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Research Guides

Southeast Asian Studies MA Research: Research Strategies

Starting Your Reseach in Southeast Asian Studies

How to Start a Major Research Project

General Sources: Start with a general Library search using the terms you know.  See what comes up and look at Subject Headings on those items that interest you.  Continue to search focusing in on those new vocabularies.

Look at the information below on Literature Review to see what secondary scholarly literature is available.  This will help you form an argument and provide structure to your work.

Look at the existing scholarship to see what primary sources are being used.  Does UW Libraries have a corpus of materials that you can use for your project?

What would a Primary Source be for my project:

Newspapers from the time of the event

First person diaries or memoirs

Contemporary literary or artistic interpretations

Photographs or films

Official publications

Data

 

Why a Literature Review?

  • Identify experts in your field; whose work is your professor reading?
  • Identify major debates driving scholarship in your field; who are the protagonists?
  • Identify major journals and other sources (report series, data series, government sources, internet sites), including best places for book reviews of new works in the field.
  • Identify gaps in existing scholarship that can help direct your research.

Conduct and Document Your Research

 

  • Keep track of your research
  • Set up an account on RefWorks, or other citation manager supported by UW Libraries
  • See Managing Your Citations
  • Use "note" and "keyword" fields to annotate your research findings.  This will help you follow trends in the literature and organize your thoughts and data into a written draft
  • Synthesize results
  • Use your RefWorks database structure to structure your work
  • Use your RefWorks database to suggest new questions for further research

Plan Your Review

Define your area of interest using more general literature

  • Are there existing Literature Reviews?
  • Search UW catalog using terms "methods" or "research" or "bibliography" in conjunction with terms for your topic
  • Search Interdisciplinary Tools for review articles
  • Search Discipline-specific databases using terms such as "Literature review," "Bibliographic essay.
    • Select your source databases
      • Visit the Libraries' Research Guides to see what databases are recommended for your field
      • Use OCLC for comprehensive book searches, if books are important in your field
      • Indexing only, or full-text databases: be sure that you are not missing older data
      • What is in an index?  Chapters from books?  Only journal articles?  Popular interpretations, news reports?
      • Citation databases, like Social Science Citation Index: allow citation tracing to determine important research
      • Web of Science - Use the "times cited" feature and "cited reference search" to narrow your literature review; create a "citation report" on your literature review topic
      • Google Scholar  - Use the advanced search feature to limit by publication date, journal, author, discipline; use the "cited by" and "related articles" feature to connect to other scholars  
    • Discipline-specific databases will provide more useful information than aggregated databases, like Academic Search Complete
  • Choose search terms
    • Become familiar with the terms used in your databases
      • In EBSCO databases, click "Choose Databases" to refine your literature search to disciplines
      • Within your database, click on section indicating terms, e.g. Thesaurus (Eric), Index -- Subject Descriptors (EconLit) or MESH (Medline)
    • For book searching, become familiar with the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Start with a keyword search, and find a book that is on your topic, look at the Subject Headings and click on them to refine your search, or find similar items.
  • Define criteria for relevance
    • What is the scope of the empirical materials you are searching for?  Subjects, date ranges etc.
    • What languages are important to your field.  Are you using search terms that catch those languages?
  • Define criteria for methodology
    • What are the possible methodologies you might employ, do they fall within a discipline, interdisciplinary?
    • What are the specialized disciplinary sources for this methodology?