Putting It Together: Locating and Evaluating Sources

  • Popular newspaper and magazine articles are meant for a large general audience, are generally affordable, and are easy to purchase or available for free.  Professional magazine articles are meant for people in a particular profession, and are often accessible through a professional organization. Scholarly journal articles are meant for scholars, students, and the general public who want a deep understanding of a problem or issue.
  • The information in primary sources has reached us from its creators without going through any filter. Secondary sources are translated, repackaged, restated, analyzed, or interpreted original information that is a primary source. Tertiary sources further repackage the original information because they index, condense, or summarize the original.
  • You can eliminate certain sources and find the best fitting ones to support your ideas on the topic when researching by remembering to stop, investigate, find better coverage, and trace claims.
  • One of the things that gets in the way of identifying evidence of bias on websites is our own biases. Sometimes the things that look most correct to us are the ones that play to our own biases.
  • The first step to internet research is to identify the main concepts in your research question, then brainstorming and listing alternative terms, including synonyms and singular and plural forms of the words.
  • For advanced research techniques, use search statements, put quotation marks around phrases, use wild card or truncating symbols to find variations of a word, add Boolean operators, and group the appropriate terms with parentheses and quotation marks.
  • Resources at the library can be found using the library catalog and filtering results or by using their specialized database—often called a research or library database.  Another way to find resources is through Google Scholar or by bibliography-crawling.
  • When reading for research, some strategies to find relevant information include scanning for information, using the table of contents, changing search terms, and making the topic broader or narrower if needed.
  • Your research notes provide a written record of your sources, help you to read actively by asking questions and emphasizing important points, help you recall key facts and claims, prevent inadvertent plagiarism by connecting ideas to their source, and provide the raw material for your writing.  You’ll want to take note of bibliographic data, main points, data/statistics/quotations, and questions.
  • Some note-taking strategies include outlining, concept mapping, and Cornell notes.
  • An annotated bibliography is a list of sources that has notes and details. The bibliography will consist of a citation, followed by a summary of the work, why the source is important, and how you plan to use it in the essay.