Bibliography Sprint: How to Find 30 Sources in 15 Minutes
This post comes from a book I am working on called Research and Writing for Music History Students: A Field Guide. While the book is aimed directly at students in the music history sequence, the concepts in it apply to anyone who is looking to accomplish research. In this excerpt from the “Tactics” section of the book, I discuss how to quickly find relevant sources for your topic. This chapter is meant to be paired with my steps for Exactly What to do in your First Two Hours of Research.
How to Build a Preliminary Bibliography
Step One. List your topic.
Step Two. Define your search terms. Include terms that zoom in and zoom out so that you can have a broad starting point for collecting items on your topic.
Step Three Check the bibliographies in other sources, such as your textbook's "For Further Reading" section, and related reference entries in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Add selected resources to your list.
Step Four. Search your library's online catalog, and add relevant scholarly books to your list.
Step Five. Search online databases of scholarly articles, and add selected resources to your list.
Step Six. Search scholar.google.com, and add selected resources to your list.
Before You Start
Before you start, take a few minutes to set up some research tools, so you can be more efficient in your collection of resources. Remember, the slow way is the fast way, and if you take a few extra seconds to check each source as it comes in, you will thank yourself later.
If you haven't already, download and install a reference manager, such as Zotero or Mendeley. I use Zotero. This is where you will put all sources that you collect during your search. Set up a new folder for your research project (see What to do in the first two hours of research on your music history topic.)
I recommend that you install your reference manager's web browser plugin, such as the Zotero Connector. This will allow your reference manager to read information from the web page you are searching and automatically capture some or all of the bibliographic information on a source.
Keep in mind the following rules before you get started:
Collect scholarly sources such as books and articles.
Take the time to check bibliographic information at the point of entry.
You do not need to have a source in your possession to collect it.
When in doubt, collect it. Have a bias toward inclusion.
One important caveat: if you go through the six steps here and are unbale to get 30 sources on your topic, consider adjusting your topic. Perhaps you can zoom out, or focus on a different part of the topic or era to find more sources.
Step 1: List Your Topic
Step 1 is to list your topic. Write it down on a piece of paper, or in a document on your computer screen, and keep it close by during the process of building your preliminary bibliography. Refer back to your topic during the process, revising or refining it as you find resources.
Example Topics
Verdi's style from early to late.
Jazz in the Civil Rights era.
Step 2: Define Your Search Terms
Step 2 is to define your search terms. Begin by writing down the obvious search terms, such as a composer or genre name. For the Verdi example, some good search terms would be: "Verdi," "opera style," "early style," "late style." Next, zoom out and zoom in on your topic, defining additional search terms. Zooming out on the Verdi topic would add "Italian opera" to our terms list. The process of zooming in would perhaps include considering some specific operas, one early and one late. An earlier opera might be Rigoletto or La traviata, and a late opera might be Otello. There will be other search terms that occur to you throughout the process. As they do, collect them in your notes.
You can get started after doing the steps above, but you may want to add the step of finding appropriate Library of Congress Subject Headings. See defining your subject headings for how to do that.
Examples:
Verdi Topic Search Terms: Verdi, style, early style, late style, Rigoletto, La traviata, Otello
Jazz in the Civil Rights Era Search Terms: jazz, civil rights, avant-garde, Art Blakey, Abbey Lincoln, Freedom Now Suite, Charles Mingus
Step 3: Check the Bibliographies of Others
In step three, go to your textbook's “For Further Reading” section, and find where your topic is discussed. The For Further Reading section of a textbook is a great way to find influential scholarship on many different topics. The authors of your textbook have already done some of the work for you. If your topic or a related topic has sources in the For Further Reading section, add them to your bibliography.
Next, go to the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, an online reference work that is housed in the Oxford Music Online database. Find reference articles on your topic, and then go straight to the bibliography of each. Collect sources that look relevant and recent. Note that unlike most bibliographies, the bibliographies in Grove are organized chronologically, rather than alphabetically. So you can see which sources are the most recent by going to the end of the bibliography and working in reverse. Unless you speak other languages, only collect sources written in English.
After these two most recent steps, you should already have a handful of sources in your preliminary bibliography. Keep in mind that combing through the bibliographies in the books and articles you find can be a great way to discover additional relevant sources throughout your research. Any time you find a book or article that is closely aligned to your topic, be sure to go to the bibliography and collect any sources that might be relevant to your topic.
Result: 5–10 sources
Step 4: Collect Scholarly Books
In step 4, you will use your defined search terms to check your library's online catalog for print books and Library of Congress subject terms. Go to your library website, and find the search bar. Select "Advanced Search," and put in your first search term. Under item type, select print books and select ebooks. If you don't know how to use advanced search, ask a librarian, or search the help documents on your library's website. Consider also limiting the date of your search to only find sources after 1980. This will allow you to start with more recent research. Run your advanced search.
In the search results, start collecting the bibliographic information of books that seem recent and relevant to your topic. Resist the temptation to look too deeply at this point. There will be time for that later. Instead, your goal should be to collect all the resources that you intend to review later. Spend a few minutes collecting book resources from your library. Repeat this process for other keywords in your keyword list.
Search tip: instead of searching by keyword, try searching by subject. If you can find the right subject heading for your topic, your search results will likely be more relevant.
Result: 10–15 sources added to your bibliography, but you may get many more.
Step 5: Collect Scholarly Articles from JSTOR and Google Scholar
Now that you have collected scholarly books in your bibliography, Step 5 is to check online databases of scholarly journals and add relevant articles to your bibliography. The sources in your paper should be balanced between books and journal articles. Books can often give a wider view of how your topic fits into a genre, time period, or other category, but scholarly articles often discuss specific cases in more depth. To find scholarly secondary sources in music history, I would recommend starting with JSTOR, if it is available through your library website. If it is not, skip to the Google Scholar step below. This database will allow you to access a large number of articles very quickly.
Since JSTOR includes journals from many disciplines, be sure to use the advanced search capabilities to find more relevant results.
Recommended advanced search settings for JSTOR:
Select an access type: Content I can access
Item type: articles
Language: English (add any languages here that you are comfortable reading in)
Publication date: 1980 and following (leave the end date blank to indicate this)
In the Journal Filter, narrow your search by discipline by selecting "Music"
Review the search results and add any relevant sources to your bibliography. While you will be reviewing sources very quickly in this Bibliography Sprint process, you will want to come back to this step later and do a more thorough search of JSTOR. You will also want to search other relevant music databases such as Academic Search Complete, and RILM Abstracts of Music Literature.
After you search JSTOR, go to Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com) in a web browser. Google Scholar allows you to use the power of a Google search, but just on the world's scholarly articles and books.
When searching Google Scholar, it is best to start by using the basic search bar (make sure "articles" is selected), then refine your search from the results page. Start by searching for a relevant keyword, and submitting the search.
On the Google Scholar results page, you will see a listing of relevant results. I recommend setting a custom time range starting from the past ten years to today. Once you have gone through those resources, you can work backward by decade. Collect any sources that seem relevant to your topic.
Result of this step: 10–15 articles added to your bibliography, but you may get many more.
Working with Your Preliminary Bibliography
If you have gone through these five steps, you should now have a healthy start on your bibliography. Hopefully, you have at least thirty sources, but depending on your topic you may have found several more.
Remember that the purpose of this preliminary bibliography is to provide a list of resources for you to review in the next phase of your research process. You should continue adding new sources as you find them, and remove sources that end up not being useful. In the end, your bibliography will stand as a record of your research, reading, and thinking on your topic. The bibliography that you end up putting in your research project will be a subset of this larger list, because it will only include the items that you cite in your project. Always keep the separate, larger list of sources on the topic so that you can refer back to it during the process of completing your project, or later in your career.
What Do I Do if These Steps Didn't Work?
You may have found during this process that you either found too many or too few resources on your topic. If you found thousands of relevant sources in your searches, your topic is likely too broad, and needs to be narrowed. If you were finding very few sources for your topic, it may be that your topic is too narrow, or that you haven't yet found useful search terms. In either case, use your searching creativity and problem-solving skills to either narrow, broaden, or shift your topic focus. Consider the sources you found in your search. Was there anything that caught your eye as interesting, something you would be curious to learn more about? Often, a clear research question will emerge only after you have done considerable reading on the topic. After you have done some work on your own, set a meeting with your instructor to discuss how to refine your topic and research question.