Beginning a search
If you are presented with a new term or concept, with the expectation
that you'll inform yourself about it and investigate what's being done by
active researchers, where should you start?
The answer depends in part upon what you already know, in
part upon what resources you're already comfortable with, and in part
upon what the outside world (in this case, your faculty
supervisor) expects of you. A few years ago the obvious starting place
would have been dictionaries and encyclopedias; for the last 4 years or
so the 'electronic card catalog' [ANNIE at W&L] has been the first
tool of choice; but
now a persuasive argument can be made for starting with the World
Wide Web --and if you're in Dr. Wielgus' group, that's your explicit
assignment.
Whatever starting place you choose, your task is primarily
linguistic in that you have to make sense of terminology as
you read items (books, articles, references, etc.) you encounter. And
it's certainly true that you'll need to explore a wide variety of
possible sources. As I've noted elsewhere,
No single source contains everything you need;
every
search teaches you something.
Consider what the various possibilities can get you:
- Library catalogs point you to specific books and to areas of
the library where shelf browsing may be fruitful and to significant
terminology which you can incorporate into your searches.
- 'The Web' has vast amounts of possibly-useful stuff, but you
have to (a) have a good idea of how to search the anarchy and (b)
you have to read and evaluate much and discard a lot.
- Reference books (not all of which are in the library's Reference
section) sometimes provide excellent summaries of topics --more focused
than most of what one finds on the Web.
- Science journalism (newspapers, general magazines, 'news' sections of
science magazines) can be extremely useful in the early stages of
discovery, before you are familiar with the specialized terms of the
research literature.