What does doing bibliographical research mean? What does it consist of?

Question

Is it the same as compiling a bibliography? If not, what is compiling a bibliography? I am applying to do research for a professor, but I don't know exactly what the job entails.

Answer 1

He will give you a list of topics to find out things about. You either use the library or the Internet (Google Scholar is a starting point) preferably both. The librarian will help you start.

Let's say that you have been assigned to look up research that's already been done on glass that's been reinforced with steel wool. You find, say, a scholarly journal: the Journal of Composite Materials, say. There will be an index for this journal, so you jot down every article in the journal that might have something to do with steel-reinforced glass. You go to the shelf where the journal lurks, and look up each one.

At this point, you have to ask the professor what to do. He will likely want you to duplicate the articles that seem interesting, so you do that.

Then you go have a look at the references listed at the end of each interesting article and see if you can find those articles. You may have to get some through inter-library loan, though the Internet is somewhat more useful for this sort of thing than it used to be.

When you get the articles listed in those references, you look at them and check these new articles for reference lists, and chase those down. And while you're at it, you'll read the table of contents for each journal or book that you pick up to see if there's something else interesting listed. In fact, it's often most productive to go through the whole run of a journal, one issue after the other, and look at the table of contents of each one. You can do a better job of this than Google ever will.

This all seems incredibly tedious, but there are two mitigating factors. One is that it's interesting work, and you can learn an awful lot if you're a curious sort of person. The second help is that you can get really good at this work in a very short period of time; in a week or two you'll have a feel for all of the resources available.

It's also exceedingly valuable work for academic people. A proper literature search can eliminate scads of embarrassment, expenditures, and duplication of effort.

It's how scholars become scholars.