Research Quick Guide: Using Research Helps

In this short guide, I'm going to walk you through some of the basic research helps that will equip you to do good research early on in the process of writing a research paper. One great place to start when it comes to looking for research help is the “Research Guides.” While you can search the research guides, I'd recommend you simply click “Research Guides A-Z.” On this page, you can find the major categories of research guides that are available to you. While this list is not extremely long, there is a chance that there will be a research guide available for you related to the topic that you're covering with your paper. For example, if you're in a Systematic Theology 1 class, and you want to write a research paper related to one of the topics covered in the class, you can scroll down to “Systematic Theology.” If you're taking an Old Testament class and you need to write a paper for example on the book of Malachi, there are several Old Testament guides that might direct you towards commentaries and books that will be helpful for you. 

Using Research Guides

Click on “Systematic Theology.” As you see on the left, the major category of systematics is broken up into several more minor categories or smaller chunks, and each of those has resources that are “Recommended.” Click on “Doctrine of Christ.” As you will see, we have quite a few works related to the doctrine of Christ listed. This can be a helpful starting point to see the general literature at least that is available on this more general topic. If you're writing a research paper, you're going to be writing on something a bit more specific than simply the doctrine of Christ. Yet these resources will generally have chapters that are more specific and footnotes that will cite even more specific works that you can utilize in your research paper. In other words, this is a great starting point as you do your research. 

If you click on the “Person of Christ,” it opens a particular book. Many of these books in the library’s research guides are available as ebooks, and if they're not available as an ebook you can often request them to be sent to you as an online student. But see here we can click “View ebook.” Once this opens up, you can click “PDF Full Text” and view the contents of the book. Hopefully, you can find what you're looking for more specifically in the table of contents, and then you can head over to that specific chapter. For example, selecting the chapter on the baptism of Christ, you can read through this material and look for any footnotes that are available that might give you more specific works which you'll also want to find on the library's website.

Using Commentary Guides

The next part of the research guides I want to show you though is “Commentary Survey.” Depending on what kind of class you're writing a paper for, there's a good chance that commentaries will be helpful in your research and studies. If you click on “Commentary Guides,” it pulls up some of the surveys of the commentary works that are available for you. For example, if you’re writing a paper once again on Malachi, you could click on “Old Testament Commentary Survey” and then “View ebook” to read the online table of contents. Going down, you can find Malachi on page 144. Jumping to page 144 and scrolling down, there's Malachi and it's going to list for you many commentaries. It's also going to rate them for this book; it's going to rate it based on Tremper Longman’s analysis, and you can copy one of these commentaries if you're interested in it and search for it on the library's website, view it as an ebook. If you need to, you can also request it in print form.

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Video produced by Jonathan Ahlgren, text by Flynn Evans