Tips for History 115P Research Paper
Spring 2007

You are required to write an 25 page research paper on a topic related to violence in the Medieval world. This web page is to help you with your research, showing you how to find both primary and secondary sources.

STEP ONE: TOPIC SELECTION
You first have to pick your topic. What aspect of violence do you want to focus on? How do you want to frame your research questions?

Start with a reference book

The following is a selection of some of the reference books from the UCSB Libraries that might help you pick a topic. Remember to pick something that is interesting to you because it is really difficult to write a good paper on a topic that holds no interest to you. Decide which group, denomination or movement appeals to you the most and then look it up in a few reference books (from the list below or others you might find). Reference books will help you focus and describe your topic.

STEP TWO: SELECTING SEARCH TERMS
Now you need to identify key terms or concepts from your research question. Then come up with similiar concepts for each of those terms. These will be the words you use to search. You can print out this chart to help you build your search.

Here is an example of what this chart might look like:

This complete search string would look like this: (violence OR abuse) AND (home OR domestic OR family) AND (Church or Christian*) After doing this search, we might decide to eliminate some terms if they give us results we don't want. Or we might add some new ones.

The * is a standard truncation symbol. This means the search will look for any words that BEGIN with what is before the * ("christian*" will get christian, christians, christianity)

Depending on the database, you will use * or ? to truncate. Always check the database's help screens.

Brainstorm alternate spellings, too: medieval vs mediaeval

STEP THREE: WHERE AND HOW TO SEARCH
You need to find both primary and secondary sources for your research. Since the approaches are different, I'm separating them out here.

STEP THREE A: PRIMARY SOURCES
The University of California Berkeley has a helpful website on finding primary sources. It includes a table with some specific terms to add to your Pegasus or Melvyl searches to identify primary sources.

You can search Pegasus and Melvyl to find books. Pegasus will tell you what UCSB has and Melvyl will show you what is available from all the other UC campuses. You can access both of these from the library's home page: http://www.library.ucsb.edu

There are also a few series that will be useful for this. Below are some of the series titles; there are others as well. You can search these as a keyword and click the "words as phrase" box:

There are also a few websites that have digitized primary source material for this time period. Some of these same web resources also have secondary sources. For the ones that are subscription-based, you will need to follow the directions for off-campus access.

STEP THREE B: SECONDARY SOURCES

Books
Search the Advanced Search screen in Pegasus and Melvyl to find books on your topic. For search terms, refer to the Keyword Search Strategy worksheet you made above. Alternate your searches using one word from each row.

Articles
Use article indexes and other databases to find secondary source material. Most of the below mentioned are linked from the library's Article Indexes & Databases page.

Historical Abstracts

International Medieval Bibliography

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index

ITER: Gateway to the Renaissance (also has Medieval period)

MLA International Biography

Please ask for help when you need it. There is a librarian at the Reference Desk Monday-Thursday 9am-9pm, Friday 9am-5pm, Saturday 1pm-5pm and Sunday 1pm-9pm. You can also e-mail Anne Barnhart, the librarian for Latin American & Iberian Studies, Richard Caldwell, or Chimene Tucker, the librarian for world history. Be sure to put History 115P in the subject so we know it's not spam.