INST 201: Expansion of International Society
Spring 2005
RESEARCH PAPER
ASSIGNMENT
II. A Strategy for Conducting Research in International Studies
VI. How to Rewrite a Paper (not required for this assignment)
I. Explanation of Assignment:
Your assignment is to write an empirical research paper of approximately fifteen pages in which you identify a specific aspect of economic, political, social, or cultural life in the country in which you are likely to study during your junior year and explain its occurrence or explore the consequences of its existence, giving a reasoned account fully supported by convincing factual evidence.
Your explanation of this phenomenon or of its consequences should be the thesis of your paper, that is to say, the goal and purpose of your paper, its controlling idea, and the source of its unity and coherence. Thus, all of your research, and every word which you write, should be directly relevant to offering a reasoned explanation about the phenomenon you choose for examination. You should build your case as a skillful scholar does, stating in your opening remarks the conclusion which you intend to demonstrate. In the body of your paper you should carefully present evidence and arguments to support your thesis, admitting weaknesses in your case where appropriate. Your conclusion should flow logically from the evidence and arguments which you present in the body of your paper. Your thesis statement, then, is the focal point of your entire paper. Extraneous material which does not directly address your thesis or advance its presentation simply serves to confuse and distract your reader.
It should be possible to state your thesis or conclusion in a single declarative sentence, which should summarize your entire paper. A thesis is not a topic. The emergence of Hindu nationalism sets out a phenomenon to be explained, but it offers no explanation, and it states no proposition to be tested. Nor can a thesis be expressed as a question, such as, Why has Hindu nationalism grown in strength in recent years? To ask such a question may help you to formulate a thesis, and to identify relevant factors which you might wish to test as possible explanations, and thus may help to narrow the focus of your research, but it does not, as yet, state any position or establish any relationship between the growth of Hindu national identity and some other causal factor. However, I do establish such a relationship when I assert that the growing intensity of Hindu communal identity threatens to destroy the secular democracy created by Nehru and other founders of independent India. Such a statement offers a proposition to be tested by evidence presented in the body of the paper. It takes a position on the question which may be disputed, and which remains to be demonstrated, but it does draw a conclusion about how a specific factor has affected a specific (in this case) political phenomenon.
Please note that in the example I have limited my thesis to one of many possible explanations regarding this phenomenon. I might also have explored the effects of Hindu political identity on Hindu religious practice, or on relations between Hindus and other religious communities in India (Muslims, Sikhs, and so forth), or I might have suggested that the growth of Hindu nationalism may be promoting a cultural renaissance among Hindus in India (or that it is destroying Indian culture, if that was what I thought). Any of these relationships could be and probably have been explored by scholars interested in the recent growth of Hindu communal identity, but if I tried to explore more than one of them in a short paper, I would never really be able to do an adequate job of presenting the evidence about any of these relationships. Besides failing to present a convincing case for any single relationship, I would also run the serious risk of writing a paper which jumped from topic to topic, and thus lacked coherence. Therefore, I have chosen to test the effect of a single factor (the growth of Hindu communal identity) on the political stability of India.
Please note that you are not being asked to give a merely
descriptive
account of some social or political event, but to explain why
that event
occurred or why that issue is important, and to draw wider conclusions
about
what this event or relationship tells us about the nature of the
economy,
political system, culture, or society of the country or region you are
exploring. For example, you need to do more than simply recount the
chronology
of events leading to an outbreak of a revolution. Instead, you might
examine
the role which a particular actor or force (e.g., a particular national
leader,
economic forces such as industrialization or social forces such as
nationalism,
the diffusion of new political philosophies, et cetera) played in a
particular
revolution and then use this explanation to draw broader conclusions
about the
role which that particular actor or force plays in national politics,
or the
conditions which permit such a role. At the same time, you are not
being
asked to write an editorial commentary in which you state your
agreement or
disagreement with a particular policy decision made the government of
some
other country or your acceptance or rejection of some aspect of another
society's culture. Before we can offer any intelligent criticism of any
culture
or the policy of another country's government, or offer any workable
alternatives, we must first understand, in all its complexity, the
issues
involved and the factors that affect the resolution of those issues in
the
contexts we are exploring. You may, for example, feel that a foreign
government
such as the Japanese government has, in certain foreign economic policy
decisions, threatened the economic interests of Americans. However,
rather than
asking you simply to vent your disagreement with that policy, the
assignment
requires you to explain this policy outcome by examining the
role which
some specific factor has played in producing it. To continue with this
example,
once we understand the forces that shape Japanese industrial and trade
policy,
we can understand the issue in its complexity, and therefore deal with
it in
its complexity.
II. A Strategy for Conducting Research in International Studies
Choose a topic. You must first, of course, choose a topic on which you will write your paper. Which topic should you choose? You ought to take the following considerations into account:
- Choose a topic in which you have an interest. You will not always have this luxury in the future, but since this assignment allows choice in topics I recommend taking a topic that stimulates you intellectually. My major conclusion, having read hundreds of research papers, is that you are much more likely to enthusiastically conduct research and develop an argument about a topic about which you care. Hence, your paper is more likely to be a good product.
- Select a topic that is neither too broad nor too narrow. You are not yet a major scholar. At your level of intellectual maturity you will want to be careful not to choose a topic that is too large because you will find it impossible to explore it adequately, especially since you are being asked to include primary sources in this paper. Further, a very broad topic, when explored in a short paper such as this, often is treated superficially.
- Find a topic on which there is likelihood that information will be available. Some topics are too recent for reliable data to have accumulated. For some topics too few other people have taken sufficient interest to gather information. On some topics government confidentiality precludes access to the necessary information.
Once you have chosen a general topic, ask yourself: "What do I know about this topic? How do I know it, if I do?" If you know something about the topic, go back to the source(s) from which you learned it. Chances are that you have studied the topic in which you are interested before, in this course or previous courses. Explore the books you read in which your topic is treated. If you know little about the topic, find a general background source and do some preliminary reading about it. Your professor might have advice here and the library can provide sources--especially in general books (e.g., textbooks or reference books) and professional articles (esp. review articles).
Formulate a question or hypothesis. As the result of this background reading, you should discover the important issues related to your general topic. From those, determine which you want to explore. The best way to orient the research for your paper and the argumentation in your paper from here onward is to formulate a question or hypothesis about your topic. From these you can develop a thesis statement that will give focus to your entire effort. You are asking two related questions here: "What do I want to know? What do I want to demonstrate to my reader?" Make sure to ask yourself: "Is this question important? Why?" Also: "Is this question one that can be answered?" Ask your professor or another professor the same questions. This is an extremely important step in the process of writing a research paper. An unfocused effort is likely to produce an unfocused paper. For this course, the result of formulating a question or hypothesis should be a research prospectus, due February 16. A prospectus is a page or two that describes your topic—why you are interested in the topic, your research question or hypothesis, and few suggestions about how you plan to conduct your research.
Explore the literature to determine if previous authors have explored the question or variants of it. Knowledge is built cumulatively. Thus, good researchers need to be aware of previous efforts to explore their topics. You will first want to find a guide to the literature. A good start would be the bibliography and footnotes of a source you have studied before. Of course, some works are better than others for providing bibliographies or other citation of sources. Textbooks are often the best source for undergraduates because they cite more accessible materials. However, their bibliographies may be more general than you need for exploring the scholarly literature about your particular topic. Ask your professor's advice; he may suggest that you see another professor in whose field your topic lies and he may be able to suggest bibliographic sources for you to consider. Also, explore the library for a bibliography. There are specialized bibliographies on topics and many general works of scholarship do include bibliographies. Bibliographic essays in works such as the Cambridge Histories can be especially valuable. In exploring a previously used source or a new book or article you have acquired for your research, you may want to note important events or people involved in the issue you are exploring; they can be researched separately and they will be valuable as guides for finding primary data.
As a result of your efforts, you should find some of the works of importance on your topic. From there, use the on-line catalog (CONSORT), particularly the author section, to find works by the authors on your bibliography. Note that the authors in your bibliography may have written additional works, beyond those on your list, which may be more directly of interest to you. While doing this, you should use the subject tracings on the catalog records to determine relevant subject headings and use those subject headings to explore the library's holdings further. Finally, when selecting the books from the shelves, look left and right of those you choose for any additional books of note (not everything is perfectly catalogued!). You will also want to locate the journals mentioned in the bibliographies (many articles are written; you want to use recommended ones so as to save yourself the time of reading them all to determine which is best). Further, you should use periodical indexes (such as PAIS, Social Science Abstracts, or Historical Abstracts) to find more recent articles on the topic (after all, topics are continually studied and some topics are of new importance).
Take stock of the literature. You should be asking two separate sets of questions here: First, what are the relevant conceptual/theoretical issues? Which of those are interesting to me (perhaps they have policy importance or deal with an issue I want to know more about)? Who has written about them? Has the issue changed as a result of changes in the world or of changes in theoretical perspectives held by scholars and analysts? Based on your reading, create a bibliography, preferably an annotated bibliography. Perhaps at this point you should do some preliminary writing: summarize the critical theoretical issues since the first part of your paper should include such a summary. You should also prepare a rough outline of the paper so you will know for yourself how you plan to answer the question you posed in your prospectus.
Your second set of questions will be: Given my question or hypothesis, what kind of evidence will I need to answer it? On the face of it, what kind of evidence do you think you will need? That is, what would common sense suggest is the evidence you need to convince someone of your case? But you should also consider the types of evidence used by previous authors. They may have ideas that did not occur to you. Of course, you also want to evaluate whether their evidence was compelling or whether better evidence is needed to answer the question or make the case than previous authors were able to unearth. Further, you want to consider whether their evidence is out of date. Do their studies need to be updated?
Search for data. Based on this analysis, begin to look for primary data. A primary source is an original statistical report or a first-hand narrative written by someone who witnessed an event. Journalists' first-hand accounts of events, letters between individuals, speeches or political pamphlets, journals and diaries, census reports and electoral statistics are typical primary sources. In contrast, a secondary source is an account or an analysis written by a scholar, a journalist, or an analyst of some sort at a later date based on primary sources. You are producing a secondary source in this assignment.
If you are exploring an event (such as an important action or an
important
speech) or a related series of events (a political or social process),
you can
use newspaper indexes to retrieve relevant newspaper articles (articles
in news
weeklies such as Time, Newsweek, and especially The
Economist
would also be appropriate here, although they may have less detail
about the
events). These provide eyewitness accounts, sometimes texts of
speeches, and
often opinion and analysis written at the time by those seeking to
influence
events or policies. If you are exploring a phenomenon about which you
need to
provide statistical data (e.g., electoral data, demographic trends,
economic
conditions, and so forth) you should use appropriate indexes (or
perhaps follow
the practice of previous authors) to find those statistics. Before
going
further, ask yourself: Is this evidence usable? Will it make the case I
want to
make? Then prepare a
detailed outline of the
paper with an annotated bibliography.
Conduct your analysis. Ideally, of course, you should draw your conclusions after weighing all of the relevant evidence. In reality you tend to form your conclusions as you consider more and more of the evidence. This is normal. My point is to discourage you from reaching hasty conclusions, those drawn from analyses that never consider all (or at least the most important) evidence. At this point you will want to be sure that any empirical analysis is connected to the theoretical questions you asked at the beginning of this process. If your topic is empirically oriented, it will lead to a research paper which uses observations (facts) to make an argument which has theoretical implications. It is not simply a narrative account of a sequence of events nor is it a piece of normative or deductive theorizing. Based on your analysis, you should write the empirical section of the paper and put the theoretical and empirical sections of the paper together.
Submit the paper. This will be due April 27.
Use Kate L. Turabian,
A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
various editions) for suggestions on proper style for the use of
abbreviations
and numbers, spelling and punctuation, and the incorporation of
quotations,
tables, and illustrations. Turabian's guide has been used in many
courses at
Kenyon, so you should be able to acquire a copy from a friend if you
need it. Otherwise, you may consult The
Chicago Manual of Style, available in the library (ask a
reference librarian at the information desk).
III. Explanation of Grading:
Your paper will be evaluated using the following criteria:
CONCEPTUALIZATION:
Have you clearly identified the specific phenomenon that you intend to explain? Have you narrowed your focus to a single phenomenon and a single explanation? Does your paper state a coherent thesis? Does it offer an understandable and precise statement of the issue presented for consideration? Do you clearly and appropriately define all terms and concepts that you employ in the course of your discussion?
RESEARCH:
Have you narrowed your research to the specific aspect of the phenomenon that you set out to explain? Have you read widely enough to give a balanced view of the way in which other scholars have treated your topic? Does your bibliography provide evidence that you have consulted the full range of sources available (books, journals, periodical literature, reference works, government documents, et cetera)? Are the works you cite the most appropriate for your topic? Are they directly relevant to the narrow aspect of your topic that you address in your thesis? Are they written at a level of sophistication appropriate for honors-level work? Are your sources current enough so that the information they contain is not outdated?
ANALYSIS:
Have you offered a mature, balanced, and plausible explanation for the phenomenon that you have explored? Does the body of your paper support your thesis with substantial evidence and persuasive argumentation? Have you examined your phenomenon with a thoroughness that allows you to draw and support mature and informed conclusions about it?
MECHANICS:
Have you avoided major errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation and
usage?
Does your paper demonstrate attention to the organization of your
argument? To
transitions between paragraphs and major ideas? Does your essay present
a
unified, coherent statement? Have you properly and consistently
documented your
sources?
You might consult Professor Wendy Singer's advice on how to show your sophistication as a researcher at http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/PSci/Inst21/scholarship.htm. It gives concrete suggestions that I find valuable and with which I strongly agree.
IV. Proper citation:
There are two significant issues here: what to footnote (or cite) and how to do it. The former question is more open to interpretation than the latter. You will find during your college career that different types of papers call for different degrees of extensiveness in citation. This is a paper in which you are acting as an original scholar, not as an essayist or a journalist. Hence you will be expected to use footnotes in the following instances:
1. Citing the source of a direct quotation;
2. Identifying the sources of facts which are controversial (i.e., can honest people differ over the authenticity of a fact?), obscure (i.e., is the source authenticating a fact not familiar to the ordinary reader?), and significant (those upon which very important parts of your argument rest);
3. Providing short commentaries indicating the major sources that have dealt with a particular issue. For example:
For approaches to democratization which emphasize the role of political elites, see Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Giuseppe Di Palma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and John Higley and Richard Gunther (eds.), Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
4. Providing tangential information which might discuss research methodology, define the meaning of words, or simply clarify some point in the text.
For additional discussion of citation of sources, see the following link at Dartmouth College's library: Sources: Their Use and Acknowledgement (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sources/).
For footnotes or endnotes, you should use the following style, drawn
from
Turabian's manual (based on The Chicago Manual of Style). An
extensive website with good documentation about different styles to use
in citing sources is available from the Writing Center at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison (go to http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/Documentation.html).
I discourage the use of the Modern Language Association (MLA) style
guidelines; more appropriate here would be Chicago/Turabian or the
style guidelines of the American Political Science Association (APSA),
discussed at the Wisconsin website.
For footnotes or endnotes, you should use the following style:
Author, Title (Place: Publisher, date), p. cited.
For example:
1Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), pp. 167-8.
The above example illustrates the style for footnotes that is the standard in social science journals and books. Unless you are writing literary criticism, the Modern Language Association (MLA) citation style that you may have learned in ENGL 101-2 is not appropriate.
You may use in-line (or scientific) citation instead of footnotes or endnotes if you wish. This, however, is the appropriate form of the above (note that it includes the date):
"In his discussion of Rousseau's stag hunt, Waltz (1954: 167-8) states . . ." or
"Rousseau's stag hunt is a classic example of the security dilemma (Waltz 1954: 167-8)."
Then you must cite Waltz in your bibliography, preferably like this:
Waltz, Kenneth N. 1954. Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press.
Footnote style for articles:
Samuel P. Huntington, "Transnational Organizations in World Politics," World Politics, 25, 3 (1973), p. 335.
Bibliographic reference to above for scientific style citation:
Huntington, Samuel P. 1973. "Transnational Organizations in World Politics," World Politics, 25, 3, pp. 333-368.
Footnote style for articles in an edited volume:
John Lewis Gaddis, "The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System," in The Cold War and After: Prospects for Peace, ed. Sean M. Lynn-Jones (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 13.
Bibliographic reference to above in scientific style citation:
Gaddis, John Lewis. 1991. "The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System." In The Cold War and After: Prospects for Peace, ed. Sean M. Lynn-Jones, pp. 1-44. Cambridge: MIT Press.
For further reference regarding citation style, see Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 6th edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) or The Chicago Manual of Style.
V. Plagiarism
The Kenyon College Course of Study has defined plagiarism in this way:
Learning from another artist or scholar is commendable, but to use the ideas (written, oral, graphic or artistic) or the phraseology of another person covertly, so as to represent the material as one's own, constitutes plagiarism.
The Course of Study has an extensive discussion of academic honesty that you are responsible for reading and understanding. If you have any questions, you should feel free to ask your instructor or members of the Academic Infractions Board. Different disciplines have different needs and accepted methods of referencing, and faculty can help you determine what is proper, but it is the student's responsibility to be aware of Kenyon's policy on academic dishonesty.
The following guidelines should help to clarify what is plagiarism and how you can avoid it. For your instructors and others who read your papers or other works, it is important to be able to identify your individual contributions. "Giving credit where credit is due" is essential for others to evaluate your work. For students, academic honesty is a vital part of proper research methods.
The central idea involved in plagiarism is that others' work is misrepresented as your own. Your work cannot be properly evaluated if others' work, including other students' work, is attributed to you. You owe recognition to those upon whose work you have drawn and it is academic dishonesty not to acknowledge sources. Footnotes, endnotes and other references serve to identify for the reader which ideas are yours and which belong to others. Another purpose of references is to identify the sources for the paper, so that readers can verify your information or do further work in the subject.
Be careful to take adequate notes as you research the paper. Write down the reference you will need later. A complete footnote will include the title, author, publisher and date of the book or article and the page number for the specific material you use. It should have enough information for the reader to be able to locate it. Identify in your notes any quotes or paraphrases to avoid confusion with your own ideas when you write the paper later. If you are in doubt about what your notes represent, check the sources before you include the notes in a paper.
References should be specific, to the phrase, sentence, passage or idea that you use. It is not appropriate to place a footnote at the end of a paragraph which includes several sources and material of your own. The reference should follow the material it applies to immediately, and it should be clear which material is covered by the reference. Any direct quote must be referenced. Never include the exact words of other without quotes or single spacing and a footnote. The reason to include a quote is that it is particularly well expressed and you cannot improve it, but it must be properly attributed to its author. An idea which is not your own should be footnoted, even if you have expressed it in your own words. Facts which are not generally known such as statistics should be footnoted. Failure to reference such items is plagiarism. Here you must use your judgment and footnote what is distinctly another's contribution rather than general knowledge.
Note that submitting the same paper for two courses without prior permission of both instructors constitutes academic dishonesty. These guidelines apply to take-home exams as well as term papers. Copying another student's work is as much plagiarism as copying from published work.
VI. How to rewrite
(With thanks to Wendy Singer of the Department of History for providing the original document upon which this section is based.)
You cannot work on everything at once. Therefore, I suggest five stages in the process of rewriting.
- THESIS. Identify your thesis. (Sometimes it is at the end of your paper.) Use your original paper as a draft. Reread it to find out what point you wanted to make. State this thesis at the beginning of your paper. Be sure that the thesis is manageable. Can you prove it in a fifteen page paper?
- OUTLINE. Once you have identified the thesis make an outline delineating the examples and arguments you will use to prove the thesis. Which ideas are most important? Reevaluate each paragraph in terms of your outline. what needs to be elaborated and what can be removed? Only keep ideas that are relevant to the thesis.
- CONCLUSION. The conclusion is the most difficult part of writing a strong essay. It must follow logically from the body of the paper, proving your thesis and also suggest a larger context or direction for your argument. A good conclusion does not contain new facts or evidence but suggests an important way of looking at the evidence you have produced. It is different than the thesis.
- STYLE. Once you have accomplished (1), (2), and (3), you should think about language, grammar, and punctuation. Also you will want to think about varying language or using gender inclusive pronouns. We will not deal with these in this document. First work on structuring your argument.
- A SURE BET for beginning a rewrite is replacing the introduction with the conclusion. Often the conclusion of a paper is not a conclusion at all, but rather it is a restatement of the thesis (in clearer and more precise terms!) If you put the conclusion first, it changes the whole tone and direction of the paper and often clarifies it.
Also, ten things to watch:
1. Run SPELLCHECK or proof read carefully.
2. Be sure to give your paper a title.
3. Write out contractions.
4. Be consistent with tenses.
5. There is no apostrophe in a decade, e.g., 1930s.
6. Use active verbs; avoid the verb to be.
7. Its means belonging to it. Note that its does not have an apostrophe.
8. Each and everyone are both singular. For example, each girl has her book. If you do not intend to
specify gender in your sentence, make it plural. For example, they all have their books.
9. Indented, single-spaced quotations do not require quotation marks.
10. Do not end a sentence with a preposition.