Research

Intro

Research is a foundational skill for many information-intensive activities, and it is especially an important skill for policy debate. Research is what guides the arguments introduced to a round and the evidence we find and present through “cards” are what substantiate those arguments in the first place.

Research isn’t just imperative in an activity like debate, it becomes a work of art that can express what debaters want to argue, from citing an expert advocating for a plan to a critical theorist critiquing ontological aspects of a policy. Being able to research effectively in debate would not only help debaters scout and develop arguments they can use in a round, but also find arguments to build on or against other arguments.

Researching for debate can be broken down into two steps. First, you search for the evidence you want to use in debate. Second, you selectively modify the evidence you found and turn it into a card, which is the basic unit for evidence in policy debate. Learning how to properly find evidence and convert it to arguments becomes crucial.

Table of Contents

Researching sources

What is a card?

Card Cutting 101

Researching sources

Finding evidence with a purpose in mind can be a daunting task, but there are a bunch of tools that can streamline your research session.

Google is THE search engine for finding the articles you want to use. It is the most accessible in finding articles, but also the most broad in searching for what you want. In order to maximize your research experience, you need to be able to learn techniques for the search engine.

Firstly, you should keep an eye for particular sources, depending on the type of evidence you want to extract.

News organizations report over relevant events and policy. These sources are the most accessible as they provide generic overviews and the simplest analysis over a certain issue, commonly documenting details such as the who, what, when and where. Look for sources like the New York Times, BBC, and Reuters.

Think tanks are research organizations that delve into analysis and research over certain topics. These sources provide more in-depth analysis over a certain issue and explain certain motivations or implications of the issue. Look for sources like Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Foreign Affairs, and Brookings Institute.

Scholarly literature are articles typically submitted to a dedicated academic journal. These sources provide the most empiricism and research over the certain issue, although they are the least accessible as most submissions require access through an institution, which is usually a university. The best place to look for scholarly literature is through Google Scholar, which provides literature from websites like ScienceDirect, Taylor & Francis, and ResearchGate. Another place you can look through are databases such as JSTOR, Project Muse, HeinOnline, LexisNexis.

Secondly, you can utilize Google’s search engine operators to specify your searches. The four primary operators you will be using are:

Quotes (“”): Quotes find the exact phrase in your search.

For example, searching [“arctic”] will show articles with the word arctic in it.

Dash (-): On the contrary, dashes exclude results with the word you specified.

Searching [-arctic] will only show articles that don’t have the word arctic in it.

AND/OR: These show results either with both words or either words you specified.

Searching [“arctic” AND “research”] will show results with both the words arctic and research in it, while searching [“arctic” OR “research”] will show results with either words.

site:xxx : This lets you find results with the specified website url.

Searching [“arctic” site:highnorthnews.com] will give you results from High North News having the word arctic in it.

Finally, when you find an in-depth article on a certain issue, looking through the hyperlinks to other articles or other authors the article cited helps further with researching. This helps you learn different angles of the literature and even give you more sources to cite and cut evidence from.

To the right is an example of a references section in the context of telehealth in the Arctic

What is a card?

Cards are the basic unit of evidence in policy debate used to present an argument in the round.

A card contains many aspects to it, but there are three foundational parts to a card.

Firstly, the tag is the short thesis of the argument made in the evidence, based on how it is cut and ultimately presented.

Secondly, the citations are the credentials of the article you cited from, consisting of the author’s name, their qualifications, date, title, publisher, and the url link. The citations start off with the author’s last name (with et al. if multiple authors are involved) and the year, which is read after the tag.

Finally, the evidence is the article itself, pasted and manipulated to best showcase the argument made. Debaters read the highlighted aspects of the evidence.

Card Cutting 101

Cutting a card is a simple and relatively quick process, as the research to find the evidence you’re looking for takes the majority of the work.

Let’s say we want to argue that oil drilling is inevitable in the Alaskan Arctic.

Once you find an article, look through and copy the evidence we want from the article (i.e. the paragraphs that we want to use). To the right is the article we have chosen.

First, we must create a citation for our evidence. Here’s a quick guide on Evidence Ethics, which are rules you must follow for a citation - otherwise, you can lose the debate.

Evidence Ethics

Because we take works from an existing publication, we have to do proper citations to not only fully credit the original works, but also follow basic evidence ethics.

Primarily, it’s important that your evidence is accessible at all times. There will be concerns about evidence that might be distorted to the team’s advantage or even doesn’t exist, where debaters will ask you for the original source of the evidence.

Secondly, fully completing the citations is key to evidence ethics. At the bare minimum you need the author and the title of the article/book. The more you can access, the better - dates are usually very important, along with URLs and author qualifications. If you cited works from a journal article, then you need the page number, name and issue number of the journal.

Next, we build the foundations for the card. We paste the evidence in and format it correctly to match the source article.

Then we start underlining the article. Underlining serves as the initial survey over the article, filtering in the important lines that best demonstrate the argument wanting to be made while eliminating redundant lines of the article, whether grammatically or in general. Bolding important parts of the underlined areas is also useful, especially for longer cards.

Next, we highlight the article. We highlight the underlined lines in a way that most efficiently states the argument wanting to be made. This is very important, since debaters only read the highlights of a card - keep it concise.

Finally, we determine the tag for the card, based on what is being argued in the highlighted portions of the card. This is the bare minimum you need to do in order to cut a debate-viable card.

You can apply stylistic elements into the card to make it visually appealing. Card aesthetics not only make it easier to read a card, but it also boosts the credibility and authenticity of the card.

Firstly, you can shrink the lines that are not underlined to a font size of 8 or 5. You typically do this by using the Find and Replace function, finding lines that have the default font size and not underlined and replacing them with a smaller font

You could also place underlines and bolds in the tag and evidence. This places great emphasis on crucial aspects of a line, whether it would be describing key actions or bolding acronyms to make it easier to read.

You could also do a combination of both, based on your preferences on cutting the card. Here’s the final version of the card.

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