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Paper Writing Guidelines

We offer the following guidelines as a general aid to writing research papers in our courses.

Your paper should be a research paper, i.e., one that requires library research. It should supplement and deepen your knowledge of a topic relevant to this course, and while it may begin with or include what you learned in lecture or in the assigned readings, it must go well beyond these, showing that you acquired some information on your own.

The hardest part of writing a paper is deciding what, exactly, you want to say. Selecting a topic is not enough. Your paper should make an argument, pose a question, state a hypothesis, or in some other way direct the reader to a specific issue. A paper which is simply "about" some general topic does not usually merit a good grade, especially when the topic is very broad. First select a topic, some general area that interests you, and start reading. It often helps to begin with general reference works, such as subject encyclopedias or area handbooks, to familiarize yourself with a topic and provide some leads. Don't forget your textbooks as a good place to look for potential topics and some initial references. As you read, begin to narrow your thoughts into a thesis or problem. The first few questions you devise may require further revision as your reading continues.

You may come up with a question or problem that no one had thought to ask in just that way before. This means that you will not find articles and books addressed exactly to that problem. Remember that this is a research paper, and that you will be using library resources based on other people's first-hand research for your own ends. You will be gleaning these resources to find information or make inferences about your problem. This often requires putting together lots of little bits of information from several places and interpreting these pieces in a new way, or using them to suggest something new. Problem oriented papers often end with a solution or with a decision about which of two or more competing views the writer favors. Even if you do not succeed in finding a clear answer to your problem, you may succeed in pointing to an important gap in our knowledge, or suggest a direction for future research.

Faculty welcome discussions with anyone at any stage of the paper-writing process. Don't be afraid to try out your ideas for topics and problems on your teacher. He or she may be able to suggest good places to start looking, and later, to help you find and formulate a good problem.

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"Help! The Kenyon library has nothing on my topic!" When teachers hear this cry, they suspect that the student has not yet learned to be a good library sleuth. Before you catch the shuttle to OSU, or order fifteen books on interlibrary loan, be sure you have made the most of what we do have at Kenyon. For most undergraduate papers, the resources available at Kenyon should be sufficient. Don't worry if you turn up references that you cannot find here. That will always be the case, even when you utilize a graduate research library. The point is to have enough resources for your purposes, not to read everything ever written on your subject. Be resourceful and learn to cope.

It is your responsibility to learn how to use the library and information resources. You may be introduced to some of these resources through library instruction in connection with classes, but more often you will have to learn them on your own. You can access information for a large number of resources on the Library and Information Services (LBIS) web site. Included on this web site are resource pages organized by subject and courses. This guide will help you know which resources will be of most use in sociology. The time spent learning to use these resources will be well repaid, and the sooner in your college career you learn to command a variety of information resources, the more efficient and proficient you will be in writing research papers.

The quality of your research, and finally the quality of your paper, rests on the quality of the sources you use. In general, journalistic sources aimed at a general readership (e.g., National Geographic, Harpers, Newsweek) do not have sufficient depth of information and authority for academic papers in sociology. Scholarly books and journals should form the bulk of your sources, although popular magazines, the press, and other sources may be useful from time to time.

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There are numerous aids to help you locate relevant materials for your paper. Some of these are general in nature, while others focus on materials more specific to sociology.

CONSORT-the Online Catalog. Begin your research with the library's online catalog. Online catalogs allow us to expand our searching beyond the traditional title, author, and subject to also search using keywords and combinations of keywords. Learn to perform a Words search in the CONSORT catalog and if you do not know how, use the "Help" information at the bottom of the Words search page, or ask a librarian for assistance. Performing Words searches will provide you authors' names, and then you can search by author to see if they have written any other books related to your interest.

A Words search can also be used to find the more correct Library of Congress Subject Headings which can then be used to further refine your search in the catalog. For example, try a Words search for sociology and bibliography (limiting your search to the Kenyon library). You will get over fifty results for topics such as rural sociology, religion, theory, and other topics. If you click on one of the results you can then see the subjects at the bottom of the record such as "Sociology - Bibliography." These subjects are the correct Library of Congress Subject Headings. Clicking on them will conduct the search according to that subject heading and likely refine your results. Clicking on the subject from the previous example (sociology - bibliography) retrieves five specific results.

For starters, try a keyword search of sociology and bibliography to see if our library has any bibliographies that may be of use to you in your paper. Searching for sociology and bibliography in the keyword search, for example, gets you over thirty sources, on rural sociology, religion, theory, and other topics.

Library of Congress Subject Headings. If digging around in a particular subject is not getting you very far, consider that you may be using the wrong term for it. Consult the Library of Congress Subject Headings books, one set of which is located in the reference section near the atlases. The librarian at the information desk has another copy. Looking through this book may help you to narrow, expand, or change the terms you are using. Also, don't forget the subject heading trick mentioned above in the section regarding the CONSORT catalog.

The Social Sciences Index. The library has coverage of this index from 1983 to the present as part of the Index to Journal Articles which is available through the LBIS web site. The print volumes of this set from 1974 to 1995 are available in the reference area of the library near the atlases. This index lists all the articles published in the major journals in the social sciences since 1974. For many years this has been the standard place to begin library research on anthropological and sociological topics. If you are using the print volumes, start with a volume, follow the subjects and cross-references that fit your topic, and work backward several years or so.

Humanities Index. The library has coverage of this index from 1984 to the present as part of the Index to Journal Articles which is available through the LBIS web site. The print volumes of this set from 1974 to 1995 are available in the reference area of the library (reference table #6). This index covers some journals that are important in anthropology and sociology. Depending on the topic you select for your research paper, you may find this useful. It indexes some archaeology journals, for example, as well as those on topics of language, religion, and folklore.

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Ref H40 .A2). Sometimes the articles in here are a good place to begin work on a topic, giving you the background on arguments or on historical figures.

Survey of Social Science (Sociology Series) (Ref HM17 .S86 1994). This five volume set has over 300 articles relating to topics in sociology. Articles begin with a listing of topics covered, are generally about six pages in length, and include annotated bibliographies.

Sociological Abstracts. The library has coverage of this index from 1963 to the present as an electronic database which can be found through the "All Databases" page on the LBIS web site. The print volumes of this index from 1953-1963 are available in the reference area of the library (Ref HM1 .S67). Sociological Abstracts lists under broad subject headings nearly every article published which would be of interest to sociologists. As the title implies, it provides an abstract as well as the full reference. It includes articles written outside the USA and papers presented at meetings of professional associations.

Public Affairs Information Service International in Print (PAIS). The library has coverage of this index from 1972 to the present as an electronic database which can be found through the "All Databases" page on the LBIS web site. Print volumes are available in the reference area of the library for the period 1917-1973 (Ref HB1 .A1P34). "A selective list of the latest books, periodical articles, government documents, pamphlets, microfiches, and reports of public and private agencies relating to business, economic and social conditions, public policy, and administrative and international relations published in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish throughout the world."

Annual Review of Sociology (HM1 .A763). The library has this resource available in print from 1975 to the present. In addition, electronic access is available via JSTOR (on the LBIS web site) from 1975-1995 (with a five year moving lag time) and you can access the site directly at: http://soc.AnnualReviews.org/ While you will not get access to the full text of the entries at the web site, you are able to search and read the abstracts. This resource is often worth the effort of searching.

Additional reference materials available at Kenyon include:

International Bibliography of the Social Sciences: International Bibliography of Sociology (Ref. 301 .In8) (1979-1986)
Sociology of America: A Guide to Information Sources (HN59 .M37 1976)
Encyclopedia of American Social History (Ref. HN57 .E58 1993)
Contemporary Social Theory (H51 .B28 1971)
Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory (H61 .B477)
Sociology: A Guide to Reference and Information Sources (Ref. HM51 .A24 1997)

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Computers enable us to search through vast numbers of newspapers, journals, and books for relevant materials. Many of these resources are available through the LBIS web site. You can access all of the available electronic resources through the "All Databases" page or you can limit your access to resources (print and electronic) more specific to sociology through the "Sociology" subject page. Some of the electronic resources accessible through this subject page have been mentioned previously. Some of the other resources are described below.

Academic Universe (Lexis/Nexis). This important resource provides full texts, i.e. you can read and download whatever sources you turn up. This is the proverbial library without walls! Developed for the legal and business professions, it includes everything you could ever want relating to laws and precedents set at the state and national levels. It includes newspapers from around the world, an invaluable resource for courses that have an area focus. It also searches the entire text of articles, not just the titles, it is a powerful device that will turn up far too many references for you to use-unless you learn how to limit your searches. There are few academic journals (aside from law reviews) in this databases, but if you can use information from high quality news magazines and newspapers, and if you need to know how the courts have decided on some issue, this resource is a must.

Social Sciences Citation Index. The SSCI allows you to start with an author and article title you know to be useful or important for your research, and to learn where that article has been cited. This reveals the responses and arguments to an idea, as well as giving you a sense of how important or influential that idea has been. This database also allows you to perform a subject search as you would in other periodical indexes.

Electronic Journals are also becoming available at Kenyon. Two of these collections are OhioLINK's Electronic Journal Center (EJC) and the JSTOR collection. These collections offer wide variations in coverage. The JSTOR collection includes the full-text of journals up to the last five years. JSTOR maintains a moving five year lag in coverage and adds the next volume's contents as time moves forward. Lastly, some full-text of articles may be available through databases such as Sociological Abstracts, Periodical Abstracts, etc. The full-text coverage in these indexes varies greatly but will increase over time.

More and more information is available through electronic means. Electronic discussion groups on the Internet (often called lists) exist on an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Not only is there a sociology list, for example, but also specialized interdisciplinary lists that deal with a single country, or with a specific topic such as world systems theory. In most of these lists, most of what is posted is not useful as research material. Sometimes, however, postings such as reprints of newspaper articles, position papers, or expert opinions can be put to good use. One starting point for discovering scholarly discussions is the Directory of Scholarly and Professional E-conferences which can be browsed or searched. The World Wide Web (WWW) can also allow you to access papers, bibliographies, and other documents from around the world.

Because electronic documents are freely accessible, easily downloaded, and easily modified, one must be especially careful when utilizing these resources. While these documents may be freely accessible does not mean that they are free of copyright. Also, a note of caution is in order, in that you must thoroughly evaluate any information which you find on the WWW for its authority, objectivity, currency and other factors. Like all sources, these must have an appropriate citation in your References Cited page. See the models provided below in the style guide. To be safe, it is a good idea to make and keep a hard copy of any electronic sources you cite in case your teacher or another reader wishes to follow up your reference to it.

For the novice, one of the easiest ways to introduce yourself to some electronic resources is to explore the "Subject/Course Pages", the "All Databases" page, and the CONSORT and OhioLINK catalogs through the LBIS web site. If you start your research early you will be able to maximize your use of the online request functions of the CONSORT and OhioLINK catalogs for books and the interlibrary loan services for articles.

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This treasure trove of materials is not fully indexed in the regular library catalog, and it is not organized the same way as the rest of our collection, so students often do not discover it. It contains a wealth of useful things for sociology, including census and other statistical data, information on Native Americans, the family, laws, agriculture, and more. Learning to mine this collection may take a little time at first, but will be well worth it.

Government publications are organized, not by author and subject, but by their corporate author, i.e., the organization that produced them: the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, the Smithsonian, or the Department of Education. (Learning to use this collection gives you a lesson in the organization of our government!) Instead of a call number, the documents or books have a SUDOC number.

The most useful index for this collection is the Monthly Catalog which lists most of the documents published by the U.S. government. This index is available in three ways electronically including GPO Access (1994-present), via OCLC FirstSearch (1976-present), and GPO on Silverplatter CD-ROM (1976-present). The library also has print volumes of the Monthly Catalog for the period 1895-1994 including a set of cumulative subject indexes for 1900-1970. GPO Access and the FirstSearch database can be accessed on the "Government Information Resources" page of the LBIS web site. The CD-ROM can be accessed in the library on the Infocenter #2 workstation. The print indexes are available in the government documents area near the librarians' office and outside of the technical services department on the 2nd floor of the Chalmers library. Ask the librarians for assistance with the government documents.

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Primary sources include data collected through interviews, observations, recordings, excavation, surveys and other methods. Primary materials are also available in the library however, in the form of newspapers, magazines, letters, diaries, public documents, and so on. The Gerritsen Collection of Women's History, 1543-1945, for example, is a microfilm resource in the library that includes magazines (and also monographs) in many languages. The library also provides access to some digital collections of primary source materials such as Access to African Studies and Access to Women's Studies both of which are part of the CIS History Universe. Local libraries, court houses, and historical societies often house archives on specific subjects. Sometimes you can purchase an index to their archives on request. One general guide to archival materials is The National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (for reports on holdings from 1958 to 1993), and A Guide to Archives and Manuscripts in the United States (for listings before 1958). Another resource is the ArchivesUSA database which is available through the LBIS web site and which has absorbed The National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections since 1993. It provides information about over 5,000 repositories and over 100,000 special collections.

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Papers must be typed, double spaced. Make corrections at the word processor. All foreign terms should be italicized or underlined. Number the pages.

Margins are important for purposes of copying and for making comments. Leave at least one inch on each side and one and one-half inches at top and bottom, but please do not justify the right margin. Be careful not to run off the bottom of the paper.

Papers should consist of a title page, the body of the paper, notes (if any), and references cited. A page at the end of the paper called "Notes" lists entries that correspond to numbers within the text. These end notes allow you to elaborate or qualify something that would be cumbersome or digressive within the paper. A section entitled "References Cited" lists all and only those references you actually cited in the paper. It is not a bibliography of everything you might have read in the course of doing the research.

"Within the paper, cite your sources according to this format" (Kohlman 1985:33). (Note the placement of the quotation marks, the parentheses, and the punctuation.) If you use a direct quote or otherwise want to be specific, you need to provide the page number, but if you do not use a direct quote, you can just include the author and year (Kohlman 1985). Entries within the References Cited should look like these. In order below are examples of citations for articles, books, articles in books, documents from electronic resources, archival documents, and interviews. This not an exhaustive list of examples, however, so consult the American Sociological Association Style Guide or The Chicago Manual of Style for other cases.

McCarthy, George. 1971 How to Write a Term Paper. American Sociological Review
6:34-36.

______. 1973 The Term Paper. New York: Random House.

Sacks, Howard. 1985. How to Read a Term Paper. Pp. 97-123 in Things Every
Teacher Should Know, edited by Marla Kohlman, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

Yanoff, Scott. Special Internet Connections. [Available by anonymous FTP to
csdr.csduwm.edu and GET pub/inet.services.text]

Amnesty International. "Shock Therapy:" Restoring Order in Aceh, 1989-1993.
[Posted on Indonesia list, apakabar@access.digex.net, 3 August 1993.]

Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform Papers. Alice Belin du Pont
files, Pierre S. du Pont Papers. Eleutherian Mills Historical Library, Wilmington,
Delaware.

Macionis, John J. Interview with author. Mt. Vernon, Ohio, 23 September 1993.

For additional models, look at the References Cited section of any paper published in American Sociological Review.

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Plagiarism is a serious offense. Read the section on Academic Honesty published each year in the Course of Study. You can be found guilty of plagiarism even if you did not intend to deceive, and the penalties for plagiarism can include an F in the course or suspension from the College.

Learning to write a research paper means learning how to keep track of sources and also how to present information so that the reader knows which are your ideas and which are part of the background that inspired you. All quotations should be carefully punctuated as such, and you may not paraphrase or borrow someone else's ideas without citing a reference. Citations do not have to appear in every sentence, but may appear, for example, at the end of a paragraph in which you have summarized someone's argument or data. Cite only those sources you were able to consult, and if you learn of someone's idea second hand, that is, you were not able to consult the original source (this happens frequently when using a small library such as Kenyon's) then your citations must indicate that circumstance (Sacks 1973, cited in Kohlman 1985). Your References Cited must then contain an appropriate entry.

For example:

Sacks, Howard. 1985. How to Read a Term Paper. Pp. 97-123 in Things Every
Teacher Should Know, edited by Marla Kohlman, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

Read the section in the Course of Study under Academic Honesty for a discussion of other potentially troublesome instances, and notice there a description of procedures and penalties for infractions.

Defacing or misusing library materials harms and annoys other people who want to use those materials. Every semester students report that certain journals or books they need are missing, and occasionally that pages have been ripped out. Please return journals to their shelves; do not squirrel them away where only you can find them. Faculty will suspect and question students about misuse of the library if their papers contain references to materials which the librarian or other students have said are missing from the library. If the student is guilty, faculty may exact a grade penalty on the assignment.

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The faculty recommends The Elements of Style, a small, inexpensive paperback and an invaluable guide to writing clearly and straightforwardly. Here are a few of the general rules it contains:

Use the active voice. Avoid passive constructions such as "it is often thought that," or "was believed to have been."

Omit needless words. Avoid, for example, a wordy construction such as "owing to the fact that," and use "since" in its place. Aim for direct, forceful sentences.

Where you can, substitute strong, vigorous verbs for is, was, and were phrases. Sometimes you can drop these "is" verbs altogether. For example:

The shopkeeper, who is a teacher in the afternoons,...
The shopkeeper, who teaches in the afternoons,...

Teachers often make stylistic suggestions on your papers. Study these marks, and compare their phrasing to your original sentences to improve your writing.

The details of your presentation do matter. Proofread carefully to catch typos. Check the spellings of any words of which you are not sure. Take care to punctuate properly. A sloppy paper full of errors tells the reader that you are not well educated as a writer, or else you can't be bothered to be careful. In either case, you leave an unflattering impression. All writers need reference materials to consult about grammatical and spelling problems. If you do not already have a good dictionary, buy one. A Manual of Style, by the University of Chicago Press, is a good resource for looking up stylistic and grammatical rules, but any good guide will do. Finally, be sure to consult the American Sociological Association Style Guide for current practices within our discipline.

Sociologists talk less and less about man, more and more about humans. Avoid using man, he, his, and him in the generic to refer to all of humanity. Psychologists have found that when experimental subjects read sentences phrased in the male generic, they tend to imagine that the reading is about males. Since sociology hopes to comprehend the whole human condition, we must not construe our theories and interpretations as if only males were our subject. With a little practice, one can learn to use nonsexist language, and it does not have to make one's sentences awkward. If you think of a sentence in male terms, substitute the words human, humanity, people, persons, one, we, they, etc. Using the plural rather than the singular often helps get around those "his or her" constructions.

Compare:

Man is naturally aggressive. He has always fought to survive, but he has had to cooperate as well.
Humans are naturally aggressive. They have always fought to survive, but they have had to cooperate as well.

In the course of man's evolution, he has used his energy sources more and more intensively.
In the course of human evolution, we have used our energy sources more and more intensively.

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