The Bibliography Challenge!

When I was an undergraduate, one of my classes had this super evil library scavenger hunt. It was full of psychotic questions like, “The following quote [insert random bizarre quote] is a line from a book. Find it.”

This was before the internet (yes, I'm that old) and there were 100 questions like this.

Me and my group were working, like, 8 hours a day every day for two weeks. We were so mad about that stupid assignment and the awfulness, etc. And we were having trouble. So we started to get desperate. To try desperate things. For example, we narrowed one question down to four books. But we couldn’t find the answer in any of them.

So we called the authors.

All stalker-like, we got their phone numbers and friggin called them at home and read them the quote and asked them if they wrote the book that had the quote and if so, which book was it?

We did a lot of other things, too. We talked to professors. We broke into email accounts. We pretended to be research assistants for professors that didn’t exist and got librarians to find stuff for us. We were like Veronica Mars, but with more rage.

Well, I wrote nasty things about that horribly hard assignment on the course evaluations. It was the worst assignment EVER, I concluded. And all I learned was how to be MAD.

And then, years later, I was in grad school, doing a research project. Everyone in the class was having trouble finding stuff, but I wasn’t. They all asked me how I was finding stuff. So I told them.

They looked at me like I was crazy.

And it hit me: everything I knew about doing research, I learned from that awful assignment. Everything.

You don't need to call any authors today, but I thought you might enjoy practicing one of our techniques: the technique of the bibliography.

See, one of the things I learned during that assignment is that bibliographies are the most fantastic ways to find sources. Instead of pouring over databases, grab books on topics slightly larger than your topic and turn directly to the bibliography. Don’t even read the book. Just read the bibliographies. You’ll be amazed how much easier it is when someone else has done the research for you. Something I (still!) commonly do is to go to the library, find 20 books, pile them on a table and pour through the bibliographies. (Let someone else put the books away.) So useful.

So, here are the rules of the challenge:

1) Work in your peer review groups

2) You have only the class period. Fifty minutes. After that, time is up.

3) Start with one person’s topic and then work your way through everyone else’s topic. Get through as many people as you can, but don’t exceed the time limit. Rock paper scissors to see who goes in what order.

4) For each topic, find 20 books written on a broader topic. Don’t open the books yet.

5) Once you have ALL 20 books, put them on a table and flip to the bibliographies.

6)Write down peer-reviewed articles that apply to each smaller topic from each bibliography.

7)When you’ve gotten through the 20 bibliographies, it’s time to move to the next person in the group.

8)Repeat for each person until the time limit is up.

9)Bring your lists of applicable peer-reviewed articles to next class. The group with the most articles wins a prize.