Research Guides: History Research Guide: Home

Welcome

Welcome to the library guide for History!

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Learning Historical Research
A primer from William Cronon.

OneSearch This link opens in a new window
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The search engine for materials owned by the library, both on the shelf and online. Also provides millions of full text article and citation records harvested from publishers, open access repositories, and a large percentage of the library's licensed databases. Click here to view a list of databases with content not findable or only partially findable in OneSearch.
Tip: Remember to check "Include Results without Full Text" in the left-hand facets of OneSearch to expand your results set to citations matching your research interests; full-text can be acquired through interlibrary loan and delivered to you free of charge in a short amount of time.
WorldCat (Discovery) This link opens in a new window
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Catalog of library resources held by institutions around the world. Find materials and place interlibrary loan requests for resources not owned locally.
WorldCat on the former FirstSearch platform is available from http://libguides.lib.umt.edu/worldcat-firstsearch

Developing a Research Question

1. Select a topic that interests you and do some pre-research. Look at course readings and class notes. Find information using Google, Wikipedia , CQ Researcher, or Credo Reference if you need ideas.

2. Consider the scope of your topic. If it is too narrow, you might have trouble finding enough information. If it is too broad, you can be overwhelmed with information.

Think about your assignment prompt while determining the scope of your topic. It is important to consider the size of the assignment and the length of time you have to complete it in thinking about scope.
Find more on narrowing your topic.

3. Turn your focused topic into a research question. Know that your research question may change slightly depending on what sorts of resources you find. While you should have a topic or question in mind, allow the sources you find, along with your interests, to help shape and refine your topic further.

Questions to guide the development of your research question:

Is it focused enough to be covered in my paper or project?
Is there enough literature available on this topic?
What is the question that my research is answering?
Am I genuinely interested in this topic?
Is my topic going to be new and interesting to my audience?
How do you determine if a resource has quality, useful information?

Keywords

Brainstorming keywords for your topic will help you refine your topic, find the most information about your topic and save you time by helping you search databases in a more efficient and systematic way.

Why? Different authors will refer to the same concept in different ways. Having a comprehensive list of keywords to search will help you find more information about your topic!

1. Pick out the main ideas in your research question. For example, the main ideas in this research question are in bold: “How did Mormons influence the settling of the American West?"

2. Take each of your main ideas and brainstorm as many synonyms, related words, acronyms, initialisms, and spelling variants as you can. For example, for Mormons:

Latter-day Saints
Saints
LDS
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

3. Do this for each of your main ideas. Searching all the variants you can come up with will give you a broader selection of relevant information. Consider making a chart to keep track of which combinations of keywords you have searched for.

Get more help in choosing and using keywords.

4. Know that there is no such thing as a perfect search. Searching is a process, so having a list of potential keywords will help you begin your research. You’ll find that different combinations of keywords will bring up different results in different databases. You can still learn something from every search you perform, so know that this list of keywords can continue to grow throughout your research process.

You can also use what you learn from searching to redefine your research topic or question.

5. Several other specific search techniques can help you use your brainstormed keywords. Take a look at:

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