GUIDE TO RESEARCH                      Written by Dan Chang

Preface:

A significant portion of your class grade rests on the quality of the term
paper you are required to submit.  The quality of your paper, in turn, will
depend highly on the degree of success you achieve in performing the research
necessary to obtain accurate, substantial, and varied information on your
chosen topic.  For those students who find themselves in the situation...

	You have only two weeks left to finish your term paper.
	You have only two sources that are rather vague at best.
	You declare up and down that there is absolutely no information
		available on your particular topic.

or for any student who is either having difficulties finding sufficient
material for a paper or is simply contemplating research with a sense of
ominous, foreboding doom, we offer this one reassuring note.  For every
term paper topic available there are thousands of excellent books, articles,
and other such material out there waiting for the erstwhile student.  These
topics are ones that are widely debated in our world today, and countless
numbers of students and professionals have found or produced millions of
words on them.  The goal of research is simply to uncover where these works
may lie.
		
How to research:

For the beginning student (or even the experienced one) research projects
can be extremely intimidating and stressful.  The art of research is in itself
a onerous task to master.  Nevertheless, one of the key abilities to be
acquired in college, and one of the most useful in life, is that of knowing
where to look and how to find information you need (whether it be articles on
fuzzy logic or a handbook of Acura NSX car repair.  This guide is intended to
give you an idea of the basic principles behind effective research and
hopefully help you in finding abundant material for your research term paper.

In any form of research project there are two standard methods of research.
The first I will refer to as subject-oriented research (there is a technical,
library science name for this, but I don't know what it is - maybe I should
go research it).  This is probably the kind you are most familiar with.  In
these cases, you will already know the specific topic you are interested in
(such as pleisiosaur mating habits) and can use this "key word" to look up
articles and journal entries in catalogs, indices, etc.

The LUIS system available at any campus library is probably the best
facilitator of subject-oriented research.  For those who are not familiar
with the system, it allows you to enter a subject, title or author keyword
and will then search for entries based on that information (see the library
staff for information and user-assistance).

You will find LUIS (and subject-oriented research) to be the overwhemingly
*least* useful method of finding articles and sources on which to base a
term paper of any real consequence.  LUIS is designed for locating library
items for which you have very specific information.  If you want to find all
the books that deal with Shakespeare or where you can find "The Grapes of
Wrath". looking in LUIS or a card catalog will be quite effective.  The problem
with LUIS is that it requires the "magic word" with which to look for
information.  When dealing with a topic such as "computers and effects on
society" you will find it excruciatingly difficult to come up with the word
needed to reveal articles of interest (and only those articles).  Simply
using the command

	subject=computers

for instance will give you some 4000 subtopics with probably an infinite number
of entries.  LUIS entries also tend to be rather outdated, and the topics
dealt with in your term paper are of a very recent and widely changing nature.

This is not to say LUIS might not be useful - in fact, for obtaining books
that provide descriptive and background information for a topic is can be
quite effective.  It is merely to point out that if you restrict your work to
this vein of research you will in all likelihood never find all the material
you will need for a complete, informed paper.

A better way to perform subject-oriented research is to consult a catalog called

	The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature

Available in all campus libraries (ask for the location at the circulation desk)
this book comes out every few months and lists all the periodical articles
(i.e. magazines, newspapers, journals, etc.) that were printed in those months
by subject.  Even though you will again need to look for the "magic word" for
your particular topic, each volume of the Reader's Guide is short enough that,
in the event that you get desparate, it is not difficult to flip through most
of the book in search of topics that might be close to what you need.  Although
by no means should your sources be limited to only periodicals, you will find
that periodicals provide the most recent information for our topics.  In
addition, your term paper stresses an analysis of the issues and controversies
surrounding a particular computer related field, and periodicals (specifically
the more "current affairs" type of magazines, etc.) are often specifically
geared at addressing the arguments (usually in a rather bias fashion) being
asserted over a particular issue.

Which brings us to the final, most effective method of research, and that is
what I will refer to as source-oriented research.  We can look at research
in the following manner:

	We already know that periodicals are a good place to find information
		(see above)
	We know that these topics are very current issues.
	We know where to find this "type" of information.

By this we mean that you know for a fact that, for instance, magazines such
as Time and Newsweek regularly present articles about things and stories that
affect our lives.  If you are looking for a discussion of the problems with
technology, you know that a non-technical science magazine such as Omni
or Discover would have an article somewhere in it.  In fact, periodicals tend
to recycle the same topics in some way every six months or so, since there
is only so much new news you can report, and since you need to follow-up
on progress all the time anyway.

So you can use this information in source-oriented research in this way.
For starters, simply walk over to the library shelves where they keep the
recent issues of Time and Newsweek (ask your librarian for directions).  Sit
down and flip through the last six months of each.  You need only look at the
table of contents, with an eye open for any articles related to the topics
you are interested in (before you go to the library you should have two or
three of your favorite topics in your head).  Within six months
of either of these magazines you will be guaranteed to find at least one
article (more like three or four) related to even the most obscure of the 
topics available to you.  What you will find is that, say if your topic 
happens to be virtual reality, you will see an article titled

	"little joey goes to the VR supermarket"

which you would NEVER have found in LUIS.

The upshots to source-oriented research are

	1)  You are guaranteed to find some kind of source, because you
	know that these sources are the kind that will have what you need

	2)  If you find an article, chances are that it will in fact be there
	(not like when you use LUIS and every entry is either checked
	out or missing)

	3)  Your sources will be recent (since you decide what month's issues
	to look at).

	4)  You will probably find references to other author's, books
	or magazines in the field.

This last point is especially helpful, because it not only gives your more
sources you can do research on, but if you get a specific author's name
or book title, you can go to LUIS and get much better results than the
proverbial "subject = computers".

>From here, you will want to determine what other kind of sources will have
articles on your particular topic, and repeat this method of flipping through
the last six months of the source.  For instance, if you have chosen the topic
of employee monitoring via the use of computers, you know that this is a
business issue.  Therefore, business magazines such as Forbes and BusinessWeek
will undoubtedly be discussing it somewhere.

To this end the following is a short (and by no means complete) list of some
sources to look through.


General Current Events

	Time				Newsweek
	US News & World Report
	New York Times			Wall Street Journal

Non-technical Scientific

	Omni				Discover
	Scientific American

Computer related

	PC Magazine			PC World
	PC Week

Humanistic (i.e. effects of technology on society - sound familiar?)

	The Humanist			Whole Earth Review
	Wired				Mondo

Business related

	Business Week			Forbes
	Esquire


As a final note, above all you should have a strong understanding of what your
topic of choice is actually about, and the types of issues that it entails.
This will keep you from missing an article as you are doing research simply
because you did not know that it applied to your topic.  In addition, having
the wrong idea about what a topic is about will cause you to look for
information that

	1)  you don't need
	2)  is irrelevant anyway
	3)  is probably not even there (i.e. it is not an issue so no one
	bothers to write about it).

See the professor or a teaching assistant for an explanation and clarification
of what a topic is about.