Every Mad Scientist Creates a Monster Now and Then
an Afterword
This is the final installment in the series Get Your Facts Straight: Research Skills for Writers. For more about this 18-part series, including the complete schedule and the Table of Contents with links to all the other articles in the series, click here.
Get Your Facts Straight: Research Skills for Writers was born of a request from a novelist friend about how to keep track of bibliography and citations for a historical novel. Even though this friend is, as it happens, also a professional librarian, they found themself at a loss for how to handle the mounting pile of references they were working with as they wrote their book. Because I’m an historian with explicit training in research and a person who has written several research-based books, as well as someone who has taught college writing and research skills, my friend thought of me as the right person to ask. Many months and about 200 pages of text later, my friend may well have come to regret this decision, but I suppose every mad scientist creates a monster now and then.
As for me, I hope I’ve succeeded in smuggling some of the most salient ideas about research itself along with a crucial set of research skills out of the ivory tower, and making it available, Robin Hood style, to those who have fewer ways to access the resources of the research-rich. A lot of this knowledge tends to get hoarded in there among the academics, and I don’t really think that’s fair. Gatekeeping only serves those on the same side of the gate as the goodies, after all.
What I ended up writing went far beyond the scope of my friend’s original request, as the existence of an eighteen-part series of articles in response to an innocent question about reference organization amply proves. As research itself often tends to do, the project snowballed. Thinking about how to organize and keep track of references got me thinking about how to ask the research questions that lead to finding the references in the first place. Thinking about how to ask research questions got me thinking about why we do research in the first place, and the role of information and meaning-making in our lives. That, in short order, got me musing on how we understand the information we encounter and what categories of questions we can—and can’t—use it to answer. More importantly, it got me thinking about how writers who are doing research, and who aren’t necessarily trained as researchers, can tell the difference between those things.
Even for those who are trained as researchers, it can be difficult to know what sources of information are trustworthy and which should be questioned. I have been writing these essays at a time when the digital information environment has exponentially magnified the problem. Digital information sources and distribution methods have not only introduced problems of forgery, fraud, and misrepresentation in ways we simply haven’t encountered in the past but also has brought us whole new information handling tools like search engines and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that present challenges so new we often don’t even know enough to recognize them as such.
Both search engines and AI software, to say nothing of the enormous databases of information they rely on to work, are human creations into which humans have introduced a great many liabilities and limitations. They have been created, and continue to be created and adapted, with flawed and sometimes predatory ethics and ambitions. Because these tools are so new, however, their liabilities and limitations aren’t always apparent to those of us users out here in the cheap seats. It seemed within my self-imposed remit, as someone who found herself writing a series of articles to help writers doing better research in better ways, to flag at least some of the known issues and offer some coping strategies.
In part because digital tools for research and information handling can be so troublesome, I also wanted to be sure that this collection included solid direction for using old-school research sources, particularly academic research resources. Academic research, with its formality and communitarian processes, has been intentionally developed to be robust in terms of accuracy and documentation. All research ought to aspire to similar high standards, and it’s helpful to have an understanding of one way to achieve them not only in order to be able to hold your own research up to the same kinds of standards but to know how best to understand and use high-quality academic research for your own purposes.More specifically, I wanted to offer some strategy to writers doing research in a few particular realms that are particularly prone to faulty, peremptory, and ideologically skewed handling of research information. Writers in the areas of history and medicine are both highly prone to making errors and misrepresentations about “the research” and what it says, often because writers coming from outside these academic disciplines aren’t beginning with the same presumptions as researchers within them. Sometimes, though, the problems are closer to what we find in the arena of research on sexuality: the research tends to be shaped, colored, and even defined by what we want to have be true for cultural or political reasons. It isn’t always obvious that researchers don’t only need to ask the question “how badly do I want this to be true?” when reading nonacademic sources online, but also when they’re making their way through academic writing, yet it’s never a bad question.
This is particularly germane given the lengths to which many writers outside of academia have to go in order to get their hands on research materials to begin with. While digital media and the Internet have democratized access to a great deal of information and have done a lot to make research easier, there’s still a lot that isn’t accessible that way. The more specialized or the more academic the research we want to do, the less likely it is that we’ll be able to find it easily online, so I’ve given some strategy guides for using public records and publicly-funded libraries and other repositories, as well as open-access repositories inside and outside of the academic world. There is advice on how to access physical libraries as well, particularly those at academic institutions, as an outsider. There are also some general principles that will help you ask experts, again especially those inside institutions, for in-depth information and assistance.
In the end, though, all the research in the world isn’t as important as what one does with it, and so the final two articles in this series are devoted to helping writers convert their research into writing readers will be able to comprehend, use, and hopefully enjoy. The temptation of every research-doing writer is to prove to the world that they’ve done their homework by sharing every single bit of information they’ve unearthed, but this is inevitably counterproductive. Instead, I offer two paths forward to help writers determine how the information they acquire fits into the context of their subject and how to use minimal amounts of information, discerningly chosen, to maximum effect.
At the end of this series, I realize I have far more that I could still say about research and how to do it. There are dozens of topics I did not explore, and in many of the subjects I did cover, depth takes a holiday in favor of making the discussion approachable to newcomers. It’s also left me making plans to write an entirely different series on information infrastructure—the phrase I use to describe the science and art of choosing and sequencing information and ideas in order to establish premises, make arguments, use evidence to build cases, and make claims. This almost became a part of the current series until I came to my senses and remembered that structuring information is only possible once you’ve obtained the information in the first place, and therefore, it genuinely needed to be a separate project.
To the friend whose request got me diving down the research methods rabbit hole to begin with, thank you for asking. It’s been an interesting and enjoyable trip for me, one where I had the significant pleasure of realizing how much information and opinion I’d amassed about the processes of doing research over the decades I’ve mostly just been doing it. I’m pretty sure you never intended any of this when you emailed me your question about keeping track of references, to trigger an entire 18-part series of articles about research. Whether they have been of much use to you I honestly haven’t had the courage to inquire, but I do hope I did turn out to be a good person to ask.