You need to develop a research strategy or methodology. Are you going to:

• Read your sources and find common themes: What questions do you want to “ask” your sources? How do those questions relate to your “problem of study?”
• Quantify certain things in a period of time? For example, are you planning to quantify how many times a female politician made the headlines in a particular newspaper and compare it to the number of headline references to male politicians over the course of five years? Are you planning to account for the times the word “democracy” appears in a speech by one or more presidents and analyze how it was used and the meanings of it? What questions do you seek to answer from this quantitative analysis?
• Compare a number of sources that have common themes but were produced at different times, and find similarities and contrasts? What questions do you want to answer from this comparative approach ?

It is not possible to construct a research strategy that is applicable to all historical research. However, finding and reading other articles about similar topics about other parts of the world or times can:

• give you ideas about questions you did not consider
• suggest possible sources or different hypotheses
• help you as an analytical tool; give you suggestions of possible ways to analyze your sources and findings
• provide you with good models about how you might organize your own piece of writing

Example: A student in one of the Spring 2005 J400 courses researched caricatures produced during the U.S. Civil War and the War of 1898 and analyzed how African-Americans were represented in these. In her paper, she asked the question, how similar and how different were these depictions of blacks in the U.S. media? This student found ideas about research strategy in an article about how African-Americans were represented in newspapers during the Civil Rights movement. Although the article did not give her information to use in her paper, the way it analyzed the sources gave her ideas about how to use her sources and helped her to think of questions that she had not considered before.

If you consider other ways in which scholars have “attacked” the issue, you can structure and analyze your attack in a more secure fashion. Of course, you should acknowledge in your bibliography the essay(s) or books that gave you ideas and inspiration.

List all of the possible subject headings and use the online sources listed in your course-specific website or other IU Wells Library sources. In the example above about media representation of African-Americans in the Civil War, the student used subject headings such as: blacks and cartoons; caricatures and cartoons; African-Americans—history—caricatures and cartoons.

A research proposal is an essay (often only a few pages long) that describes the following:

1. What problem you want to study. Be sure to contextualize the problem; explain not only what, but also when and where. See “How can I find a question/controversy/problem of study?”
2. Why this problem is important. Taking into account what has been written on this subject (your annotated bibliography, if you’ve prepared one, should help you identify what has been written about the problem you’re studying), explain how your problem of study relates to what has been written on the subject and why someone should examine the problem you've chosen.
3. How you will study the problem. Explain your research strategy or methodology and describe your sources.
4. What you expect the result to be. What conclusion do you think you will come to? See “What is a hypothesis?”
5. What sources you've already found that you intend to use and how you plan to use them. A bibliography or annotated bibliography is often included in a proposal.

If you don't address the issues above before starting to write, you're likely to have a long, painful, and unsuccessful writing exercise. On the other hand, a clear, well thought-out proposal can make the writing process easier. In fact, your proposal can form the basis of your paper, because the structure of the two is very similar.

Proposals are often used to compete for grants as well. For this reason, the tone of the essay should be very persuasive; you want to convince the reader that your project is important and that you have the best possible way to execute it. It should also be clearly written so that people from different disciplines can understand it.

There aren't any hard and fast rules here, but the following brief outline is appropriate for most proposals in history:

1. An introductory paragraph: Here you identify the general topic and the research question or problem (that is, the question that the thesis statement of your paper will answer). You should also establish the significance of your research.
2. A section that describes the larger historical context and perspective on your topic: Try to identify the major trends in the literature on your topic, and very briefly review that literature. Who has written on the topic, and what have they found? (See “How do I find sources for my paper?” and “Why create an annotated bibliography?”) What questions remain to be answered? Restate your question in the context of this literature review, showing how it fits into this larger picture.
3. A section describing your methodology: In this section, you describe your “plan of attack”—that is, how you will approach your problem, and what sources you will use.
4. In the final paragraph(s), discuss what you expect will result from your research (your hypothesis ) and reiterate how it fits into the larger historical perspective on the topic.
5. You must also include a bibliography that lists the articles and books you plan to use in your paper.

After identifying what your research strategy will be, and preparing a research proposal that will guide your inquiry, you're ready to do the actual research.

This depends on the type of research or “research strategy” you are conducting and your personal preference. You can:

Suggestion #1 : Take notes on index cards.

Have one set of index cards with the bibliographic information that you will need for building your bibliography later on.

Use another set of index cards to take notes. Some people like to have an index card for each theme, i.e. African-Americans and caricatures about work; gender and caricatures; clothing and caricatures, etc. You can write the theme on the top of the card and take note of what you find about that topic in different sources. Write the last name of the author and page (you have the rest of the bibliographic information in the bibliographic index cards described above). You can easily organize these cards later on by topic and use them as you write your paper.

Example:

Yet the problem is how to select what you need to write from your mountain of evidence. Of course, you do not want to copy everything you read or you will never finish! It's therefore critical that you have a question of study or hypothesis that will help you determine what to take notes on and what to skip past. Ask yourself how everything that you read relates to your hypothesis. Of course, your hypothesis may change slightly or completely as your research advances. Do not get disappointed because you should have taken different kind of notes from the first books/articles you read. This happens! See it as part of the natural process of doing research (and look at “How do I know what to pay attention to when I'm reading a source”?)

Suggestion #2: Take notes in a notebook and write the different topics in the margins

Suggestion #3: Use bibliographic database programs. For example, the program Endnote is excellent because you can obtain the full bibliographic citation online (you do not need to type the information again) and then the software formats both endnotes/footnotes and bibliography using the citation style that you need (MLA, Chicago, etc.). You can also use the software to take notes on each source. EndNote is available free of charge, and the Library holds training sessions often in the semester.

Suggestion #4: If you are doing a quantitative analysis, you may want to consider using spreadsheet or database programs such as Excel, Paradox, SPSS, or SAS among others. The Research Analytics Center in Woodburn also provides stats consulting.

By this time, you may find that you are a long way from your original question and hypothesis and may need to refine them in the light of the research you have now done. You'll need to evaluate your original problem of study and hypothesis. Do you need to rework (refine/qualify) them? Do your sources and analysis answer your question of study and support your hypothesis? How? Can you answer your question of study in one or two sentences? Answering these questions may help you identify your thesis statement.

For example, see the table below. It shows how some students in one section of J400 in Spring 2005 went from a problem of study to a hypothesis to an actual answer/thesis statement [1].

After you have done much of your research, the answer to your problem of study and evaluation of your initial hypothesis will give you the argument/thesis statement around which your paper will be built. The argument/thesis statement is an explanation of the reasons that you have to agree or disagree with others on a particular subject, to decide something, or persuade someone about something. Please note that “argument” and “thesis statement” basically refer to the same thing: a reasoned exposition that explains the main point of view that the author wants to prove in a piece of writing. For more, look in the Pamphlets section at “Writing Tutorial Services" for "How to Write A Thesis Statement."

Once you have identified the answer to the problem of study that guided your research and you've written it as thesis statement, you are ready to organize your essay. See “How do I get started on the writing process?”