On Sourcing Your Papers

Right, so today I'm working on a final presentation for King Arthur.  (Technically, I'll be doing that all this week, but that includes today).  Since I'm a filthy procrastinator, I only started looking for sources properly yesterday.  This means that I have very little of note so far to say about the weaponry of the Arthurian legend.
This is in part due to the fact that nobody else had anything to say about it, either.
There are very few papers about this topic anywhere online.  The only ones I could find were from the last quarter of the 19th century to the first quarter of the 20th century, and archaeology has probably caught up quite a bit since then.  I assume that nobody has written much about this in a very long time because there are two sorts of people who are interested in ancient weaponry nowadays: collectors of ancient swords and LARPers.  (this is what my web searches are telling me, anyways).  The former group should get their acts together and write some cool stuff about their artifacts, because I WANT ALL OF YOUR RESEARCH.  The latter group should name their weapons something different (well, I should probably yell at the creators of D&D for that), and get their butts out of my Medieval Weapons searches.
Since there are no academic papers on the topic, you have to go to books.  Like, actual books.  Like, my right arm is sore because I was just carrying three 500-page hardcover books around for half an hour as I looked through the library for sources on What Might Have Been Used to Kill People in the Middle Ages.  I know that Arthur was technically in the Roman era, but there's always room for authors to impose what they know.  There wasn't Google back then, so Geoffrey of Monmouth couldn't have gotten an image of the sort of sword Arthur might have used in reality, so he probably took his own mental image of a noble's sword and assumed that weapon had always been used. Same goes for Thomas Malory, Edmund Spenser, the Gawain poet, and a lot of people who wrote about the Arthurian legend.
Time to do some real-life research, though.