How To Research Niche Ideas in Literature and Philosophy

Advice from a Literature and Philosophy Student who loves researching...

Research is an art. A soft craft. A quiet ritual. Not the sterile kind you’re taught in school—full of rigid referencing and bibliographies in 11-point font—but the kind where you sit hunched over your desk at dusk, reading something half-relevant, and stumble upon a sentence that makes your stomach drop. That’s the magic part.

To research is to follow a scent. Sometimes you know what you’re looking for. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it starts with a single word you can’t shake, a quote you read in passing, or a flicker of an idea that has no shape yet, just feeling.

My Substack is rooted in literature and philosophy—two disciplines that are, I believe, less about finding answers and more about asking better questions. And the questions I ask often take me down very narrow paths. Less main road, more rabbit hole. The deeper I dig, the stranger (and more interesting) the findings become.

But this kind of research isn’t something I always knew how to do. It’s a muscle, and I had to train it. I started in academia, and now I do it from the corner of my living room, between Slack pings and mugs of tea gone cold. I used to research as a student. Now I do it in the hours between a full-time job and the rest of my life. But the impulse—the desire to understand the world more deeply—remains the same.

I have a BA in English Literature and Philosophy, and an MA in English Literature. I’ve always had a taste for the lesser-known. For my philosophy modules, I chose topics that were rarely taught—like Mencius, a classical Chinese philosopher known for his work on Confucianism. There were few translations. Fewer secondary sources. I had to dig. During my MA, I focused on modern and contemporary fiction, which meant writing about books too new to have been heavily studied. For my thesis, I chose Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride—a novel often eclipsed by The Handmaid’s Tale, No one was really talking about the mother-daughter relationships in it. So I made that my project.

What I learned from all this is simple: surface-level searches won’t do. You need to dig. You need to get creative.

So here’s how I approach it now—how I research the things I write about here, and how I chase down ideas that feel just out of reach.

1. Trigger Words

Every good search begins with a glimmer. An image, a sentence, a word. “Every battle is linguistic,” I once read in Girls Against God, and it stopped me mid-page. I didn’t know what I’d do with it yet, but I highlighted it. Saved it. It became a breadcrumb for later.

You don’t need a full thesis. Just an angle. A thread. Let’s say you want to write about Plato. Don’t start by typing “Plato” into Google. That’s a black hole. Instead, start on a curated encyclopedia—Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is best for philosophy—and skim the sections. Look for something that clicks. Something off-centre. Maybe you land on “Plato’s Indirectness”—a section about how Plato rarely speaks in his own voice, instead using Socrates as a vessel. That raises questions about authenticity, intention, authorship. Now you have your spark: Plato, narrative form, indirectness. Already, you’re closer.

2. Footnotes and Bibliographies

When you find a good article or essay, crawl its bibliography. Bibliographies are treasure maps. Follow the names. Follow the hyperlinks. Find the one-line citation that leads to a whole new rabbit hole. Some of the most insightful articles I’ve read were ones I found three clicks away from where I started.

I also pull from outside academia now—quotes from novels, lines from Substacks, screenshots of tweets that are smarter than they first appear. But I treat them carefully. In university, you can’t cite just anything. On Substack, though, I like to blur those lines. If something moves me, it’s valid. But I still look for substance—something textured, something that thinks.

3. Finding Resources

If you want the academic stuff this is hard to find online. If you are fortunate to have access to a uni library (I am still an alum) then this makes it easier to find those specific articles you are looking for. JSTOR has some free stuff and you can also get some good snippets from Google Scholar.

You can also “PDF” to search terms, or “.edu” to narrow it down. I search for books by keyword, not title. I let the results lead me sideways, not just forward.

But let me say this plainly and I know some people won’t like to hear this: Google isn’t a search engine anymore. It’s an ad machine. You won’t find the good stuff without clicking up to like page 9.

So I recommend when struggling to use AI. Carefully, curiously. Ask it to find those resources for you. It’s smarter than Google and more efficient.

4. Don’t Read Everything

Skim first. Commit later. Especially with academic papers—read the abstract, the intro, the conclusion. That’s where the heart of the argument is. If something’s only tangentially related, make a note and move on. If it references something more specific? Chase that reference. Be ruthless with your time, gentle with your curiosity. And if the idea you are looking for is only mentioned on one line you can check if there is a reference and follow that through with the bibliography.

5. Handwrite, If You Can

Philosophy and literature are messy. Tangled. You need space to draw arrows, scribble tangents, reframe questions. I still handwrite everything when I’m in the middle of a research spiral. It’s less linear. More like thinking. I know it’s not an option for everyone (I have nerve damage in my hand, so I can only write for short bursts), but it helps me move from thought to thought more fluidly. Stream of consciousness lives better on paper.

Researching isn’t just a way of finding facts. It’s a way of finding voice. Of sculpting meaning out of uncertainty. I don’t research to be right. I research to feel closer—to myself, to a question, to an idea that won't let me go.

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