Familiarizing yourself with the Literature
The best way to get started in the formulization of your question is to familiarize yourself with the literature on courtship and marriage. Start by browsing titles of articles and books, reading journal abstracts, and skimming writings that capture your fancy. At first you should read the literature more for fun than purposefully. You will get a sense of the kind of questions asked, the major theories, the constructs measured, the procedures used to collect data, and the kinds of analyses performed. Later, once you identify a topic and begin to formulate a question, you will carry out a more thorough search of your topic, and read the relevant pieces more carefully.
A good university library is the best place to start. Identify a few books you know are worth looking at, and then browse the library stacks in the area where the books are located. You will inevitably find an armload of books relevant to your interests. Identify the major journals that publish on your topic and pull out the last four or five years' worth of bound copies off the shelf. Look through their tables of contents, read the abstracts, scrutinize the bibliographies (to see what journals are being cited for related work), and skim articles that catch your fancy.
Another tactic for finding articles is to search one of the on-line databases, such as Ovid's PsychLIT or the Social Sciences Abstracts. Links to these resources are available through our University of Texas Library Social Sciences/Education Index page (some access is restricted to UT students or staff).
As you read the articles, you will come across many new useful writings cited in the bibliographies. Most articles in an area "know" their neighbors, and it doesn't take long to track down the whole community of scholars working on a particular topic.
Once you have identified an area and know the key articles, you will want to use the Social Science Citation Index (for students at UT, this service is available only at UT libraries; students at other Universities should consult their campus librarian) to find publications that have cited these key articles. Social Science Citation Index lists all the articles cited in social science journals and identifies the articles that did the citing. Thus, for example, if you were interested in tracking the influence of Zick Rubin's "The measurement of romantic love," originally published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1970, you would find that the article was cited 202 times between 1971 and 1988. It was cited about twice as many times in the 1980s as in the 1970s. A scholar willing to track down and read these citations would have a good sense of how the social science literature on love has developed over the past two decades.
To keep up with the current literature in your area, you may also review Current Contents: Social and Behavioral Sciences on a regular basis. Current Contents, published weekly, reproduces the Table of Contents of nearly every social science journal, along with an author index and address directory.
