If your topic deals with popular culture or recent events, it will be difficult to find typical scholarly information on that exact topic. You need to view your topic through a more academic lens. For example, I wrote a paper where I argued the comedy band NSP would not have achieved their current level of success if they had not partnered with the let's play YouTube channel, Game Grumps, in 2013. Neither of those groups has been mentioned in scholarly literature, and the scholarly literature around YouTube doesn't discuss the 2012 algorithm shift in depth. What has been discussed in scholarly literature is sex and sexuality in the media, 80s and 90s pop culture, otaku and nerd culture, and branding relationships. All those academic concepts can be applied to my argument.
The concept map below shows how this argument can be broken down through an academic lens and the types of sources I looked for.
Information comes in many different forms. What are some categories or types of voices where you can find information?
In academic research, we tend to only emphasize academic voices while there are many other voices in different formats that can be used in a scholarly context.
Here is an example of a Research Honeycomb for LGBTQIA2S+ topics.
Waldo Library uses Library of Congress Classification (LCC) for the majority of our collection and Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) for children's books. DDC call numbers can be read as a regular number with a decimal while LCC is a bit more complex with letters and numbers. The videos below explains how to find books using an LCC call number. If you need help, go to the Service Desk at the front entrance.
Because NSP or Game Grumps are not mentioned in any scholarly literature, here are some ways the concept map helped me create searches:
sexual* AND (musicians OR influencer OR "pop* artist")
(80s OR eighties OR 1980s) AND (nostalgia OR culture OR "pop* culture)
(otaku OR nerd) AND (culture OR "pop* culture")
(marketing OR branding) AND relationship
Topic: What is being researched.
Academic Voices: What we typically think of in academic research. Books, journal articles, conference presentations, etc.
News Media: International, national, local, regional, or topic-based news sources.
Community Voices: The voices of those who are being researched. Social media, blogs, YouTube, etc.
Association and Organization Reports: Information created by non-government organizations.
Government Reports: Information created by government organizations/agencies.
Stakeholders and Allies: Information by those who are not directly related to your topic but may be indirectly related socially, financially, regionally, etc.