In this course you will be going through the step-by-step process involved in producing an effective research paper. The end result will be an essay between 13 and 15 pages long devoted to a cultural aspect of a particular decade between 1950-2000; you must support your thesis and the entire paper with at least ten sources taken from books, scholarly journal articles, web sites, and at least one popular source. So, where to begin??!! Below is a very general outline of how to begin researching your topic, finding resources at the UCSB library, and beginning your paper.

You may want to explore this topic before you begin your in-depth research. Subject encyclopedias and reference books are a great resource for concise, easily-accessible background information. Below are a few examples; check Pegasus for call numbers and locations. Most of these will be in the general reference area on the first floor of the library, but some may be shelved in the stacks on the upper floors.

• Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture
• American Decades
• Encyclopedia of Social Issues
• Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture
• St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture
• Rock on Almanac: the First Four Decades of Rock ‘n Roll
• Handbook of American Popular Culture
• Dictionary of Twentieth Century Culture
• Encyclopedia of Pop Culture
• Encyclopedia of Television
• The Vietnam Experience : a Concise Encyclopedia of American Literature, Songs, and Films
• Grateful Dead and the Deadheads: an annotated bibliography

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Try to find a topic that interests you! You'll be spending a lot of time researching this -- be sure that what you decide on is suitable for a 15-page paper and is interesting enough to keep you motivated as you do the research and writing. This next step involves identifying key terms or concepts that define your topic, then designing a research question that will become the basis of your paper. You may need to narrow or broaden your focus at this point; use the worksheet to help you.

The * truncation symbol is used in most databases and will pick up alternate endings to a word, so that athlet* will pick up athlete, athletes, athletics, athleticism, and so forth.

pop culture

1960's music and politic*

rock and roll and political unrest

political unrest and Vietnam

Sample Research Question: "How did 1960's rock and roll mirror the political unrest of the Vietnam War?"

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There is a distinction between journals and magazines. The former are often referred to as 'scholarly', 'peer-reviewed' or 'refereed', and are the types of publications that you will most often use for your research papers. For this assignment, though, you may also be using popular journals or magazines -- check with your instructor about this. Here's a chart describing the main differences between these two forms of serial publications.

So, how do you find articles? The most efficient way to locate articles in journals is to use an article index or database . Indexes usually focus on a particular subject -- PsycInfo, for example, indexes journal literature in psychology and related disciplines, and Atla Religion covers religious and theological scholarship. The library subscribes to hundreds of these indexes, both in print and in electronic format; the trick is trying to figure out which ones to use. For this assignment the indexes listed below will be particularly useful. The complete list of article indexes and databases available at UCSB is at www.library.ucsb.edu/databases.

Note: If you are working from off campus and want access to articles and licensed databases, you must first register with the library's Proxy Server.


Expanded Academic.
This is a general index, which means that it covers journals articles on all topics and from both scholarly and popular publications.

• Type your keywords (e.g. rock music and society ) in the search box. If you want to limit your results to articles from scholarly journals, check the box labeled Refereed Publications.
• Some of the citations you get will be available online directly from this database -- you'll be able to tell this by looking at the icons next to the citation. Just click the article title for access.
• If the article is not full text in Expanded Academic, click the UC-eLinks icon to get the call number of the journal. In some instances, the full text version of the article will be available through another database which UC-eLinks will direct you to.
• In still other cases, you will have to look up the journal title in Pegasus and get the print copy of the article from the library shelves.
  
  

• This interface allows you to string together a number of synonyms across text boxes. For example, type words such as culture or cultural in the first row of boxes, then type 196* or nineteen sixties in the second row, and television or t.v. in the third.
• Most of the results will be citations to journal articles, but some articles may be available online: check for the “full-text” link in the yellow band above each citation.
• To the right of each citation you'll see a list of "descriptors". These are a useful means of learning the subject terms associated with your topic: go ahead and click any of these to explore.

• Enter keywords such as popular culture and 196* . The * truncation symbol in this case will bring up records that include 1950, 1951, 1950's and so forth.

JSTOR
A full-text, archival collection of journals from all disciplines and back to the journals' first issues.

• You may want to limit your search by date and to journals appropriate to this subject: from the Advanced Search page, type in your search terms, then scroll down the page and click the boxes next to Sociology and Population Studies, or whatever else is appropriate.
• You cannot email records or articles from JSTOR, so if you have a long article you'll have to print it or download it. In some cases it's actually more convenient to find the print copy of a journal article so that you can check it out and take it home.

• click the 'news' link in the upper left margin
• choose 'general news' from the first dropdown menu
• choose 'major papers' from the second dropdown
• enter your keywords. The default setting will search headlines and lead paragraphs, but you can change this in the dropdown menu.
• be sure to change the date in Step 4! It defaults to 'previous six months' which may be too limiting for your paper
• results are full text
• the Help link in the upper right leads to a useful section on how to cite references in MLA style. Click Help, then link to 'citing references' in the lower right.

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Use Pegasus to find books and other materials at the UCSB Libraries. Begin by using the default keyword search. This will find your words in all the regular places (author, subject, title...) and will also scan the tables of contents of most catalog records. Because critical, scholarly articles often appear in the form of book chapters, this keyword searching is a useful tool. The * symbol will pick up alternate endings to a word, so that crit* will find library records that contain the words criticism, critical, critique, and so forth.

Examples:

• cultur* and united states
• vietnam* and personal narratives
• social history twentieth century
• adolescents and culture
• rites of passage united states
• religious cults america

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The Internet can be a great source for information, but be careful: not every website has accurate or reliable information. Ask yourself if the website is authoritative and accurate. How do you know? Can you figure out who wrote it, whether it's been updated recently, or whether that even matters? Pay attention to domain names -- a website name ending in .edu or .gov may well be more authoritative than a .com or .org , but not necessarily. Use a website evaluation checklist such as USM website evaluation and Johns Hopkins website evaluation. And remember to credit anything you use from a website just as you would from a book or article.

Here's a list of sites that may be useful for this assignment:

• Popular Culture List of resources broken down by decade. Unfortunately, many links are broken.
  
• Sarah Zupko's Cultural Studies Center A good collection of annotated links to pop culture sites.
• American Studies Electronic Crossroads Endless links to other pop culture pages, plus bibliographical, research and teaching aids.
• Culture Studies Central A "gathering spot and central clearinghouse" featuring original interactive commentary and links to other cultural studies resources. Worth a look.

This one's all yours!


Step 7: Citation Formats

Here's a citation machine to help you format your citations and bibliography in standard MLA style.

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