“planning” have all been used to describe this stage of the writing process, yet conducting searches of these words would yield different results. Retrospective searches in composition studies can be difficult, writes Scott, because “even where older research had addressed similar or overlapping questions, the old indexes don’t use the expected new words, and a kind of bibliographical amnesia sets in” (“Bibliographical Problems” 169). In addition, Scott writes, what makes the retrieval of relevant sources by subject terms further challenging is that “compositionists tend to talk about more than one topic in an article, and to raise issues that cut across simple subject-categorization” (“Bibliographical Resources” 83).
Still another bibliographic difficulty Scott discusses is that of field demarcation. Scholarship in composition studies is often interdisciplinary, drawing on fields such as education, linguistics, speech communication, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and literary theory. This broad scope of potential inquiry makes it difficult for compilers of bibliographic resources in composition to determine which sources to include and which to exclude when indexing scholarship. Such ill-defined parameters for the discipline also leave researchers uncertain about how fully a subject has been searched when using the bibliographic resources in composition studies. As recently as 2006, librarian Daniel Coffey confirmed the interdisciplinary nature of composition scholarship when he analyzed the citations in a representative sample of the discipline’s core monographs and journals. Coffey concluded that “part of what makes composition scholars unique is that their research is not completely encapsulated within the disciplinary realm of the humanities” (162). Perhaps even more than students in traditional humanities disciplines, then, students of composition studies would benefit from a longstanding, comprehensive, user-friendly bibliography.
Unfortunately, the development of a thorough bibliography in composition studies is instead more recent and troubled. Patrick Scott, Paul Bryant, and Richard Haswell have all published historical accounts of the development of bibliographic resources for composition studies, and they all fault the discipline’s professional organizations for not developing a comprehensive annual bibliography for the discipline sooner. Scott writes that the sheer multitude of professional organizations in composition studies created a professional segmentation, hindering the commitment of a single organization to devote the money, staff, and resources to a large-scale bibliographic endeavor (“Bibliographical Problems” 172–173). Scott describes this lack of initiative on the part of professional organizations as “embarrassing” (“Bibliographical Resources” 82); Bryant’s criticism is equally unforgiving: “That neither the CCCC nor the NCTE saw fit by the mid-1980s to devote some of their considerable publication resources to such a clearly needed, basic professional tool as a comprehensive annual research bibliography when, during that same period, they found it possible to provide significant support to various political and social agendas is regrettable” (“No Longer” 144).
Although helpful volumes were available that offered an introduction to composition scholarship, these also had extensive shortcomings, as Scott explains:
[I]n addition to being dated, discursive and orientatory guides pose other problems: nearly all the existing guides are avowedly selective in their coverage, most of them are silent about the kinds of searching from which they were compiled, they are often biased one way or another in their selection of material, and most fundamental of all, there are disturbing gaps in the chronological coverage they provide. (“Bibliographical Problems” 167).
What Scott claimed that composition studies still lacked and sorely needed in 1986 when he wrote the above passage was “on-going, systematic, non-judgmental coverage of activity in the field” (167).
This need began to be filled the following year, although it was more than a decade before an annual bibliography in composition studies had a permanent home. In 1987 and 1988, Erika Lindemann edited the Longman Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric, which provided citations and annotations of scholarship in the discipline that was published in 1984–1986. When Longman discontinued this series after publishing just two volumes, the CCCC contracted with Southern Illinois University Press to continue the annual bibliography under the title the CCCC Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric. The nine volumes that followed provide citations and annotations of scholarship in composition studies that was published in 1987–1995. These annual volumes then ceased because the CCCC began plans to join its annual bibliography with the one compiled by the Modern Language Association (MLA); however, Todd Taylor later combined all eleven volumes from both prior publishers and updated them through 1999 into an online, searchable, open access database. Scholarship published after 1999 that would have been included in this annual bibliography, had it been continued, is instead indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.
Whereas composition studies once lacked adequate bibliographic resources, such resources for the discipline are now plentiful. In addition to the continuation of the discipline’s annual bibliography in the MLA International Bibliography, students and professionals can also use CompPile, JSTOR, ERIC, WorldCat and other valuable resources to conduct bibliographic research in composition studies. Because all of these resources differ in how they operate and what they offer, now more than ever, students entering the discipline need bibliographic instruction to gain skill in using these varied resources astutely.
It may be tempting to become comfortable with only one or two bibliographic resources and to assume they will produce adequate results, but Scott warns against this practice, arguing that “in composition, as in other reference fields, we are often channeled by our favorite bibliography’s taxonomy and coverage base into one particular research tradition or one phase of a continuing debate, while being cut off from other traditions or phases, and we need, here as in other disciplines, to come to terms with this channeling effect” (“Bibliographical Problems” 176). Elsewhere, Scott reiterates this advice: “For most purposes, it is better to use multiple bibliographical sources rather than relying on a single favorite source—not just because a favorite source might exclude relevant items (different bibliographies have different methodological leanings, for instance), but because in any particular source all the relevant items may not be sorted or indexed under the heading(s) the researcher is using” (“Bibliographical Resources” 88). An important objective of this text, then, is to make you confident about your ability to enhance your search results by using multiple bibliographic resources.
In addition, in keeping with the recommendations of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) previously discussed, the bibliographic instruction you will learn in this text extends beyond just explaining the tools available to addressing the research process itself. The importance of this approach, as articulated by Scott, is worth quoting at length:
Practical advice about composition bibliography must therefore be concerned with attitudes and search-strategies, not just with the bibliographies themselves. Often, for instance, when quite sophisticated composition graduate students turn to a bibliographical search, they revert to the worst kind of old-style high-school-research-paper thinking and assume that, given the right subject-heading and the right bibliography, they ought to find readymade the list of all necessary material. This could only be true if the research project was a first-level search on a very stable aspect of the discipline. As compositionists should know, research-writing (and therefore research) is not simply about assembling readymade information, but about changing the ways a topic can be looked at and about making new cross-connections between material. (“Bibliographical Resources” 87)
Scott continues by cautioning researchers against relying on “the bibliographer’s prepackaged selections” (“Bibliographical Resources” 87) and explains that “specialized bibliographies [ . . . ] are best used for preliminary orientation to a topic, or for refreshing our sense of the range of material, rather than as a substitute or short-cut for our own systematic library search early in a major project” (“Bibliographical Resources” 79).
What this text will teach you is the processes used by experienced researchers in the discipline, what Scott describes as “search-strategies
