In this lecture we're going to talk more about finding sources and about note taking. We've already talked about the difference between popular sources and scholarly sources. On the left, here are some examples of popular sources, and as we move to the right, the sources get more scholarly. On the far right, we have the most scholarly sources, the library databases, Google Scholar, and Sage Open. In the middle here are news sources. Now news sources are more scholarly than the popular sources, but not as scholarly as say the library databases. In college classes, your teachers may let you use news sources or they may tell you they don't want you to use those because they're not academic enough. You'll always want to do what your teacher tells you to do. In this course, because not all of you are studying in a university right now, and may not have access to library databases, I'm going to allow you to use the news sources for your academic research. If you're at a college or university and you have access to library databases, you should use those for your research. But if you don't, you'll want to use Google Scholar, and then it's okay to use some of these respected news sources. These are just some examples, there are others as well. Remember, you just always want to check to see if the source is reliable, and remember there were several questions to check if it is reliable. Who wrote the article? Who published the article? What's their purpose? Are they biased? These are all things to consider when you're evaluating your sources. Because we're learning about academic research, I do want to show you a little bit about the library databases, even though all of you won't be able to access them right now. Most college websites will also have a library website. Here's an example of a library website. This one is for the University of California Irvine. These library web pages will be extremely helpful to you. Here in the middle, you can see lots of different databases and catalogs. These are all different ways for you to look for sources. These e-journals and databases are probably the best place to look for your online sources. These are some of the library databases that are available at most universities. You should remember these names and look for them at your school library. Some of the more popular ones are JSTOR, LexisNexis, Proquest, and CQ Researcher, and you see they even have Google Scholar here. If you're not a student at a university though, you won't be able to access most of these because they require a login, and you have to have an account with that university. That's why I keep telling you about Google Scholar, because if you don't have an account with a university you can always use Google Scholar. But if you have a library account, then you'll want to use these other library databases. This is what JSTOR looks like. It looks like a search engine, there's a place for you to type in your search, and here I've typed in a sample search for free college education. I want to point out a couple of important things on this page. Notice here we're searching for all results but we could narrow our search if we just wanted to find journals or if we just wanted to find books. You see I've also selected Content I can access. There might be some sources that I don't have access to for some reason. I don't have permission to use them. So I've asked JSTOR to just give me results for sources that I can access, and then I've also chosen to sort the results by relevance. That means how important they are to my keywords. If you wanted to just search for varying news sources, you could select newest and it would put the newest sources at the top of the list. Here's an example of the results I got from that search. You can see three sources listed here, and JSTOR has given a passage from the text that includes my keywords, and they highlighted the keywords for me. So this is an actual few lines from the text of this article. It allows you to read briefly and decide if this source might be what you're looking for. From this short passage, you might decide that this article, even though it mentions free college education, doesn't really have anything to do with your research question. Or you might find, yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Then you would know that this is a source you probably want to take a look at. This is the first thing you would want to do when you're searching in one of the databases, and notice there are a few links below each source. You could read this article online or you could download a PDF, and there's also a link to help you with the citation. After seeing a description that I thought I was interested in, I clicked on it and this is what I see next. Here's the article title and the author's name, and a little description about the author so you know who wrote this. You also get more publication information up here at the top. And different databases look a little different, but they all will have some kind of information like this. So, if you learn to use one database, like JSTOR, then it'll be easy to learn how to use the others. Or if you know how to use one of the others you can figure out JSTOR. Most of them will have tools over on the side like this one does. Notice JSTOR allows you to view the PDF. You can view the citation or you can email the citation information to yourself so you can put it in your works cited page later. Sometimes there's an option to email the article to yourself as well. So always look around to see what tools are available in that database. Now let's look at the rest of the article. First, there is an abstract. This is just a short summary of the article that was written by the author. The abstract is a way for you to quickly decide if the article will be useful for you or not. As you can see, these academic articles are sometimes really long. We're not even halfway through this article yet. You're going to be reading dozens of articles, and it'll be difficult to remember everything in all of them. So a good idea is to take notes on the articles that you are using in your research, and here's a sample of the notes that I took for one of those articles. You see at the top I put all of the citation information. I put the title of the article I was reading, I put the journal that it came from, the date that it was published. I put that I got it from JSTOR, and I put the date that I accessed this article. I'll need all of that information in my works cited page, and it's hard to go back and find it later. And then below that you'll see the notes. These are just the notes from reading the article. Most of these notes are just phrases. I didn't use any complete sentences, but these are things that I will be able to remember about this article later. And I wrote down things that I think might be useful for my research paper. You'll want to do this for each of the articles that you read. Keeping notes on all of the articles will help you to be organized.
