Fill Out Your paper Research Guides

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:

The Great Ideas of the Western World. (adapted from Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon)

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.

Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer (adapted from the same by Leda Cosmides & John Tooby)
- This guide is constructed using full text. Each sentence of the text is used as a separate search query.

A Management Theory Primer (adapted from Management Redefined by Michael Lissack and Kurt Richardson)

This guide is also constructed from full text but the text itself is a summary of work in the field.

Introduction to Psychology (adapted from An Introduction to the History of Psychology by B.R. Hergenhahn)

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,