Fill
out
your
Paper
a
service
of
the virtual research assistant
Does
your research paper need more meat? Does it need some related
ideas?
Use the material below to
"browse" for ideas
which can contribute to your work.
For example go to the great
ideas
guide, select "happiness",
decide that the "pursuit
of happiness" would add more meat to your paper or argument and the
guide will give you great
references.

Four fill-out-your-paper
research guides are presently available:
- This guide makes use of Adler's 102
"great ideas" to structure the queries. Start with a concept, see
a definitional "branch" and then explore.
- This guide is also constructed from
full text but the text itself is a summary of work in the
field.
- This
guide
is
constructed
by
making use of the
outlining technology at Cram101.com.
Warning: if you go to a
research guide and just pick some phrase at random, you are approaching
the phrase without context and
the
results
you
find
are
likely
to
also appear to be without
context. Instead find a starting point and browse. The
context will begin to fill in the relevant conceptual space as you do
so. With a quick browse around the concepts you can find just the
right material to use to help fill out your paper.
Think of these research guides as the virtual equivalent of a library
stacks. To reach for a random book and turn to a random paragraph
is usually devoid of context, but if you flip the pages and look at the
other books around the one you grabbed .... context reveals
itself. So too, with these fill-out-your paper research guides.
All of
the guides follow a
similar output structure. For each hyperlink provided there is a
list of 25 suggested readings related to the concept or the outline
item. These search results can be used to further explore a topic
or to gather ideas for further research. Where the text has
been divided into chapters, an added link is provided for "the top 25
references." Every item within a given section has its own search
results in addition to the aggregate results for that section.
To continue
your research
we suggest you submit a portion of the chosen
snippet or its reference to Google -- a button to do that is provided
for you. 
If you wish to compile similar "bulk search results" use the Virtual
Research
Assistant. Queries to the Virtual Research Assistant
can be up to 10,000 words in length. Each query is parsed into
sentence like chunks and each chunk is the subject of its own search
query. Results are presented chunk by chunk and in the
aggregate. The Virtual Research Assistant will take a rough
draft, an article or an outline and do the research so that you have
more time to read, process, and understand. As the above examples
illustrate, if you wish to get conceptually broad results --
submitting free form text without a focus on rigor works fine; by
contrast, if you are after in-depth research, it is better to focus the
input text first -- by, for example, submitting an article
on a topic or a draft outline of a paper. The best results will
be from focused sentences within a draft paper.
Examples
of
browsing
for
ideas:
click Baby
Boomers
Stay
Active,
and So Do Their Doctors (this is a browse of
the article
by Bill Pennington in
Sunday's
NY
Times) Or:
click
The
Cappuccino
Conquests (this is a browse of a lecture by Prof.
Jonathan Morris on Starbucks and its equivalents in the UK)
Where traditional
approaches to text make use of taxonomies and ontologies
-- these research guides make use of conceptual
spaces. This means that the context for inquiry is not
resident in some sort of hierarchical space, instead it lies in the
relative position of a query within the data set.
It is critical to note that
we stopped gathering material for inclusion in our index in 2004.
We regret our inability at this time to bring the references cited more
up to date,
All text from the Outlines and
Essays is Copyright by their respective copyright holders.; this
electronic edition is Copyright© 2009 by Michael R. Lissack and
reproduced by permission.