When my friend and Baylor colleague Philip Jenkins lets you in on his writing “trade secrets,” you ought to pay attention. Especially if you are writing a dissertation or an early-career nonfiction book, I encourage you to read Professor Jenkins’s latest post, on bibliographies. Here’s an excerpt:
So How Do You Make a Really Useful Bibliography?
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Start by seeing if Google will lead you to any kind of working bibliographies on the topic you are pursuing, e.g. US empire. Such items might be included in the college course syllabuses that some professors kindly put online. Use these as a basis of your new bibliography...
If you are interested in Topic X, then you assuredly know a couple of the major books in the field, preferably ones written recently. Look at the references that those distinguished authors cite, and incorporate them into your working document. You will very soon get a sense of who the key scholars are, and you can follow them up in a database.
I entirely agree with Dr. Jenkins’s advice. One of the most common mistakes graduate students make is failing to realize that research and writing is more a conversation in scholarly community than a standalone exercise of assertion.
On this front, the worst thing to do in scholarly writing is to enter an ongoing discussion but you don’t even know it is happening!
For example, anyone writing on the First Great Awakening needs to account for the most controversial argument ever made about it: Jon Butler’s 1982 Journal of American History article which argued that the Great Awakening was basically invented by later evangelical historians. When I came to write a book on the Great Awakening (published 2007) it would have been embarrassing and unacceptable if I simply proceeded without knowing that Butler advanced that argument.
To be sure, I can’t account for every single comment anyone anywhere has made about the Great Awakening - there must be hundreds of thousands of such comments, when you count brief references in history books and articles, blog posts, encyclopedia entries, etc. Most of those references do not carry the scholarly weight of Butler’s bombshell article in the Journal of American History, the most prestigious journal in American history circles.
So composing a bibliography especially entails knowing the most important and up-to-date literature in your scholarly genre. The bigger the topic, the more judicious you need to be about focusing on what’s most influential.
Some dissertation writers might get paralyzed when facing a massive scholarly literature. “I won’t ever be able to read all that stuff!” you might think. Well, this is what coursework, exams, and dissertation prep is for - to at least gather a professional level of familiarity with the material on your topic.
But a word of caution: do not fall into the trap of feeling like you cannot write anything before you have read every single scholarly word on your chosen topic.
This is where preparing to write is as much art as science. You are not trying to master and memorize everything on your topic before you write. You are seeking to understand the state of the scholarly discussion well enough to have a framework within which you write your dissertation.
As Professor Jenkins says, knowing the literature also helps you see what questions need to be answered, or what issues have been misunderstood. It is in those questions and gaps that you find the animating themes of an article, dissertation, or book.