"Hmmmmm, another paper assignment . . . gotta get a topic . . . let's see, something about . . . is there something that's easy to research . . . I'll just get on the Web and see what's there . . . "

Have you ever had the preceeding conversation with yourself? If you haven't, then maybe this is the first time you have tried to write a research paper. This Web Page is intended to explain a step-by-step process to create a high-quality paper on original research. If you do all of this, you will earn a top grade, AND learn something important about history and how to present it.

WARNING: This is not a difficult process, but it requires commitment and determination. In addition to class time and the time you spend reading for class, you must be prepared to work from three to six hours each week on your research paper. That will give you time to locate and consult sufficient sources, prepare at least three drafts of your final paper, and reflect on the results of your research.

If time permits, you must review all of the literature relevant to your question. For a doctoral dissertation or an academic article, this can take months. For an upper-level undergraduate course, this should require a few hours in the library to locate relevant books and then as many hours as it takes to read the relevant portions and take notes on the reading.

As you read, take notes on your reading, and in particular, keep track of what you've read and where you found information that appears useful. After each new book or article, refer back to your question and see if you have increased your understanding of the question.

Example: In the example given above, suppose that you have chosen to answer the question "Who owned canoes in the Niger Valley?" While looking through the index to Richard L. Roberts' book, Warriors, Merchants and Slaves: The State and the Economy in the Middle Niger Valley, 1700-1914 (Stanford University Press, 1987), you found on pages 68-74 that people called Somono controlled trade on the Middle Niger River of the river during the 18th century. You also learned that freight canoes involved specialized forms of construction and investment, and that the Somono operated boats as large as thirty tons, although typical boats were more likely to displace from six to ten tons. The largest boats required 16-18 crewmen plus three officers, while the typical boats usually operated with only three crewman. Finally, you learned that by the late nineteenth century, large freight canoes cost 200-300,000 cowries, which was more than most merchants could afford. Instead, large canoes were owned by successful Maraka planters who used them to transport their own crops and sold space to individuals and groups of merchants.

This suggests three things that you need to learn. First, what was a Maraka planter? Second, who much was a cowrie worth, or more to the point, how much were 200,000 cowries worth at the end of the nineteenth century? Third, where did the Somono operate? Did they sail the entire length of the Niger River (roughly 2,600 miles), only in the Middle Niger Valley (between the waterfalls at Sotuba and Ansongo, roughly 800 miles), or in some smaller portion of the Middle Niger Valley?

The answers to these questions may lie elsewhere in Roberts' book--use the index to look for Maraka, cowrie and Somono. Maybe the information is not in Roberts' book, but one or more of the footnotes on pages 68-74 directs you to another source. Finally, maybe neither of these is true--Roberts assumed that the reader already knew what a Somono was--so then you have to locate a source for that information on your own. Carefully note as much information about Somonos as you can from Roberts' book, and then head back to the library.

If you are writing your paper during a fourteen-week semester, you need to reach this point fairly quickly--probably sometime before the end of the second week of the semester. If you decide that your question is "answerable," then you can relax a bit, but if not, this will give you time to find another question before it gets too late.

Ask yourself the following questions about the material that you have found:

1. Do I know how to define every part of my question? In other words, can I explain the precise meaning of every word and/or phrase in my question?
2. Do I have a source for everything that I want to say about my question?
3. Have I reached an answer to all or part of my question?

Example: Actually, you may not need to find a new question. You may be able to refine your first question. For instance, in the "canoe" example, you will have learned by this time that African canoes were called piroques by the French, and that they are still in use on the Niger River even though steamships and diesel-powered craft are also in common use. You may have considered asking how piroques are used, but become frustrated because no one seems to know exactly how many there are or what they carry. However, in your preliminary reading, you learned that the Middle Niger Valley produces cotton and wondered if any of it travelled in canoes. So you change your question to "how do export commodities produced in the Middle Niger Valley reach the world economy?"

Once you have collected a large amount of information, you must analyze it to decide what it "means." The customary way to achieve this is to organize your facts in ways that reveal patterns and relationships.

Your first step is to organize your facts into chronological order. This is not enough to complete your analysis, but it will expose some relationships and help you to reject others. For instance, if one event occurred after another, then it cannot be the "cause" of the earlier event. Be careful though, because the earlier event is not necessarily the cause of the later event, since both could be consequences of a third, even earlier event.

You should also organize your facts into "sub-topics" of your original topic. For instance, if you are writing about "Who owned canoes in the Niger Valley?" you should have learned that in addition to the Somono people (mentioned above), the government also used canoes for the postal service and another group of Africans, the Bozo, used them for fishing. You might organize your facts into those three categories--Somono, government and Bozo--to see if there are any patterns. If all of your facts about Somono ownership fall between 1880 (when the French first reached the Niger River) and 1923 (when the French introduced regular steamship service on the Niger), then you have established a pattern--Somono canoe ownership was part of the precolonial economy, and it was reduced by the introduction of the colonial economy.

Using the same example, you may discover that the French began its canoe postal service in 1895 and discontinued it in 1923. That suggests another pattern--of competition between canoes and steamships that was won by steamships.

If your notes on the Bozo indicate that they continued to use canoes after 1923, then you may be able to show that the economy of river traffic on the Niger River did not operate along purely "free market" lines, but instead offered ways for local transporters to survive. Determine how the economy of river transportation worked, and what, besides the amount of money collected per unit of distance, determined the success of a voyage?

Plan to write three drafts of your paper. The first draft is used to get your ideas down on paper in coherent paragraphs. The second draft allows you to put your ideas in a logical order that takes the reader from your question to your conclusion. The third draft gives you a chance to eliminate grammar and spelling errors, and to make sure that your paper is ready to hand in.

FIRST DRAFT: Begin writing your final paper at least three days before it is due, and preferably earlier than that. Start by thinking about how you discovered the "answer" to your question. Write an outline consisting of short phrases that represent each of the major ideas that you used to construct your answer.

Example: Suppose that you decided to answer the question, "Why did Africans continue to use canoes on the Niger River after the introduction of steamships by the French?" Your outline might look like this:

1. Africans used canoes to carry freight and passengers before the French arrived in 1885.
2. The first steamboats were used for military purposes and Africans could not use them.
3. After steamboats were opened to African trade, African traders did not give up canoes.
4. Discuss the costs and benefits of using steamboats.
5. Africans derived other benefits from using canoes than just transportation--employment, recreation, independence.

Now write at least one paragraph on each item in your outline. Don't interrupt the flow of your ideas to look up a fact--if you need to look up a fact, just put a star next to the place that needs checking and keep going.

SECOND DRAFT: Put aside your first draft for at least one day so that you can reread it with a fresh mind. Read the whole thing through completely before you start to rewrite it. After you have finished reading the entire paper, ask the following quesitons:

Does the paper still seem as logical to you today as it did on the day that you wrote it? If not, then does your paper simply need transition sentences to connect your paragraphs together, or do you need to rearrange your paragraphs into a new order?

Is there anything--a concept, a place name or an idea-- mentioned in any of your paragraphs that will be unfamiliar to the reader? If so, then can you explain it clearly by adding a descriptive phrase or sentence, or do you need to add an additional paragraph to explain it fully?

Have you answered the question completely? Imagine that this was someone else's paper and your assignment was to disprove the argument. Have you omitted anything that is needed to make the logic of your argument clear?

After you have done all of that, this is a good time to let someone else read your paper. A pair of fresh eyes will find mistakes that you cannot find, and someone who is not familiar with the topic can tell you whether your organization makes sense.

THIRD DRAFT: Now is the time to reread your paper for spelling and grammatical errors. First, run a spell-checker on your paper to get all of the easy errors. then go through it line by line and look for the following things:

1. Make sure that every sentence has a subject and a verb, and that all of your verbs are in the correct tense--usually simple past tense, since you are writing about things that took place in the past. Get rid of all verb contractions.
2. Look at every indefinite pronoun--he, they, it and so on-- and make sure that it is clear to the reader to whom or what each pronoun refers.
3. Look at every foreign word and proper name to make sure it is spelled correctly. Use a dictionary to be certain.
4. Look for words like "their" and "there," "its" and "it's" and "where" and "were" that can fool your spell-checker. Make sure that you have used them correctly.
5. Make sure that no words are missing from your sentences, and that there are no extra words are "left over" from an earlier draft (like the third "are" in this sentence).
6. Make sure that every abbreviation is also spelled out the first time that it appears in your paper.

Three drafts constitute the minimum that you need to write a good paper, but if you followed all of these instructions, you should have a presentable paper.

Your paper should include ample reference notes that identify a specific source for everything that you write. The reader should be able to ask "How do you know that?" for every single fact in your paper, and be able to determine the answer from your reference notes. Note that if you have several statements of fact in the same paragraph, and they all come from the same source, it is acceptable to use a single reference note for the whole paragraph.

Example: If, in the research paper on canoes in the Middle Niger Valley, you included a statement like "Somono sailors operated freight canoes as large as thirty tons for Maraka owners who sold transport services to local merchants," you may use a single reference note:

Richard L. Roberts, Warriors, Merchants and Slaves: The State and the Economy in the Middle Niger Valley, 1700-1914 (Stanford University Press, 1987), 68-74.

There are rules for how to refer to a large variety of sources--books, articles, interviews, unpublished masters theses and more. For complete information, see Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 5th edition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 111-174, available on reserve at the university library's reference desk. (If you find a newer edition, feel free to use it.) You may use the following examples as a general set of guidelines for the most common type of sources:

Author's first and last name, Title of the book (City of publication, State and/or Country: Publisher's full name, Date of publication), pages.

Sanche de Gramont, The Strong Brown God: the Story of the Niger River (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1976), 127.

Author's first and last name, "Title of article" in name of magazine or journal , Volume and/or issue number (Date of publication), page range in the issue.

Capitaine L'Enfant, "Le Niger, voie ouverte à notre empire africain" in Le Tour du Monde, tome IX, nouvelle série, n°1 (3 January 1903), 1- 96.

Author of document, "title of document" (place, date), name of archive where the document is located, name of file where the document is located

Commandant Supérieur de la Marine, "État de Situation des Équipages de la Station locale du Sénégal au 1 Jan 1865" (St. Louis, 1 January 1865), in Archives Nationales de France, Section Marine CC3 1183.

Name of person interviewed, "interview by" name of person who conducted the interview (location, date), location of transcript or original tape recording.

Moussa Guindo, interview by James A. Jones (Ségou, April 29, 1992), tape in James A. Jones collection

According to The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th editon (1993), sec. 15.424, in general, a reference should contain the author, title, name of source [type of source: i.e. database on-line, electronic bulletin board], vol. no., date document was created [date document was accessed], URL or other unique source. For more up-to-date information, see International Standards Organization standards for referencing electronic documents.

Jim Jones, "West Chester's Everhart Park: A Century of Recreation," web page, August 2004 [accessed January 19, 2005], http://courses.wcupa.edu/jones/his480/reports/everpar1.htm.

A reference note from one Web page to another web page should include the same material that appears in a written report, plus an active link to the source page.

The bibliography contains a list of all the sources you used in your paper. It presents them in a way that permits a prospective reader to see how you did your research.

A research paper should provide a complete argument concerning a single historical topic which is clearly identified in the opening paragraphs. A research paper should contain complete reference notes for all sources used to construct the argument. It should also include a bibliography page at the end of the paper which lists all of the sources in alphabetical order.

Your research paper should be typed or laser-printed with one-inch margins on all size, and composed in a standard 11-point font such as Courier, Arial, Helvetica or Times Roman. Fancy covers are unnecessary--for Jim Jones' courses, a staple in the upper left-hand corner will suffice. Do not include any blank pages, and do not use a separate title page. Instead, type (single-space) your name, the course number, the date and the title of your paper at the top of your first page, skip a line, and then start your paper (double-space).