Course 4: Introduction to Research for Essay Writing This is the last course in the Academic Writing specialization before the capstone project. By the end of this course, you will be able to complete all the steps in planning a research paper. After completing this course, you will be able to: - choose appropriate research topics for college classes - write detailed outlines for research papers - find source material for research papers - take and organize good notes for research - use appropriate academic tone and language - document sources by creating a Works Cited list in MLA format - avoid plagiarizing your sources
Finding and Evaluating Academic Sources Video Lecture
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From the course by University of California, Irvine
Introduction to Research for Essay Writing
287 ratings
University of California, Irvine
287 ratings
Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Academic English: Writing
From the lesson
Introduction to Research
In this first module, you will learn about research assignments in American universities. You will practice choosing topics for different assignments. Then you will learn about choosing academic sources and evaluating them for reliability. These are important steps for getting your research off to a good start for any research assignment.
Meet the Instructors
Tamy ChapmanInstructor, International Programs
University of California Irvine Division of Continuing Education
Helen NamInstructor
International Programs, UCI Extension
In this lesson, we're going to talk about Finding and Evaluating Academic Sources.
First, let's talk about different kinds of sources.
Primary sources are first-hand sources.
So, if there's a car accident and
a woman is injured, if we talk to the woman in the accident,
she is the primary source because she's the one that this happened to.
A secondary source is someone reporting on something that happened to someone else.
So, for that woman who was in that car accident, if the newspaper
writes a story about her accident, this would be a secondary source.
You also need to know what a scholarly source is.
Scholarly sources are sources used by professionals and educators.
The people who write these sources know a lot about their subject matter and have
studied it for years, and they publish in academic journals that are well respected.
On the other hand, popular sources are things that we read every day,
often for entertainment, such as sports and fashion.
In academic writing,
it's important to make sure you use scholarly sources and not popular sources.
Sources can also be divided into print and electronic.
Books and other printed materials are print sources.
And then there are electronic sources,
which includes the Internet as well as academic databases.
These are some of the terms that we'll use when we're talking about sources.
For academic writing, you could use both primary and secondary sources.
You would only want to use scholarly sources, not popular sources.
And you might use both books or electronic sources.
I've already mentioned library databases.
When you're a student in a college or university in the United States,
you will have access to the library databases.
These are full of scholarly sources
written by knowledgeable people in all of the different fields of education.
The library databases probably have access to millions of articles.
Before we had library databases, libraries have, for a long time, had catalogs.
And they still have these.
Catalogs list all of the books and
materials that can be found in that library.
Both of these would be useful to you for
doing your academic research if you're at a university or college.
Public libraries also have databases and catalogs that you can use.
So, if you're not at a university, try your local library.
And if you're taking this class, then you have access to the Internet, and
could use the Internet to find scholarly databases.
This does not mean Google.
Google is not a scholarly database.
And we'll talk in just a minute about some of the Internet scholarly databases that
you can use.
In addition to those scholarly databases, you can use reliable news sources.
And you can find these on the Internet as well.
These are the places where you should look for your sources for
your academic research paper.
These are called unreliable sources.
These are not academic sources.
So you should not use these for your academic papers, especially not for
your research paper.
This is just a short list to give you an idea.
There are many other popular sources that you also should not use.
We say these are unreliable because a lot of them are for entertainment.
The articles are written quickly, and they're for popular demand.
These are different from academic, scholarly sources.
Make sure you don't use sources like this.
To find reliable sources you need to check a few things.
When you're looking at a source,
especially on the Internet, ask yourself who wrote this source?
Also ask who published the source?
What is their purpose?
For the person who wrote the source,
and also for who published it, you'll want to know their purpose.
And if they are biased in any way.
You'll also want to know where they got their information, what are their sources?
These are all things to be aware of when you're using a source.
You don't want to accidentally use a source that was written by
maybe a teenager who was just playing a joke and
pretended to write something that was professional.
Also make sure that your sources are up to date.
If you're writing about the effects of a law that was changed in 2014, it
probably wouldn't be useful to use an article that talked about that issue but
was written in 1996.
And also check if the source is accurate.
If there are lots of mistakes, if there are any mistakes,
you should wonder about the source.
Professional academic sources should not have mistakes in them.
And if they do, you'd probably want to reconsider using those.
Let's look at another sample topic.
This topic that was assigned by the teacher is on drug trafficking.
And the student came up with this research question, is U.S.
Customs using effective techniques to prevent drug trafficking in airports?
The student came up with some search terms and
then found a couple of articles on the Internet.
Let's take a look at the articles and
decide if they are reliable sources or not.
Here's the first article that the student found on drug trafficking.
Look at the name of the website, FindLaw, and
try to figure out who wrote this website, and what their purpose was.
Do you see anything that gives you any clues?
If you read the article, it seems to be giving some advice,
maybe talking to someone who has some problem with drug trafficking.
And over on the right side you can see that there are resources for
finding a lawyer and it mentions criminal charges with some other crimes.
This seems to be an advice page for people who have some kind of legal trouble.
Another thing you can look for is most websites have an About link, or
About Us, and you can read more about the company.
If you click on this company's history,
you find that this company is a marketing company for law firms.
This is a business that's just trying to help lawyers find clients.
That makes this not a particularly reliable source,
it's not meant to be a scholarly journal.
That means you probably would not want to use this source for your academic papers.
Let's look at another source.
When the student did his search, he also found this article.
Look at this one and see if you can find out who it's by and what their purpose is.
You probably noticed that this is written by the United Nations and
it's their Office on Drugs and Crime.
You probably are pretty familiar with the United Nations.
They do a lot of research on different topics.
So this article on drug trafficking is probably well researched,
and is written for the purpose of educating people.
Most people would agree that this is a reliable source.
And if we look at the About UNODC we see
that there is a lot of information that they give, including an annual report.
Companies that have to provide annual reports
show that they are accountable to somebody.
It means somebody monitors what they do and what they spend their money on.
That's something that would add to the credibility of this source.
Now, if you didn't know about the United Nations
you would want to look at this report and see what have they been doing,
find out more about this organization before you use them as a source.
Now I just want to show you an example of the most academic
kind of source that you could use.
This is from a scholarly journal.
This was found on Google Scholar, and it's a PDF.
Most academic journals have an abstract that tells you what the article
will be about.
And you see there are no pictures, and no advertisements.
Scholarly journals are quite long, so
they'll take longer to read, but they'll have more reliable information for you.
And they'll make your research paper stronger.
If you just use regular Google to do your search, look at how many results you get.
Over 7 million results, and they won't all be from reliable sources,
probably most of them won't be.
Here's an article from Wikipedia, which you don't want to use,
it's not a reliable source for academic writing.
Ehow is not a reliable source for academic writing.
So, when I just use google to do my search,
I end up with a lot of results that I can't use.
When I use scholar.google, and I do the same search,
notice I get a lot fewer results but still, a lot.
So, you have plenty of sources to choose from, the difference is on scholar.google,
you know that these sources are all going to be reliable,
they're all academic sources.
If you're going to use the Internet, make sure you
use scholar.google, instead of google.com.
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