A Guide to Political Science: Research As Conversation

Research is a conversation. People (experts) are having conversations about your topic. These conversations can be found in information sources. Your job is to access, explore and evaluate the conversation as it occurs in these sources. Once you understand the shape of the conversation, you can contribute your own ideas. 

As you read more about the topic, you'll develop a research question or hypothesis, based on questions you want to answer. By reading sources, you'll further refine and develop your questions. Remember that research is also a conversation between you and your sources & your topic/question.

To start exploring the research conversation:

• Start tracking down sources by searching the library catalog and library databases.
• Refer to the appropriate Research Guides to identify additional places to search
• Tracking Down Materials will help you find hard copies of sources 
• Skim/browse the sources you find. What specialized terms appear? Search for sources using those terms.  
• Look at how the sources define the scope of the topic to determine if your research question is too broad or too narrow.
• Talk with a librarian and your professor for pointers on where and how to search. Your professor might have specific scholars to recommend. A librarian can recommend ways and places to search.

Try to answer these questions:  How are experts discussing your topic? What themes do they consider? What common questions do people debate? What is the scope of the topic? Who is having the conversation – are you seeing the same names mentioned in the citations again and again?

Bibliographic traces are a key way of exploring the conversation. Once you've started to identify useful sources, you're ready to do a bibliographic trace. Start by identifying what the author of a source says about other scholars in the field. Most scholarly articles and books have a section - like a literature review - where they discuss existing scholarship. Look for phrases like "So and so is a key leader in the field" or "So and so's methodology impact our work" or "We disagree/agree with so and so".

Once you've mined your source for additional sources that might impact your work, track them down. Go to your source's Works Cited or References section. Use Tracking Down Materials for help. By tracing cited works, you will find connections that you might otherwise miss. You will discover the patterns of the conversation around your topic. This is the way most scholars search for sources, so try searching the way experts search.

How to do a bibliographic trace: Use the citations in the Works Cited or References section. Search for cited books by title or author in library catalogs. For journal articles, check the Do We Have This Journal by journal name to see if we have the full text of an article. Some databases also include features telling you how often a work has been cited. Use Tracking Down Materials for more pointers on how to find hard copies. Please also contact any librarian if you need help at any point of this process.

You can also go forward in time to see who has cited your original source since it was first published.

• To see who has cited a work since it was published - enter your original source in Google Scholar and look for the Cited By link underneath the information about the source. Click that link to see all the sources who have cited yours.