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 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 in? We talked to professors. We broke into email accounts. We pretended to be research assistants for professors that didn’t exist (that’s right, we LIED!!) 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.

Fast forward a few years and 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 one awful assignment. Everything.

[One reason to think twice about writing nasty teacher reviews: the professor I told you about who made us do the assignment? She stopped doing it. People said she was too disorganized and it was too hard. And she was disorganized, and knew it, so she felt bad and stopped doing the assignment. Here’s the thing, though: the assignment taught me so much precisely because it was such a mess. And now hundreds of students won’t learn how to research the way that I did, and my classmates did. And lemme tell you, research skills are not only useful in college. They are useful in life. My research skills—the ones I learned from the chaos of my scattered and crazy English professor—have literally saved lives. But because I was mad cause my professor was a mess and it was hard on me? Hundreds of people don’t have those kinds of skills. Our actions sometimes have consequences we don’t see. Big ones. So, beware of sour grapes. Even scattered crazy English professors can teach you stuff that might save your life.]

In addition to the stalking of authors, one of the most helpful things I learned is that bibliographies are fantastic ways to find sources.

 Instead of pulling your hair out desperately trying to find the right wording to get exactly the articles you need, grab books or snag articles on topics slightly larger than your topic and turn directly to the bibliography. Don’t even read the books or articles. Just read the bibliographies. You’ll be amazed how much easier it is when someone else has done the research for you. Something I used to do all the time was 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 groups.

2) You have fifty minutes. After that, time is up.

3) If you have different topics, 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 if you can't decide. If you’re working with a group topic, find books/articles on the broader group topic; with any luck, you’ll be able to find resources for everyone in your group (each person in the group, remember, should be researching a “smaller” topic that falls under the “mother topic” of the group), assuming you’ve broadened your topic well. (Advice: Don’t always jump to the first “broader” topic that comes to mind. Like I told the group researching Islamic Extremism in America, you might want to try “Islamic Extremism” first, but you could get better results if you look for General fundamentalism/religious-extremism in America—extremism of all religions. You can also use multiple “broader” topics. Do whatever works.)

4) For each topic you decide to research, find at least 20 books written on a/the(/some) bigger/broader topic(s). Don’t open the books yet.

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

6) Write down citation information for any journal articles that seem to apply to each smaller topic from each bibliography. (You could write down books, too, but, generally, in a paper of the scope you’re talking about for your research papers, if there are entire books on your topic, the topic is probably too broad. You can use those books to further narrow, though. Pick through their bibliographies. [A chapter of a book, on the other hand, is of an acceptable scope for your papers. So if there is a book with a chapter that works, that’s fine.])

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

8) If applicable, repeat for each person until the time limit is up.

9) For Homework: As an individual, actually look up articles that might help you with your topic. Save a PDF of the articles that apply to your topic, if you can. If you can’t, or if the articles don’t seem to be in the databases (this happens sometimes, but be really careful when you check because ILL can get cranky if you just order stuff you could have gotten on your own!) then you have some options. First, if BYU has a hard-copy, you’ll want to find the journal on the shelves of the library and photo-copy the article. If they don’t have a hard-copy, fill out a “request” form through Inter-Library-Loan (ILL—see “services” on the HBLL website). This service is AMAZING. They will send a request to another school that has a copy of the article that you want and some library TA there will scan the article for you and then upload it onto the library’s site. ILL will send you a notice when they come in and you can just click on a link and there they are, ready to be saved as PDF’s. AMAZING.

10) Look through the bibliographies of those articles. If you can find more applicable articles, fantastic. Those can be added to your stack even though you didn’t get them during the 50-minute library quest. Note, however, that you may find yourself needing to narrow your topic some more if there are a ton of articles on your topic! [A ten page paper needs about 15 peer-reviewed articles to cite. You may want to try to narrow your scope so that those 15 articles are all or most of the articles out there.]

11) For group topics: discuss with your group the possibility of keeping a google doc or something with all of the sources you’ve found. There may be some overlap of sources. That’s OK. [Is there a way to post a downloadable PDF on a group blog or something? If  you have someone computer-savy in your group, let us know! If it worked, everyone could grab any of the articles with much less hassle.]

12) Next Class Period: Bring a list of all of the articles (applicable to your topic!) that you have saved PDF’s for, a list of any/all articles of which you have hard-copies, and a list of all of the articles that you are still waiting for ILL to get to you. (ILL usually only takes a few days, though, so if you order tonight, you could have them by next class.)

13) Whichever group found the most applicable articles, they get a prize! Maybe even a big one. Maybe one worth spending a few extra hours striving for. Just sayin...


If you have questions while you're working, send me an email. I'll try to keep my computer next to me. If you have an iPhone or Apple computer and my phone number (I think it’s on the syllabus) you can Facetime me. Warning: I do not look so pretty right now!)

Good luck, y'all!