Bibliographic Research

As a researcher, you will come across these two situations:

1. Bare minimum resources
2. Abundant resources (no resource is excess)

Stress levels and confusion shoot up in both situations. In the first situation, the main challenge becomes finding resources.
The second situation does not pose a problem. Or does it?

Once you find multiple sources of information, you may think your research is as good as done. But now you are presented with a challenge. With so many sources of information, you will be spoilt for choice. Drawing inferences from a vast number of resources becomes time-consuming and laborious.

Amassing resources is just one half of the problem, utilizing it efficiently is a whole new ball game.

The easiest way to find the resources that are relevant and aid your research is by skimming through the bibliography. While doing so, note down the relevant articles. Academic authors keep their titles simple and to the point, so it becomes pretty easy to tell what their work is about from just the title or subtitle. Also, go through the authors’ names and make a note of that particular book, article, paper that was most relevant to your research. You can then look into the books or papers by those Authors.

The source of your information may be online or offline. The aforementioned method of looking up the bibliography works well for offline resources like books, research papers etc. but for online resources, it seldom works. It is uncommon to have bibliographies in online articles or papers. For this case, making annotations is the best bet. Refer the article on how to keep track of your research literature.

So we see having a lot of sources to refer from does pose a problem of its own and now we all know how to take care of that.