Exactly What to Do in Your First Two Hours of Research

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 a step-by-step plan for the first two hours of research on a new topic.

You Need a Plan

Once you have narrowed your topic, it is time to begin researching in earnest. But rather than taking a meandering approach to the research process, you should have an airtight plan to account for the first two hours of research on your topic.

Why should you have a plan for the first two hours? After all, you could go straight to the library website and just start searching, seeing what resources you hit on. But there are dangers in not having a plan for your first two hours of research:

• You might find sources that are out of date without knowing it.
• You risk missing the most important resources on your topic, ones that will be hubs that lead you to other important resources.
• You will add time to your research process. It will take more time overall to find quality resources so that you can move on to the next phase, reviewing your sources.

Furthermore, if you are haphazard in your searching, you will likely be haphazard in taking your notes and organizing the sources that you find. This will lead to confusion at each later phase, from organizing your outline, to drafting your paper, to generating and proofing your citations.

What if, on the other hand, you could quickly find the most respected sources and reference information on your topic, organized in a way that would save you time in the outlining, drafting, and proofing stages. And what if you could do that all within the first two hours of research?

I want to share with you my recommended approach to how to use your first two hours of research on a new topic. In the first two hours you will:

• Set up a simple organization system that will allow you to organize your information and sources as you go
• Find respected scholars on your topic and let them be your guides for which sources you should consult first
• Review a summary of the accepted scholarship on your topic so that you can be better equipped to review your sources
• Collect at least thirty books and articles in your preliminary bibliography that will show you where to go next in your research

Does this seem possible to accomplish in only two hours? If you have the right plan, you can actually get far more accomplished than you might think. Here is that plan, step-by-step.

• Step 1: Organize your files to collect bibliographic sources, research notes, and pdfs.
• Step 2: Read about the topic in your course textbook and your course schedule.
• Step 3: Consult an authoritative reference article on your topic an collect all relevant sources
• Step 4: Consult the "For Further Reading" section of your textbook and collect all relevant sources
• Step 5: Collect 30 sources on your topic, forming your Preliminary Bibliography
• Step 6: Go to your library website and order any books that are not in your library
• Step 7: Evaluate your topic for feasibility, and adjust as necessary

This plan is specifically tailored for a music history research project, but its principles can be applied to other research projects as well. When using this process for other projects, consider each step's principle, which is listed in bold, and apply the principle to the situation at hand.

Step 1: Organize your files to collect bibliographic sources, research notes, and pdfs.

In this step, you set up a simple system to capture the important information that you will discover during your research process. This does not need to be complicated.

First, I recommend starting a new folder in Zotero (it's called a "Collection" in the application) that is dedicated specifically to this project. Keep Zotero available during all of the steps below to add potential sources as you go. This folder is where you will put sources you find throughout your research process.

Second, create a new folder on your computer, and title it something that makes sense for your project, like "Verdi Research" (for a paper on Verdi). This folder is where you will put all of the pdf articles, scores, images, charts, and other materials you find on your topic. This folder is also a good place to keep your research notes file, where you can keep a single place to take notes as you go through the research process.

Finally, start a new note with your topic name and "First Two Hours" in the title. So for the Verdi example, the file name would be "Verdi Research First Two Hours." Keep this open and take notes in it throughout the steps below.

Set a timer for 10 minutes to complete this step.

Step 2: Read about the topic in your course textbook and your course schedule.

The first place to look for information on your topic is your textbook.

If you already know where to find the section on your topic, go there and read through it. If you don't know where to find it, use the Table of Contents and Index to find the main section or sections where your topic is discussed. Read through the discussion of your topic quickly, noting how much space is given to it compared to other topics. This will help you get a sense of how significant your topic is, and how much other research you can expect to find on it.

Next, zoom out from the specific passage on your topic and find what sub-heading it falls under. For instance, if you are doing a paper on Baldasare Galuppi, you might find that he is discussed in the section on classical music "schemas." Write down the section sub-heading name, as this can be used as one of your search terms later in this process.

Continue zooming out by looking at the title of the chapter in which your topic is discussed. The title of a chapter will typically be a broad category that your topic fits under. Write down the key words of the chapter title for potential use in your search later. (Note: If you realize at this point that your topic is the same as the chapter title, you need to narrow your topic. Look for a subheading in the chapter that interests you, and consider revising your topic to that instead.)

Finally, go back to the Index, and quickly read through any other mentions of your topic in your textbook, noting the sub-heading and chapter names of these mentions. This will give you an idea of whether your chosen topic cuts across various eras, or is focused within a single main time period.

Step 3: Consult an authoritative reference article on your topic an collect all relevant sources

Once you have reviewed your textbook for information and gotten a sense of the core points connected with your topic, consult an authoritative reference article on your topic. For music history, the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is the gold standard. This reference work is now completely online, and is housed within the Oxford Music Online database.

Go to your library website and find the Oxford Music Online database, asking a librarian for help if needed. Search for your topic, and scroll through the entire article. Don't start reading it yet. If you have chosen a well-known composer such as Mozart, Wagner, or Stravinsky for your paper, the article will be quite long. For now, just read the summary paragraph(s) at the top, to get a sense for the significance of your composer or genre.

At this point ask yourself:

• Why is my topic historically significant?
• Write down your answer in your notes, drawing from the summary paragraph, and your reading of your textbook in Step 2.

Once you have written your answer to this question, look at the section headings of the Grove article, which are organized in the left sidebar. Peruse these subheadings and note any that interest you. One of these subheadings might become the beginning of an area of interest for your project, and could lead to a juicy research question.

Finally, go to the bibliography of the reference article, and collect sources that are included there. Choose the most recent sources so that you are aware of up-to-date scholarship in your field. Other reference sources will differ, but in Grove, the bibliography is not ordered alphabetically. It is ordered chronologically from earliest to latest. Unless you can read in other languages, only choose English sources for now.

Add each of these sources to your Zotero folder. These will be the first sources in your preliminary bibliography.

Step 4: Consult the "For Further Reading" section of your textbook and collect all relevant sources

Once you have consulted Grove, and captured the historical significance of your topic, some sub-headings, and some bibliographic sources, return to your textbook, and find the "For Further Reading" (FFR) section. This section is where your authors put the most essential sources that you should consult if you would like to know more about a given topic. In other words, they have done the work of reviewing the available scholarship (often consulting specialists in specific areas) and organizing the best sources in one place for you to use.

You may have to search for your textbook's FFR section. Many print books have their FFR at the end of a chapter or collected in the back of the book. In one popular music history textbook, A History of Western Music, the FFR section has been moved to a digital file that can be found via the publisher's website, or on your course website. This digital file has the advantage of being searchable, like any document.

Once you have found the FFR section, search it for mentions of your topic. Add any sources that you don't already have to your Zotero bibliography folder. Note any sources that you also saw in your review of Grove, as this is a further indication of that source's authority.

The For Further Reading section is there for your benefit. You should use it to make sure you don't overlook an important source on your topic.

Step 5: Collect 30 sources on your topic, forming your Preliminary Bibliography

If you have completed steps 3 and 4, you should already have several sources in your Zotero bibliography folder that you set up in step 1. Now your goal should be to collect many sources quickly, so that you can more efficiently review them later.

One word of warning: you may want to start reading through these sources as you collect them. Don't. The goal here is to collect, and only later will you review these sources, something I will tell you more about later. It is a smart approach to separate the tasks of collecting, reviewing, and taking notes on your research sources.

For a step-by-step approach to gathering 30 sources on your topic, see that section in this book. But in essence, the method is to start with sources that you already have, such as your textbook and a good reference source, and gather the sources in their bibliographies. It can be a very powerful and time-saving exercise to use the bibliographies of others to grow your own, because you can leverage the work that other scholars have already done to evaluate resources. Once you have collected the sources from your textbook FFR section, and a reference article, it is time to do some advanced scholarly searching. Use the targeted search terms from your topic, and from the subheadings you gathered above, to find additional sources.

• University Library Online Catalog: scholarly books
• Online Journal Article Databases: scholarly articles
• Google Scholar (scholar.google.com): scholarly articles

Set a timer for 15 minutes, and see how many sources you can add to your preliminary bibliography. If you don't reach 30 in the first 15 minutes, just reset your timer for another 15 minutes, and keep going. If you have reached 30 sources and still feel that you have not exhausted your search, keep adding more resources. Thirty sources are a minimum, and you may want to find quite a few more at the beginning of a search. You can always filter out later the sources that do not prove useful.

Some final notes and reminders on the preliminary bibliography that you are building in this step:

• you do not need to have a book or article in your possession to include it in your preliminary bibliography
• don't be too picky at this point; gather any resources that you feel might be useful, and you can filter them out later
• your preliminary bibliography is not the same as the bibliography that will go in your paper; this bibliography is just your own subset of the world's research on your topic so that you can make your research more manageable. If the entirety of the world's research on all topics is an ocean, in this step you are creating your own little pond of research on your topic for you to fish in.

Step 6: Go to your library website and order any books that are not in your library

Now that you have created a preliminary bibliography, the goal is to gather all of the actual books and articles so that you can begin reviewing their contents. Some books and articles will be readily available through your library, through online databases, or searching Google Scholar for pdfs. But one task that you should take care of now is to order any books that are not in your library, and that you do not have access to via eBook, from Interlibrary Loan. Books that are sent via Interlibrary Loan take a minimum of a few days, and sometimes a week or more to arrive in your library. Order any books that you think you will need now, so that you have enough time to review them.

Step 7: Evaluate your topic for feasibility, and adjust as necessary

If you have gone through all of the steps above and have not been able to find a substantial amount of research on your topic, then your topic may not be appropriate for a term paper in a survey course. If this is the case, you may wish to alter your topic to something that has more available research that you can access quickly in the span of a single term. Consider the research you have accomplished in these two hours—was there another topic that you came across in your search that caught your eye? This might be a candidate for a new topic. It is much better to find out early that your topic is not feasible than it is to do so at the end of a project with a deadline looming.

On the other hand, you may have found through the steps above that your topic is far too broad. If your topic is "Verdi" for instance, you will be faced with wading through a vast amount of research. In this case, you would do well to narrow your topic to Verdi, plus another subcategory, such as "Verdi's late operas," "Verdi's style," or even a single opera such as "Verdi's Aida." To find appropriate subcategories, look again at the subheadings you found in your reference articles, or other categories that you noticed while researching your topic in the other steps above.

Conclusion

The steps above are designed to help you build a significant foundation for your research on a new topic, so that you can avoid wasting time. These research steps can be broken up and spread across multiple research sessions, but accomplishing them all in one solid, focused block of time is ideal. The time needed to complete the steps in this process will vary, but two hours is a good measure. If you are taking much longer than this, it may be that you are getting hung up on reading the sources instead of simply collecting them. This can be a challenge, because if you are curious about your topic, you are likely to become interested in what you find. To avoid this trap, keep a piece of paper or a series of notecards next to you as you review. Jot down any source that is especially interesting to you, and why it caught your eye, and then return to these notes later as a way to organize your review of the materials.

In order to save yourself unnecessarily wasted time, avoid a haphazard approach to your research. Instead use the steps above as a guide to build a solid foundation to your research. Tweak the steps where you need to, depending on your research project, and hone your ability to gain an understanding of the terrain of new topic quickly. Once this has been accomplished, the next step is to review your sources.