My second-year students need to write a paper on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, in which they must cite a minimum of three secondary sources. I give them a list of 23 topics from which they can choose, with the only restriction that only a maximum of 3 students can choose the same topic. In this way, assessment is personalized, and I don’t have to mark 60 identical papers. Students can also propose a topic of their own, though usually nobody takes up this offer.
Once the topic has been selected, students need to submit a proposal consisting of a provisional title, a 100-word abstract, five keywords, a bibliography of three secondary sources, three quotations from the novel and three more from the bibliography. This is worth 10% of the final mark but it helps very much to write the paper, which is 40%. I provide students with a template so that they learn to edit the proposal according to the instructions for authors provided. I also offer a tutorial to teach them how to prepare both the proposal and the paper, and do a bibliographical search. The tutorial’s PowerPoint is available from our Moodle classroom on Virtual Campus. They also have two more documents there: a guide called “Writing an Academic Paper” and a guide titled “Working on Abstract”. And a sample paper that I have written myself.
What could go wrong, you might ask? Several things. To begin with, there was a teachers’ strike on the day I gave the tutorial on the proposal and the paper. I did not join it but the colleagues who teach after me did join it, with the result that only 7 out of my 60 students were in class. They didn’t have to be in class at 10:00 and so they decided to skip as well my 8:30 class. I had published the calendar at the beginning of the course, and they could have checked what I would be teaching on that day. I could not teach the tutorial again because my tightly packed programme for the course does not allow it, but I left the PowerPoint in our online classroom. This presentation included slides showing how to use the library catalogue and how to use the MLA database, and a strong warning against doing a basic internet search, though I also gave information on Google Scholar and Google Books, which I use all the time. I stressed that the only valid sources I would admit were academic monographs, chapters in collective academic books, and articles in academic journals. No dissertations. The secondary sources had to be post-1995, though students could use pre-1995 sources if they included the three compulsory post-1995 sources.
I have just marked the proposals and although I believe that the abstracts are better than last year, the bibliographical selection is worse and, indeed, far worse than when I started teaching this exercise in 2009. I am using this post in fact to explain to all my students what is not working. There are two overlapping factors affecting the acquisition of this basic skill: a lack of familiarity with the basics of academic work and difficulties to use the tools that facilitate the search of sources.
So, here are the basics of academic life. Researchers are in constant dialogue with each other about their discoveries, whether they are in the sciences or in the humanities. This dialogue is kept through the publication of academic work, usually in there types of text: monographs, chapters in collective books, and articles in academic journals. A monograph is a single-author volume. A collective book is a volume that gathers together chapters by a variety of authors, coordinated by the editor or editors. An academic journal is a periodical publication that publishes articles and reviews of academic books.
All these texts are published by academic presses, sometimes associated to universities (like Oxford University Press), sometimes part of a larger business concern (like Taylor and Francis). All these academic sources are validated through peer-reviewing, that is to say they need to pass the assessment of at least two other academics who read them, write reports, and ask for modifications if necessary. Once work is ready, it is carefully proofread, so that the language is error-free. You may find online and for free perfectly valid academic publications, which employ a peer-review system and are in terms of language impeccable. However, most quality sources require payment. University libraries have the function of purchasing monographs and collective books (which you may borrow), and to subscribe to academic journals (which you can read in the library), so that students and teacher/researchers can access a great variety of sources. All this used to be available only on paper, but university libraries pay for online services so that many books (monographic or collective) and journals can be accessed from home.
What I teach with the proposal exercise is how to begin doing research for an academic paper. In text commentaries you don’t use secondary sources: you take a passage and comment on it, applying close reading techniques. In papers, however, you enter the dialogue around a particular literary text. At master’s level you need to know most of the bibliography published on a text for your MA dissertation but at second-year level, my aim is that you understand the three types of source (monograph, chapter, article) and how to find them. A problem I am aware of is that students only receive training in finding secondary sources in the first year in a random way, depending on the teacher. I believe, however, that all students ought to train themselves by visiting the library and taking courses on how its resources work apart from classes. This is a must.
So, how do you find valid academic sources? Well, take my own research for my article on the lawyer Jaggers in Great Expectations. I started with the library catalogue in which I entered the search “Great Expectations” AND Jaggers. This is called a Boolean search (https://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/02/22/what-boolean-search), as you use the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT to limit your search. The front page of the library catalogue and the top of the search page contain the words ‘Databases’. Catalogues and databases used to be very different, but they are merging a little bit. The library catalogue as it works now includes both sources available at UAB and sources unavailable, in which it is closer to being a database. We can access many books, chapters, and articles online which was not the case a few years ago.
Anyway, once I got a list of sources on Jaggers (just a few), I checked the database list and selected the MLA database, a huge resource which includes other databases such as JSTOR. You may use JSTOR independently or Project Muse, but I prefer MLA, which includes them too. MLA allows you to select bibliographical entries and email them to your account, including the texts if they are available. Once I got all I could about Jaggers, I went then to Google Scholar and Google Books, and in one afternoon I had all the bibliography I have used in my article (35 items). I also downloaded about 10 articles and could check online 10 more monographs and chapters. The rest I found elsewhere, sometimes paying for them.
If you bypass the library catalogue, MLA, JSTOR, Project Muse, Google Scholar and Google Books and go directly onto Google you might end up in the wrong place. I have entered the search “Great Expectations” AND Jaggers and this has led me to websites that publish notes for students (Cliffnotes, Sparknotes, Gradesaver and so on…), articles that while very interesting are not academic (in newspapers, magazines, blogs), resources from academic and non-academic sources for students or a general audience (The Victorian Web, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia). You may NEVER use notes for students in academic work and although non-academic work can be used, this can only be done as an extra. First you complete the academic bibliography and then you add the extras, ideally checking with your teacher/tutor if that is right.
Here comes a major difficulty. Quality academic books, whether monographic or collective, are not difficult to recognize. Check who is the publisher and that is sufficient. If you don’t know the publisher, look for their webpage. There are differences in quality but you may check also a variety of lists to learn who are most respected, or this Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankings_of_academic_publishers. Journals are also ranked by quality, and I use all the time the database of the Universitat de Barcelona MIAR to understand how they are ranked: https://miar.ub.edu/. You can see there for instance that the Dickens’s Quarterly ranks very highly (https://miar.ub.edu/issn/0742-5473).
The problem is that not all scholars in all areas of the world are willing to pass the filters that guarantee academic quality, so in recent years we are seeing a proliferation of low-quality online journals with no peer-reviewing, no control of language quality, etc. These journals usually have generic titles (they deal with literature and language together, even including culture or translation), they are not sponsored by a university, they do not appear in databases like MIAR. Since they are easy to found online students incorporate them into their bibliographies, but this is a mistake. I am not saying that all the articles published there are rubbish, what I am saying is that if you can access much better sources through the library catalogue, MLA, JSTOR, Project Muse and so on, why would you be happy to quote low-quality sources?
One word about dissertations. I love tutoring BA, MA and PhD dissertations and I am very proud to see that some of those published online get many downloads. However, dissertations are students’ exercises, and they are not quoted in academic work. The only exception are PhD (doctoral) dissertations, which are quoted particularly when they cover a topic nobody else deals with. So, why are BA and MA dissertations downloaded? I hope it’s not to plagiarise them! I think this is to check the bibliographies and see what can be found there. This is another way of finding bibliography: the bibliography of a monograph, chapter or article usually leads to other sources, and this is how you end up not with three but with 300 sources! Well, let’s say 30, the number quoted on average in chapters and articles (100-150 for monographs at least).
I know that students find it very difficult to find three specific quotations that are suitable for their topic, and they give priority to this over checking whether the sources are adequate in quality and in chronological range. Yet, academic research is a game with a set of rules you need to obey, and practice. A difficulty we don’t know how to solve in English Studies is that students cannot cope with reading both the literary texts and also secondary sources, so we have little by little diminished the compulsory bibliography until we are left with nothing except passages. Sorry to be such a boomer but in my time we were expected to read both literature and secondary sources, and I’m sorry to say that we lost in one of our absurd reforms a wonderful course called ‘English Literature Practice’ devoted to reading only secondary sources. It is all indeed a matter of practice.
I’ll end by stressing that as teachers-researchers our main job apart from what we do in class is publishing secondary sources. We are all busy writing articles for journals and chapters in books, occasionally editing collective volumes. Writing monographs of 300 pages takes time, which is always difficult to find, but I believe that all Humanities specialists should publish at least one or two along their careers. If you’re curious, this is what I have published so far: https://webs.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/publications/.
I hope this clarifies a few major points and leads to students’ finding better secondary sources, not only for the paper on Dickens but for all literature and culture paper and the BA/TFG dissertation. As I say, practice is crucial. So, familiarize yourself with the library catalogue and the databases and enjoy doing bibliographical searches. Many of us professional academics find that fun detective work, and we love it when an unexpected source appears that fits perfectly what you need to say. Just search for them in the right places!