Process Narrative: Finding Sources

With the Topic Proposal behind her, Naomi’s English Comp 2 class moved on to the next stage of the research process: the actual research! Her teacher explained that writing the annotated bibliography was a lot more about process than final product and that she would probably be building on to her annotated bibliography for a while.

Naomi already found three preliminary sources for her Topic Proposal. Her teacher commented that those sources were great, but might be useful in finding other, more relevant sources. This method is called mining a source. Basically, Naomi planned to go through the references pages of her preliminary sources to identify sources that might be more relevant to her project.

“Mining” a source

Naomi’s instructor suggested that an article from her preliminary source list, “Feeding Practices and Parenting: A Pathway to Child Health and Family Happiness” from Annals of Nutrition & Metabolism, might be a good place to start mining for sources. It was fairly recent (from 2019) and it dealt specifically with her research focus (the relationship between “family means” and healthy childhood).

Like most scientific articles, Naomi’s article had a pretty long list of references at the end (67 total sources). Instead of going through each one of these sources one-by-one to identify those that would be most useful, she decided to look at the organization of the article itself to see which sections were most relevant to her project and look into the sources cited in those sections.

Major Sections

(click to see Naomi’s comments on these sections):

Naomi decided to look at the sources cited in the “Parent Feeding Practices and Their Potential Relationship with Parent-Child Conflicts” section, since that topic sounded most related to her research project.

Parent Feeding Practices and Their Potential Relationship with Parent-Child Conflicts

Parents, particularly mothers, report considerable anxiety related to feeding, with a third to half of mothers reporting that their otherwise healthy child is difficult to feed or fussy [32, 33, 41]. There are a range of cultural, social and biological factors that contribute to the common notion that infants and particularly toddlers are “difficult to feed.” From an evolutionary perspective, a reliable, plentiful food supply is a very recent phenomenon. It is plausible that mothers are “hardwired” to feed their children as often and as much as possible to ensure survival. Child feeding is strongly embedded in culture and tradition, and feeding practices are passed from grandmother to mother to daughter [15]. Even in high income countries, it is only 2–3 generations ago that feeding children occurred in the context of comparative food scarcity [43, 44]. The traditional approaches to child feeding in this context are likely to be ineffective, even counterproductive, in our current environment where food is widely available and relatively affordable, unhealthy foods are ever present and heavily marketed, particularly to children, and excess consumption is the “norm.” Furthermore, new approaches to child feeding are required that are adapted to shifts in economic and social factors (e.g., family structures, parent work patterns, eating out) [15].

Naomi noticed that source 15 was cited a lot in this section, and not just in the first paragraph. She thought it might be a good one to look into further:

15 Birch LL. Child feeding practices and the etiology of obesity. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2006 Mar;14(3):343–4.

She was a little discouraged to see that this citation was a short (2-page) article specifically about obesity. Nonetheless, given that it was cited a few times in her article, Naomi decided to save it for later. She looked over some of the others and decided that 33 looked promising:

33 Taylor CM, Wernimont SM, Northstone K, Emmett PM. Picky/fussy eating in children: review of definitions, assessment, prevalence and dietary intakes. Appetite. 2015 Dec;95:349–59.

A few things caught Naomi’s eye in this citation. First, it was relatively recent (2015). The title also included the key words “review,” “definitions,” and “assessment.” Since she was still early in the research process, Naomi knew it was important to cast as wide a net as possible until she had a firmer grasp on some of the key concepts in this field.

Naomi decided to seek out the article. She went to scholar.google.com and copied and pasted the full citation of the source into the search box:

A google scholar search entry for an article called "Picky/fussy eating in children: Review of definitions, assessment, prevalence and dietary intakes". We see that there is an html version of the article available.

She clicked on the article link and logged in with her college library credentials. Her eyes were drawn immediately to the article’s keywords:

Keywords

Picky eating; Fussy eating; Feeding difficulties; Feeding problems; Choosy eating; Faddy eating; Child; Diet; ALSPAC; Eating behaviour

This article seemed like it could be really promising. She saved it to read in its entirety later. For now, though, Naomi didn’t want to lose momentum in her search process, so she decided to mine this article for sources using the same strategy she used for the last one.

Listing Sources

Naomi repeated this process of source mining until she came up with a pretty solid list of 6 preliminary sources. Though she hadn’t read all of them yet, she knew enough about them from their abstracts and keywords to predict that they would be relevant for her research project. All 6 of her sources were scholarly articles. She knew she should be open to using academic books and professional sources too, but at this point she wasn’t sure where those might fit into her research process.

Tip: Organizing and Citing Sources with Google Scholar

Google Scholar isn’t just a useful tool to find sources. You can also use it to save and organize your sources and to generate accurate citations for your bibliographic entries.

Visit scholar.google.com and sign in with a Gmail or Google account. Once you’re logged in, click “My Library” followed by “Manage Labels.” Create a new label for your current research project.

Screenshot from google scholar, manage labels section

When you search for a source, you can save it to your Google Scholar library by clicking the star below the excerpt.

Screen shot of google scholar article entry called Picky/Fussy Eating in Children. The star icon below the citation is checked.To add a saved source to the label you created for this project, return to “My Library,” click the checkbox next to the source you saved, then click the label icon at the top of the page and choose which label you want to add the source to.

Screen shot demonstrating how to add a particular label to a Google Scholar entry

Now, when you return to your Google Scholar library, you can click the label you created for your research project and find all of your saved sources.

Lastly, you can use Google Scholar to generate your APA or MLA-style citations automatically. Click the quotation marks below the source excerpt. You can then copy/paste whichever style citation you need into your own document. Make sure to double check the citations, as citation generators are known to make mistakes.

Screen shot showing the google scholar citation generator

Drag and drop to organize Naomi’s list of sources! Watch out though: Two extra citations have ended up in her rough draft. Also, remember that the list needs to be alphabetized!

Reading the Sources

Naomi skimmed her sources and read their abstracts before adding them to her bibliography, but hadn’t taken the time to read them in their entirety. Several of these academic articles were very long and looked complicated. For the Annotated Bibliography assignment, she had to write two paragraphs for each of her sources: one summary paragraph and one evaluation paragraph. Her teacher explained that a well-constructed annotated bibliography can save a researcher a lot of time re-reading sources later on in the process.

The key to writing successful annotations lies in accurate and efficient active reading of sources. Academic writing generally isn’t meant to be read like a novel or a short story. Sometimes it isn’t necessary to read an article from beginning to end.

Active Reading

Naomi decided to begin with the article “Diet and Health Benefits Associated with In-Home Eating and Sharing Meals at Home: A Systematic Review.” Not only did the title of this article seem to speak directly to her research question, but she knew that a “systematic review” meant that the article was most likely a literature review, or a summary of existing research on the topic. It made sense for her to read this kind of article before those focused on individual studies so she would know more about the overall state of research in the field.

Before Reading: Previewing

Strategy: Preview the reading headings to get a “big picture” of the outline of the reading. Look at the pictures and figures. Check out the bold and italicized words.

 

Naomi skimmed the article and paid special attention to the following features:

  • Title
  • Authors
  • Abstract
  • Keywords
  • Illustrations and Tables
  • Section Headings and Subheadings
  • References

 

Click on the comment bubbles in the embedded PDF to see what Naomi was thinking about each part of the article.

Naomi started a new document to keep notes about her sources. Here’s what she wrote down for this article after previewing it:

Research Notes

Naomi Harper
English Comp. 2
Spring 2022
Prof. Smith

Glanz, K., Metcalfe, J. J., Folta, S. C., Brown, A., & Fiese, B. (2021). Diet and Health Benefits Associated with In-Home Eating and Sharing Meals at Home: A Systematic Review. International journal of environmental research and public health, 18(4), 1577.

Keywords: in-home eating; shared meals; healthy diets; family mealtimes; home meals

Thesis: Relatively strong evidence from cross-sectional research supports the association of shared family meals with favorable dietary patterns in children and adolescents, including consumption of fruits, vegetables, and healthful nutrients.

Questions:

  • How do you define what is and is not a “shared” meal? What about “in home?”
  • What activities other than eating are involved in in-home eating?
  • Does the food itself actually matter?
  • Are there physical health consequences associated with family meals?
  • Are there mental or emotional health consequences associated with family meals?
  • Does family structure matter? What about eating with friends?
  • What would encourage more families to share meals?

Notes:

While REading: Asking Questions

Strategy: As you are reading, seek out the answers to the questions that the reading or you generated rather than passively scanning the words.

Naomi came up with 4 questions based on the headings and subheadings in the article. She decided to organize her notes around answers to those questions.

  1. How do you define what is and is not a “shared” meal? What about “in home?”
    • Researchers used the keywords “Home Meals”, “Meals Served in the Home”, “Family Mealtimes”, “Diet Quality”, “Dietary Patterns”, “Health Outcomes”, “Health Behaviors”, “Family Relationships”, and “Psychosocial Outcomes” when they searched for studies (2).
    • Usually researchers focus on family groups of adults and children (3).
    • Researchers are usually most interested in dinner/evening meals (3).
    • Home cooking is defined as practices and skills for preparing hot or cold foods at home, including mixing, combining, and often heating ingredients (3).
    • There isn’t much research that separates “shared meals” from “meals at home” (15).
  2. What activities other than eating are involved in in-home eating?
    • Researchers mostly look at two behaviors: the time associated with the preparation of food and the social interactions that occur while eating (3).
    • Social interaction is defined as the presence of an adult at the meal, eating in the kitchen or dining room, and watching TV while eating (3).
    • There may be a relationship between family meals and other well-ordered family interactions (12).
    • Most researchers don’t take into account changes in habits over time or season, like whether or not school is in session (15).
  3. Does the food itself actually matter?
    • There is a positive association between shared meals at home and healthier diet choices (3).
    • Healthy diet is usually defined as an increase in fruits and vegetables (7).
    • Family meals are associated with an increase in vitamin intake (7).
    • There are differences in outcomes based on gender and race/ethnicity (7).
  4. Are there physical health consequences associated with family meals?
    • “direct relationships between frequency of shared meals and reduced risk for childhood overweight and obesity are frequently reported” (7).
    • Different modeling methods make this relationship less clear (7).
    • When race and ethnicity are considered the relationship disappears, “some studies found no associations between meal frequency and risk of overweight for Hispanic families” (7).
    • Social interactions at mealtime may have more to do with the health benefits than diet itself (8).

After Reading:

Strategy: Integrate your reading notes into one location for easier reference in writing the annotated bibliography. 

Naomi added her notes about the article to the initial source information she wrote down earlier. She decided to create a “worksheet” for all of her sources that she could use to take additional notes on as she worked on her annotations.

Naomi’s Source Information Worksheet

(You can make a copy of Naomi’s source information worksheet and use it as a template. In Google Docs, click “File” and “Make a Copy” or “Download.”)