<p>Hi!
Glad to see your interest in NHD:) I've been competing for four years now (this coming year will be my 5th), and I can tell you, it's an awesome program and competition. If you're into history, you'll really enjoy it.</p>
<p>I've never written a paper. I've done individual documentaries every year I've competed. But I do know my way around the rules and competition pretty well, and I've placed in the top three at nationals twice before, so I'll try to answer your questions as best I can. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>The bibliography and appendixes don't count for the word limit. </p></li>
<li><p>Papers are one of the most difficult categories (in most regions/states) to advance in because more schools require kids to write papers, and more people feel they're qualified to do a paper than say, a performance or documentary. Then again, more entries doesn't necessarily mean more quality projects. So you can look at it like that too. However, once you get to nationals (and in the more competitive states, the statewide competition) the levels of difficulty of winning are about the same in each category. As Gian said, the most difficult states (approximately in this order) are: California, Minnesota, Texas, Iowa, Washington, Florida, Kansas, and Colorado. Others are competitive in certain categories and less so in others. </p></li>
<li><p>ASAP. In depth historical research takes a lot of time. You'll most likely find that once you get going, one source leads to another leads to another. The process of finding and using books, websites, interviews, periodicals, letters, speeches, etc. is multi-faceted, requires looking in a lot of places, and cannot be easily thrown together. This is especially true of international topics, where many of your contacts/resources may not even be in this country. </p></li>
<li><p>As you'll see from the bibliographies of the winning papers I posted, it varies greatly. The most important thing is that you have enough sources to comprehensively analyze your topic from all perspectives and viewpoints. That said, rarely do projects that win at nationals use less than 50 sources. Some may have over 200, although if you have that many I would think it'd be very hard to justify how you used each and every one to advance your project. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>It also varies category to category. I'm not an expert on the paper category, I do documentaries, but I can tell you that this year my bibliography had about 120 sources, about 80 of which were primary, and the year before I had about 100- 70 primary, 30 secondary. For me, these were the right amount of sources because I was doing topics that dealt with american social history in the last 40 years. Thus there were many more sources available than on some topics. The boy who got first in my category at nationals did his project on Jack the Ripper. Being that his topic was so far in the past, I'm sure the judges looked differently at his bibliography than mine and expected him to have fewer primary sources, simply because fewer exist and they're much less readily available. So there really is no "magic number" when it comes to sources. </p>
<p>Good luck with your project!
If you have any other questions, feel free to ask me. You can post here or email me at <a href="mailto:rbrown_nhd11@yahoo.com">rbrown_nhd11@yahoo.com</a>.</p>