Google Scholar’s “Cited by” interface.
“Read the footnotes,” many a humanities professor has intoned to me—I will admit, in vain. When you’re crunched for time and facing a steep amount of reading per day, as many Columbia students are, the footnotes or endnotes seem worth only a skim, if that. (To maximize my printing budget, I have, on more than one occasion, carefully printed everything except the endnotes.) What I hadn’t really understood every time that advice was given, and what I didn’t grasp until (you guessed it) I set out to write a senior thesis, was that footnotes are actually essential.
Diminutive? Yes. Sidelined? Literally. There’s a reason that “footnote” is a metaphor for unimportant things: technically paratext (a very Englishy word for material that surrounds and supports the central text), they are set up as material unnecessary to reading whatever it is you’re reading. And depending on what citation style the author has used, they sometimes end up seeming full of chalky bibliographic material that doesn’t read easily. But to understand what other thinkers the author is responding to, where to go next for pertinent information, and fundamentally how the author understands their place in the field, the footnotes can be crucial.
For instance, I’m writing about a 17th century play by Margaret Cavendish called The Convent of Pleasure, and so I’ve been reading about everything from the Council of Trent to the history of crossdressing in early modern England. But while I don’t have time to read all of the recent perspectives on the role of doorways in Renaissance-era Spanish Carmelite convents, I can use the notes of the one article I do have time to read to find other sources to compare against it, without burrowing down a JSTOR rabbithole. Obviously the footnotes of one article are not going to tell you everything about a specific field, but they can help you see the thing you’re reading not as an island but as part of a web of other scholarly work.
I’ve found this particularly useful for finding sources that not only sound useful but are: for instance, a book titled something like Clothing and the Body in the Early Modern Era might deal with the wrong century or place to be useful to my work, but if it’s cited or discussed in the notes of an article which is useful, it’s more likely to be useful. If it’s cited in an article about convents, for instance, it might actually have something to do with convents. Also particularly helpful for navigating this footnoting, but in reverse, is the “Cited by” function on Google Scholar, which (like it sounds) gives you a list of everything it can find which cites the text you’re looking at. This method, which was pointed out to me by a research librarian, can help you effectively filter your search results through a tradition or pattern of criticism.
I wish I had started paying attention to these skills earlier in college, not in the least because it would have made the first forays of reading for my thesis more fruitful. Reading the footnotes can help you build the kind of awareness of a field that is necessary for writing research proposals, for instance. Plus, it’s good to see how other authors navigate the field of criticism in which they’re working: after all, one of the unexpected—and unexpectedly exciting—parts of writing a thesis is that I get to write my own footnotes.