| Understanding and Finding "Source" MaterialSource material is information you have gathered to support your research topic. Try to use recent sources. A book may look valuable, but if its copyright date is 1955 the content has probably been replaced by recent research and current developments. Scientific and technical topics always require up-to-date research. The list below shows a progression from excellent to less reliable sources:
Scholarly BookLike journal articles, scholarly books are subjected to careful review before publication. Scholarly books, including textbooks, treat academic topics with in-depth discussions and careful documentation of the evidence. Two works that will help you to evaluate a book are:
Indexes that will lead you to reviews of books in magazines and journals include:
BiographyBrief printed biographies may be found in works such as Contemporary Authors, Dictionary of American Negro Biography, and Who's Who in Philosophy. You can also find brief biographies on the Internet, using a search engine such as AltaVista. A critical biography is a book devoted to the life of one person, such as Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde, a study of the British poet and playwright. To find a critical biography, use the electronic card catalog at the library or go online to Amazon.com or Barnes&Noble.com, which are bookstore sites that will show you what biographies might be available. Scholarly ArticleA scholarly article can appear in a magazine, newspaper, or journal. In general, scholarly articles offer more reliable evidence than popular magazines, although quality magazines such as Atlantic Monthly and major newspapers such as The New York Times, also provide well-researched and generally reliable articles. One way to evaluate a set of articles is by citation searching, which is a search for authors who have been cited repeatedly in the literature. As you search the various bibliographies, mark your bibliography cards with stars or circles each time a particular source is cited; two or more stars will suggest must reading. Three citation indexes will provide such citations:
Sponsored Web SiteAsk yourself a few questions about any Web site information:
InterviewFor information about conducting interviews, see the Exploring Additional Sources section in the Finding Sources tab. Experiment, Test, or ObservationFor information about conducting experiments, tests, or observations, see the Exploring Additional Sources section in the Finding Sources tab. Trade BookTrade books, such as How to Launch a Small Business or Landscaping with Rocks, are nonfiction books found in bookstores, not in a college library. Designed for commercial consumption, trade books seldom treat with depth a scholarly subject. EncyclopediasBy design, encyclopedias contain brief surveys of every well-known person, event, place, and accomplishment. They will serve you well during preliminary investigation, but most instructors prefer that you go beyond encyclopedias in order to cite from scholarly books and journal articles. Popular MagazinesLike trade books, magazines are written rather quickly and the articles seldom face critical review by a panel of experts, so you will need to exercise caution. In general, college libraries will house magazines with merit in the quality of writing. NewspapersIn the main, newspapers have reporters writing under the pressure of deadlines, so they do not have time for careful research and documentation. On occasion, however, a newspaper will assign reporters to a series of articles on a complex topic, and these in-depth analyses have merit. ListservE-mail information via a listserv deserves consideration when the listserv focuses on an academic issue, such as British Romantic Literature, or more specifically Shelley's Poetry. Online Web courses often feature a listserv site for exchange of ideas and peer review. Rather than a source for facts to quote, use the listserv to generate ideas. Individual Web SiteIndividual Web pages, posted by individuals with interest in a particular topic, must be approached with caution. For example, one student, investigating the topic "fad diets," searched the Web and found mostly commercial sites that wanted to sell something or home pages that described personal battles with weight loss. UsenetMany Usenet news groups post information on a site. They invite opinions from a vast cross-section of people, some of whom are reliable and some are not. In most cases, participants have an anonymous username, rendering their ideas useless for a documented paper. Internet ChatInternet chat conversations have almost no value for academic research, since in most cases, you don't even know who you are chatting with, and the conversations are seldom about scholarly issues. Selecting a Mix of Primary and Secondary SourcesPrimary sources include novels, speeches, eyewitness accounts, interviews, letters, autobiographies, or the results of original research. Feel free to quote often from a primary source because it has direct relevance to your discussion. For example, if you examine a poem by Dylan Thomas, you must quote the poem. Secondary sources are writings about the primary sources, about an author or about somebody's accomplishments. Examples of secondary sources are a report on a presidential speech, a review of new scientific findings, or an analysis of a poem. Be selective in quoting from secondary sources; incorporate a key phrase into your text, not eight or nine lines. Examples of primary and secondary sources are:
Reading All or Part of a SourceTo save time, be selective in your reading; cite material that is pertinent to the argument. To avoid the loss of your own voice, do not dump huge blocks of quotation into the paper. Reading Key Parts of an ArticleRead the entire article only if a quick survey encourages you to investigate further. Key parts of an article include:
Reading Key Parts of a BookA book requires you to survey:
Reading Key Parts of an Internet ArticleKey parts of an Internet article include:
Responding to the SourcesSelecting Key IdeasIn many instances you may wish to borrow only one idea from a source, which you can rephrase in your own words. For example, from a bulletin on air- bag safety, a student selected just one paragraph, on "smart" air-bag technology, to use in her paper as a one-sentence summary with an appropriate citation to the entire article. Outlining Key IdeasYou can frame your own outline to capture an author's primary themes; a quick outline of the "air bags" article might look like this (in part):
Making Notes on PhotocopiesAvoid making marks on library books and magazines, but do make marginal notes in your own books and magazines or on photocopied materials and printouts. Writing a Rough SummaryA summary condenses into a brief note the general nature of a source; for example,
From "New Rules," page 1:
NHTSA wants smart technology to detect small people in the seats, less power in the air bag, and more options for auto owners to deactivate their air bags. Preparing an Annotated BibliographyAn annotation is a summary of the contents of a book or article. A bibliography is a list of sources on a selected topic. Thus, an annotated bibliography gives a bibliographic list of all your sources, and summarizes the contents of each book or article. For example: National Safety Council. "Child School Bus Rules" 6 Jan. 2000. 2 July 2000. http://www.nsc.org/lrs/lib/fs/home/schobus.htm
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