Organizing Your Research-2
MUSC 3190 Organizing Your Research
Simple Tips For Staying Organized
Keeping track of all your research can be difficult. Here's a few tips to help you stay on top of things:
- Keep a search log, a document where you list where and how you search (date, database, keywords, filters).
- Save citations as you search, either using a citation manager like Zotero (below) or a document. Never save a link to an article without also including at least the title so you can go back and find it if the link doesn't work.
- Download article PDFs as you go, and name them in the same format (for example, AUTHOR NAME YEAR). Keep all your PDFs together in a folder so you can access them easily.
- Set up a simple chart so you can keep a big-picture overview of what you've found.
Sheppard 2019
Links to an external site. |
Lancefield 2005
Links to an external site. |
Tsou 2014
Links to an external site. |
Tsou 1997 Links to an external site. |
Book that explores representations of Japan "in the American musical imagination." Chapter 2 talks about Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado. |
Dissertation about how Asian cultural and gender stereotypes appeared in American music between 1900-1930. Discusses the terms "yellowface" and "yellowvoice," which would be helpful for me to include in the section of my paper about white singers portraying non-white characters. |
Book chapter (from this book
Links to an external site.) that analyzes the character's melodies in Puccini's Madama Butterfly. The author argues that differences in tonality are used to represent racial differences. I hadn't thought of this element before -- that racism in opera is more than just the costumes and stories. |
Journal article that talks about stereotypes of Chinese Americans in sheet music in the early 1900s. I have two articles by Tsou now -- I should look into her more since it seems like she might be an expert in this area. |
Zotero
Zotero Links to an external site. is a free tool that helps you collect, organize, and cite your research sources. Zotero works with library databases, Google Scholar, and websites to make it easy for you to add and cite items to your Zotero library with a single click. You can then easily annotate the sources, create bibliographies for different projects, and add citations in Microsoft Word.While it's not required, Zotero can help you keep your research organized for this class and for others.
This video gives you a quick glimpse of how Zotero is useful when organizing your research.
This research guide Links to an external site. will show you how to get started with Zotero and make use of all of its features.
If you're working in a team, you can share citations in Zotero. Contact your librarian if you run into trouble with this.