A collection of topics worth exploring

You Know Literature

By Anselmo Calderon

The following is a set of starting points for students who are carrying out research. It contains explanations of existing studies as well as some useful avenues for developing a research topic. The collection is not intended to be complete or to carry out the research for you—it is only meant to make the process of beginning research a bit more intimidating.

It can be rather overwhelming to look at a page and not know where to start, and that is precisely the gap which this collection aims to address. Perhaps you have an idea but don't know how to develop it, or maybe you're starting from nothing and just need a starting point. In either case the objective is the same: to provide you with something to work on so that research doesn't seem like wandering in the dark but rather like following a clear path.

There isn't a correct method for starting a research project and doing so only serves to make the task more difficult. What is important is locating a starting point—such as a question, a source, or a research topic worth pursuing—and then letting that lead the way. That is exactly the purpose of these research starting points: they won't provide you with a fully developed argument, nor will they pretend that carrying out research is easy, but they will give you a position from which to stand as you work out where you want to go. That is in fact the whole point.

Research advice often seems either extraordinarily abstract or laid out in a strictly step-by-step fashion as though curiosity could be boiled down to a checklist. It can't. Genuine research is more messy like that—you follow leads that turn out to be useless and then go back on them. You sometimes end up coming across something better than the thing you originally intended to find. That isn't a defect of the research process; that is what the research process is like.

Think of this collection not as a map but as a compass; it won't tell you where to go, but it will help you to orient yourself when you're lost. If you're dealing with your research project or simply working around an idea that you can't quite fix down on, see these research starting points as stepping stones not a lecture. It's a chance to become curious, to explore what's already available and to begin building something of your own.