When you start your research, keep in mind that research is similar to detective work. You have to look for clues to narrow your topic, find relevant search terms, and formulate ideas for your essay. While researching, you should be keeping your eyes open for clues in order to locate appropriate sources.
Read your prompt carefully. Like a detective, you need to get the basic facts and expectations from your client (your professor). What does your professor want? What is the puzzle before you? Your professor will explain the requirements for the assignment, but clues like possible search terms may slip into the text of the prompt. Words from the prompt such as humor, boundaries, offensive, inappropriate, and sensitive might be useful in a database search.
Like any detective, you'll need to have information about the different "suspects" or the topics in your assignment. You'll want information about their background to see if you can find any interesting threads that you can weave into your essay. To find background information, there are various resources.
If you use OneSearch, you will often retrieve a Start Your Research article that provides useful overviews about your topic. In the example below, we searched for the term, "satire", and found the starter article indicated with the light bulb. Not all searches will bring up a starter article, but Start Your Research articles provide background information typically found in encyclopedias. Use these articles as a starting point for research to find useful concepts, controversies, historical background, and very importantly, keywords that you can incorporate into database searches.
You can find interesting keywords and examples that you might use in your essay. You might find names of comedians and TV shows that you might want to use as search terms. You might see the word, "corruption", and decide that you want to focus your search on examples of political corruption portrayed in satirical ways and the comic's purpose in portraying politics.
To find other encyclopedic articles for background information, you can use the Gale eBooks database.