Welcome! This guide is created to help you with finding appropriate resources to finish the third paper assignment for Prof. Flueckiger's critical inquiry seminar Japan as Utopia and Dystopia. The assignment for the third paper is to carry out a critical analysis of secondary sources that deal with one of the readings or films from your class.
Use the menu to the left for recommendation to start your research, search for appropriate sources, evaluate the sources you find, and organize your sources for efficient research.
Effective research process begins with developing basic strategies for defining research topics and coming up with right search terms. Thinking through your search before you begin will help you be more effective overall. Think about the questions in the pyramid below to help devise the most useful research strategy for your task, working from the bottom up.
Once you decide on a research topic, it helps to break the research question into keywords, synonyms, and related terms. There are various tools to help you brainstorm keywords, such as a keyword concept map, or dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary, and WordVis, a visual dictionary that links words with similar definitions.
As a start, try the Keyword Concept Map below. Place your main idea in the center box, then break it down into subsequent ideas or sections. Brainstorm different words or terms you could research in order to find information on those topics!