#On Originality in Research Papers, or #"How is an Undergrad Expected to Have Original Ideas?! Help!"

If you're an undergraduate student of history, then it is very likely you have at some point been told by your instructors that one of the things they are looking for in your work is evidence of original thought. In the marking guidelines set by your institution, demonstration of original ideas is almost certainly one of the criteria that sets apart great students from good students. Many people find this a source of anxiety or distress, especially when it comes to their final year thesis. What on Earth can an undergraduate possibly say that hasn't been written by experts before? If you've ever had such worries, then this post is for you - and whilst it's aimed at undergrads, it should also hopefully be useful for anyone who is trying to get to grips with writing history.

So just what is originality, anyway?

There is a common misconception that 'originality' in a paper means 'ground-breaking'; that undergrads are expected to go out and write something completely new, with the confidence and authority of an expert. Fortunately, that is absolutely not what your instructors mean when they say they want to see evidence of 'original thought'! Rather, what the people grading your papers are looking for is evidence that you have formed your own ideas about whatever it is you're studying; that you have come up with your own original, critical response to the question, based on the selection and careful analysis of primary source material that you have found, with an awareness of how your conclusions and ideas fit in with the wider historiography.

To express originality in a research paper is to bring fresh perspectives and your owb insights to your topic, even if you are retreading old ground (and retreading old ground is by no means a bad thing). It means that you are not just repeating what someone else has said, or trying to confirm ideas that have already been expressed by someone else. A paper that shows evidence of original thinking is a paper that shows you have found relevant source material, engaged with it critically and drawn your own conclusions about the topic from that engagement. It is your ability to do this, not the significance of your conclusions, that your instructors are interested in. Original thought means presenting an argument that you have constructed, that you have found and selected the evidence for and that you can defend on its own merits.

Most papers you will be asked to produce before your final year are not expected to be original in the sense that they stand a chance at making an authentically new contribution to the scholarship. There is a reason why you'd be hard-pressed to find an article in a history journal that only runs to 2,000 words! For most papers, it is going to be enough for you to be able to demonstrate that you have an argument and an idea that is original to you. For projects where it is plausible to make an authentically novel contribution to the scholarship - like a final year dissertation or extended research paper - there is a much more realistic expectation that you will be able to devise a reasonable original idea, in the sense that your paper will do something different. To avoid crossing over too much into /u/Thegreenreaper7's general guidance on formulating a research question and thesis (which is very applicable to developing original thought), I am going to limit myself to talking about the kind of thinking and writing you should apply to something like a final year dissertation. These principles, however, can apply just as much to writing a regular paper.

Developing an original research question

So where does original thought come from when it comes to formulating research questions? In essence, finding something new to say about a topic doesn't necessarily mean that you have to discover something; rather, it usually involves finding a new research question, a new angle of attack, that nobody has properly considered before. A new idea does not stand alone, nor can it - you can only have a truly, authentically novel idea if you know what historians have already said about a topic (if you don't, how can you know it's novel?). An original research question does not exist in a vacuum; it has to be situated within the context of what historians have already written about the topic. It is perfectly acceptable and absolutely expected that original research will, in some meaningful way, refer back to the ideas of previous writers and researchers.

In order to find an original research question then, you are going to have to do a lot of reading - and critical reading. You will need to consider what you already know about a topic and chase up what has been written about the aspects of it that interest you most. Ask yourself questions like: where are the gaps in what has been written? Are there any obvious holes in the historiography that seem like they should be filled in? Have historians flagged up avenues for research no-one has really followed up on? How does what you're reading relate to what you know about similar contexts in history? What kind of sources have historians used and how accessible are they to you; could there be something that's been missed? What about divergent perspectives or conceptual frameworks in the historiography; what has been said of the experience of women for example, or of representations of a contentious issue in a period or culture's literature? Is there more that could be said in defence or criticism of an historian's position by examining their evidence in a different light? Could you make a comparison with another context no-one has made yet? Could the divergent ideas of different historians be reconciled together in a way no-one has considered before? Can you interpret existing sources in a new way that changes or undermines their implications? Is the historiography dominated by theories that you don't align with fully easily (and what is the alternative in that case)? At the same time as all of this, investigate what primary source material you can investigate as your ideas start to take shape.

The key is that you must be able to approach what interests you in an interesting and fresh fashion, not that you must find something no-one has ever written about before (though if you can do that, great!). Reinterpreting existing evidence through new frameworks, or in light of new source material, is an essential part of the writing of history. By all means retread old ground if you think you can do something slightly different and new with it - and by all means, take inspiration from other historians writing about other subjects. Historians inspire one another to new research approaches all the time.

Demonstrating original thought

The key to demonstrating original thought lies in your primary source material - or rather, in how you use it. Students sometimes think that primary sources are there to support an argument you have devised based on your reading of academic literature; this is not the case in a research paper. If you do that you are not showing original thought - you are showing you can understand what other people have written and find evidence to support their case. But they have their evidence; what we are interested in is evidence for your ideas. Primary sources are the evidence from which you construct an original argument. Your argument should come from applying the skills of source analysis discussed in previous weeks to the primary source evidence you have found. If your research question is a puzzle, then the conclusions you draw from consulting primary sources can be seen the key that helps you unlock your solution to the puzzle.

You demonstrate your argument in writing in how you deploy and contextualise your evidence. The first part of this process lies in selecting your material. If you are going to produce a piece of solid original research, I can guarantee you will need to spend some time agonising about what citations to include from a list of many possibilities you have accumulated and considered. Having a few primary sources that you can use as citations to support your case does not indicate an original argument in itself. What does indicate an original argument is the ability to select key sources from a wider body of material that best highlight the case that you are trying to make based on your study of the wider body. Making an original argument implies looking at a range of primary sources and synthesising a coherent, broader argument together from what they each tell you about the answer to your question, and selecting the ones that most crucially reflect and defend that argument; then, in turn, being able to explain and defend why those sources are the most appropriate ones to use and what their significance is to your problem. If the primary sources you use say conflicting things, you should be able to analyse which perspective is more likely to be significant - or reconcile them together in a way that is not immediately obvious reading them in isolation. Do not simply disregard them. The sources must shape your ideas, not the other way around.

Look, reddit unbroke! I'm sorry I didn't get this up yesterday.

So you have to write a historiography paper

We sometimes get questions from people who have been assigned a mysterious entity known as a "literature review" or a "historiography paper." Historiography is the study of how historians 'do history', but what should that paper look like?

In a lit review, your goal is to: (A) identify the important works of scholarship on your topic (B) figure out what the general trends and dominant theories of previous scholarship are--how they study your topic, what they are arguing (C) identify any current debates or directions for further study.

1. Identifying key works of scholarship

The shortcut here is to find the most recent book or article you can that deals with your topic. Its footnotes and bibliography should be a gold mine. If you can get ahold of a few recent books and articles, comparing their footnotes and bibliography to see which authors come up repeatedly will help confirm your thoughts.

2. Identifying trends and dominant theories

Well, this is the part where you have to read. However, you do not have to read as much as you think you do. Earlier we talked about how to read an academic book. Here, you can hopefully reduce that even further, to the introduction and conclusion. Your primary concern is basic: what the author's argument is, in a particular scholarly work.

To identify trends, though, you will probably find it helpful to go a little further: to write down what sources each author uses, whether they followed a particular historical methodology, what they claim their particular "innovation" was in making their groundbreaking argument.

3. Identifying any current debates or directions for further study

This will emerge out of your identification of trends and dominant theories. Sometimes, you will absolutely come across different (not necessarily opposite, but sometimes you do get lucky) theories within two different texts. Other times, it is up to you and your familiarity with the sources to see where problems arise. Or, if you notice that every scholarly work is taking the same theoretical or methodological approach, you might see room to apply another theory. (Like, for a solid 15 years, we studied medieval women and especially medieval women writers through a lens of power and control. Then we moved on to performance and community. Bored now. What's next?)

So what does my paper look like?

Most literature reviews spend a short paragraph on each key individual work, or each key development in scholarship. You say what the author said, and why they made that argument. You could explain how that particular perspective contributes, overall, to current understanding of the topic.

This is a very formulaic paper type, but it does require significant research time to make sure you haven't overlooked anything.

/u/sunagainstgold also made the wise suggestion that we reference AskHistorians' policy on Homework questions.

In a nutshell, asking a question on AskHistorians is not a substitute for conducting research for yourself. Asking a question here should not be the first resort, because we are not here to do your research for you. Similarly, don't ask us what topic to write about, you should consider that carefully for yourself. Most importantly, the mods and flairs take seriously the possibility that an answer provided here might be copied wholesale and become someones essay. That is plagiarism, and if caught could get you kicked out of school.

Now, there are instances when asking a question here is acceptable. If you given an honest effort at researching, can explain what sources you are using, and want suggestions for further reading, that is ok. If you are arguing a specific theory and want to know if that theory has been argued before in your study area, and what the critical reception has been, that is a good question for AskHistorians.

From Topic, to Research Question, to Thesis

This post will outline the process of moving from a topic through to a thesis primarily by discussing a dissertation-style thesis from start to finish. Essay writing differs from dissertation writing in several key ways. The first is that your general topic and a general research question have already been set for you but the overall process is still incredibly similar. If you are writing an essay then I still highly recommend reading this post in full, especially the section on how to structure an introduction (where the only real difference is the length assigned to the introduction). I will, however, highlight some key factors for approaching an essay in the light of assessing the research question and developing a convincing thesis.

The first step is identifying your broad subject. This should be the easiest step of all but can often seem daunting. I find it simplest to grab a scrap bit of paper and start with a heading. I then create a list of themes under that topic which you could discuss. I keep doing this until I hit a wall, and I am no longer able to come up with more. At this stage I choose the one which is most interesting to me and then create a preliminary reading list of academic works, articles, and potentially some primary sources. Your next step is to systematically read them. As you do this you should keep track of any new topics which emerge, any points of particular contention, or any time a scholar says ‘more work needs to be done on this’. As you do this you will begin to narrow your working topic and are ready to start constructing research questions.

Research questions are best built by keeping a finger on the pulse of your topic. Academic history is a discourse carried out both in the body of work you are reading and, most importantly, in the footnotes. Any time you see something that is interesting make sure to read the footnotes and track down the works cited! So your first action should be to find the most recently published work on your working topic and look through the abbreviations in the front and the bibliography at the back. If a particular secondary source is abbreviated in the footnotes it is very likely a highly important book in the field. Another fantastic resource for keeping abreast of the current hot topic in a particular field are academic reviews of published books. These can be found in a variety of journals but two of the most reputable are English Historical Review and American Historical Review alongside Speculum, Past & Present, and History Today. These are not reviews like those you’ll find in the Times Literary Supplement or on Amazon or GoodReads. These are written by other experts in the field and their purpose is to evaluate a work’s findings and method. A good review will not only highlight what the book does well but what it does poorly and what the reviewer wish had been covered. There will be more topic-specific journals, such as The Journal of Medieval Military History or Ecclesiastical History but a thorough examination of secondary literature should bring this to light.

In essence what you should be building is a running historiographical analysis like that described by /u/sunagainstgold here. As you are able to draw the connections between the published literature you should be able to identify topics which are commonly discussed and whether or not they are points of consensus or contention. You will also be able to get an inkling of what issues are not being discussed. This is your first research question!

Another very useful base research question is, ‘WTF is going on?’ This is best deployed on historical phenomena than secondary literature, although some scholarly debates can also invoke this query. For example, if crusaders in the Baltic were enslaving women and children during the early thirteenth-century but not doing so during the Albigensian Crusade then why the fuck weren’t they? This research question was answered by a thesis of John Gillingham (‘Crusading Warfare, Chivalry, and the Enslavement of Women and Children’, in The Medieval Way of War, ed. G.I. Halfond, (Farnham, 2015), pp.133-151) and he concluded that warriors tended to adopt the local accepted conditions in theatres of war – while it was still prevalent in the Baltic for women and children to be enslaved during warfare, this had not been true in medieval France for quite some time so it was not even considered an option. This thesis is built upon decades of work whereby Gillingham has considered what chivalry is, whether or not it was concerned with the treatment of non-combatants, and whether this concern may have had a real effect on soldier’s actions. There was undoubtedly a large body of work required before Gillingham could answer this research question. At this very early stage you should then turn back to the secondary literature to see if your WTF moment has been discussed, and note down whether it has or not and whether this discussion is satisfactory, then continue reading.

This is a perfect point to then revisit your topic lists and update them with your new historiographical surveys and early reading of primary sources. Go do it now! You then rinse and repeat and you have moved from a preliminary bibliography to a working bibliography. With this working bibliography you are now much better equipped to tackle the sources themselves and actually start thinking about how best to interrogate the data you are scraping from them.

To return to Gillingham’s enslavement thesis, what he has also done in answering his WTF question is choose two examples to resolve the issue in a manner which would be far more difficult had he focused solely on the Baltic or on south-western France (where the Albigensian Crusade was fought). This is another type of research question which is rooted in your method of approaching your sources. Modern historiography is highly dependent on theories borrowed from other disciplines, especially sociology and philosophy. Max Weber, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Quentin Skinner, and Jacques Derrida have all had immense impact on my particular field(s). Borrowing or adapting theories can be a difficult and potentially dangerous thing to do (see a wonderful new work on this topic by Nigel Raab, The Crisis from Within: Historians, Theory, and the Humanities, (Leiden, 2015)), it can, however, be incredibly rewarding. Much of the entire structure of modern history is built on foundations of Max Weber’s theory of ‘ideal types’ and these types of research questions can uncover immensely valuable findings. It is also a very good way of demonstrating ‘original thought’ as discussed by /u/sowser here!