Research Techniques This page will help students learn how to do college-level research, by which I mean research that takes the student beyond the library card catalog and beyond the Internet into the world of specialized scholarly indexes and journals.  If you are taking my 1302 course as a web section rather than on campus, and if you live at a significant distance from the OC campus, please be aware that you may need access to a library, preferably a college library rather than only a small municipal library.  If you foresee a problem with this need, please alert me as soon as possible, and I will try to work with you personally to find some acceptable solution.  However, regardless of location, every student must satisfy the research paper assignment.  Having said that, I nevertheless anticipate that in most cases, the online resources of the Odessa College Learning Resources Center (our library) will be adequate for students' needs. The specific use for this page is for the research needed to complete the research paper assignment.  For that reason, the information here will make better sense once you have read the instructions for the research assignment.  If the following words, Research Assignment Instructions, are a live link, that means the assignment is open.  If so, click on the link, read those instructions, and return here.  If the link is not yet live on this page, then check within Blackboard.  In general, I open that assignment link after the Fiction Essay assignment has been submitted.  Even if the assignment is not yet open, you may still read further if you wish, to get an early idea about doing research for this course.  In doing research for the research paper assignment, the main skill most of you probably do not yet have is how to use specialized indexes.  Specialized indexes take a student beyond the card catalog of a library, to sources unavailable through a card catalog (and also unavailable on the Internet).  What this link will do is to give you specific instructions on how to use the best such index for research in literature, which is the MLA (Modern Language Association) Online Index.  It is available to you, through the OC website, from whatever computer you are using right now.  Then after those instructions, this link will guide you to several other useful indexes which work similarly. INSTRUCTIONS FOR USING THE MLA ONLINE INDEX NOTE:  The articles you will find by following the steps below are NOT the same thing you will find just doing a Google-type search on the Internet.  They are articles originally published in printed issues of professional, scholarly journals of literature.  Every student must use one such source in his or her research paper, as noted in the research paper assignment instructions. I suggest that you print these instructions so you can doublecheck them as you go. 1.         At your computer terminal, enter the web browser, usually Internet Explorer.  2.         Go to the OC home page.  If you are at OC, the terminal will go there automatically.  If you are at home, go to this URL:  http://www.odessa.edu/ 3.         Look at the menu to the left side and select "Learning Resource Center." 4.         In the menu on the left-hand side of the LRC page, select "Article Research."  NOTE:  If you are entering this from a computer off campus (as most of my students will be doing), then you will see instructions on how to use your OC username and password to log in to the MLA Online and other indexes.  Once you have read those instructions, enter your username and password, and you will be able to access the databases which the college subscribes to, such as the MLA Online Index. 5.         At the next screen, scroll and locate "Find by Topic"; under that heading, select "Literary." 6.         At the next screen, select "MLA." 7.         You should now see a search engine, with a blank for typing specific choices.  Now, in the blank in the search engine, type in the story’s title for articles on your story itself, and get those first.  (What you type in is the title of the short fiction story you are interpreting for your research paper assignment.)  Later, if you can’t find what you need this first way, do another search and instead of the story’s title, type in the author’s name, which will give you more general articles about the author's tendencies as a writer, or perhaps articles on other works by that author.  You can use such sources.  What you must do is find some discussion of some device or preference or type of character, setting, conflict, etc. which appears also in the story you are writing about.    The search engine will find articles for you as soon as you hit Enter, and it will list them, about eight or ten to a screen, with a button to access the next bunch, and so forth. 8.         Now carefully read each entry.  The MLA entries will tell you what type of source each one is:  journal article, book, or book article (meaning an essay in an anthology).  What you are reading each entry for, at this stage, is the type of source. Remember, as explained in the research assignment instructions, your paper must have a direct quote from one article found in a scholarly literary journal. The MLA index is the best source for such articles.  At the same time you are sorting through the entries for those which are journal articles, you should also be looking for hints as to the contents of the article, which you can judge fairly well by the title.  Important note:  Unless the entry has a link for "Full Text," then you cannot access the article itself from the index.  To actually read an article in a journal which is not linked as Full Text, you must physically visit a library which subscribes to the print version of that journal.  In most cases nowadays, you should be able to find the two sources you need as full-text articles which you can print.  If you can't, I suggest you contact me via email, and I will help you.  But please do not wait until the evening of the due date to ask for help! 9.         Choose several entries which look like good possibilities and either write down the author, article title, journal title, and issue, or just print out that page of the list.  Especially, be on the lookout for full text articles, which are signaled by a live link which will say either “HTML Full Text” or “PDF Full Text.”.  These can be called up right on the screen, and printed out.  When possible, choose the PDF, because PDF shows the original page numbers.  You will need these for your parenthetical citations.  HTML Full Text files lack the original page numbers.  If you are in my web section and reading this, then probably you will prefer, if possible, to use Full Text articles accessible from your home.  Depending on your choice of story to research, these may or may not be easily found. 10.       Once you lay hands on the article, either print it out (if a Full Text link), photocopy it (if accessed in print) or else just read it on the spot.  You are looking for one sentence which is somehow helpful to your own interpretation of whatever work you are interpreting in your research paper.  That will be the sentence from that source which you quote within your paper.  (Be sure that you record the various information you will need for your Works Cited entry on the secondary source you are quoting from.  To know what is needed, visit the Sample Works Cited Page link.) OTHER INDEXES ACCESSIBLE FROM THE ODESSA COLLEGE LRC ONLINE Return to Step Six, above.  At the same place where you selected MLA, you will see several other indexes.  Some are more useful than others.  The MLA Online Index is the best choice, which is why I have given you specific instructions for that one.  But if it fails you, I suggest your first alternative might be EBSCO.  Note that the steps to use EBSCO or other indexes may vary slightly from the ones for MLA, so pay attention as you go. In closing, a warning:  Very frequently, students panic if they can't quickly find the required journal article as a research source and fear that they must choose another story for the research assignment.  Please don't panic.  It is very rare that a student actually must switch to a different story to interpret.  Instead, try these steps: "Plan B":  Wait!  What was Plan A?  Plan A was to find a journal article which discusses the very short story you are writing your paper on.  But if you have selected a very newly published author, there may be no articles on that particular story yet.  So Plan B is this:  Go back to the search engine in the MLA index (step seven).  But where before you typed in the title of your story, now type in the author's name.  You will get a broader range of entries that way.  Plan B is to find an article which discusses the writer in general--not his/her biography, but certain patterns or preferences or literary devices that are common to many works by the author.  Then you will make the connection between some general remark about the writer, and what he or she did in the story you are researching. "Plan C":  Very similar to Plan B, Plan C means you can use even an article on some other particular work by that writer.  If you perceive that the writer is doing something similar in both works, then you can use that article, even though it discusses a different work by the writer.  By "something similar," I mean a similarity of type of conflict, or of type of character, or setting, or symbol, or some other device, or some similarity of issue, or even theme.  Lots of things can work. "Plan Q":  If you have genuinely tried all the above alternatives with no results, then contact me for help.

mjordan@odessa.edu work: 432.335.6549 surface mail c/o Odessa College, 201 W. University, Odessa TX 79764