore your questions? Try to anticipate any difficulties you might have, including biases you might encounter.

 

• Part of the point of preliminary research is to start finding out what has already been said about this topic, to learn the current point of the conversation you are hoping to enter. What is the state of recent scholarship on this topic?

 

To sum up, at this point, your research prospectus should include the following: the question(s) you will be asking (not the answers you expect to find), information about the text(s) you may look at, and a little about what people are saying about this question now.

 

A good research proposal thus typically includes the following parts:

 

1. Introduction (the subject) – what are you hoping to study? Why does it need studying?
2. Description of the texts you plan to study
3. Context of those texts
4. Scholarship – what has been said already?
5. Your Big Question (the topic) and why it matters

 

 

Annotated Bibliography

4 sources

 

Good research can only derive from good sources. Your final research paper must include a works cited list of at least four works in addition to any readings from the syllabus. To help you get a start on finding the texts you will later analyze, synthesize, and cite, you are required to produce an annotated bibliography. Annotated bibliographies serve as a way to organize your research and your thoughts about your sources. Well done, they can provide excellent source material and serve as memory devices for not only your current paper but also future work on related topics.

 

Your bibliography will include four sources:

 

• One of these must be from a peer reviewed journal.
• One must be a print source. (One may be an online source that is not a commercial site.)
• One must be a primary source, an original text/story/image.
• One more of your choice, as best befits your topic.

 

For each source, you must write a correct citation followed by two to three paragraphs, single-spaced, of annotations. In your annotations, you must brieflysummarize and comment on the author’s major points, their credibility, and the context (journal, publisher, editor, etc.) of the piece. More importantly, your comments need to include any reasons that lead you to agree or disagree with the author’s arguments and explain how this particular source enriches or complicates your ideas.

 

Some Successful Research Topics of Years Past:

From Lindahl: the revitalization of the city following the Great Fire of Baltimore

From Swift: Northern Irish punk as an expression of and escape from the Troubles

From Satrapi: the canonization of graphic novels and their use in high school education

From a personal essay: the formation and success of the International Criminal Court

From Kingston: choice of specialty as a gendered gatekeeping mechanism in medicine

From Percy: tourist sites in the age of social media

From Kingston: mystical experience and neurology