February 07th, 2018

Evaluating Research and Determining When to Cite

​Get a good headstart on research methods. You will be asked to evaluate research in terms of the advantages and disadvantages.

Journals -
Advantage - most credible, peer reviewed, objective   
Disadvantage - hard to read and can be quite technical

Books -
Advantage - credible, often link to more research, reviewed   
Disadvantage - finding specific research information can be hard in a book

Encyclopedia
Advantage - neutral, objective 
Disadvantage - shallow and purely factual with no depth

Newspaper -
Advantage - easier to read, a good springboard for further research, credibly affirm dates and events,
Disadvantage - some sensationalism, bias

Wikipedia -
Advantage - peer reviewed, comprehensive, tends to be neutral, a good first step fro finding more research   
Disadvantage - lack of depth, not good fro specific research questions

Websites -
Advantage - easy to find, efficient collection, can provide links to further research
Disadvantage - often biased and credibility is sometimes questionable

The top ones are journal and books. We need to rely more and more on them but we can use the others to help get us started. Begin by looking at journal abstracts and learn to copy and paste information onto a prearranged structure. 

Learn the citation rules, particularly for MLA. A good website for that is by the IBO organization. The key thing to realizes is that it is ok to have a lot of citations and that even when you do use your own words, you still must references where the source of the information came from. A good rule of thumb is;

1. Cite if you are using any quantitative data even if you knew it before
2. Cite if it related to information that is not common knowledge such as where a person was born or how many family members or chemical compositions etc...)
3. You can cite opinions but only as it carries authoritative weight to your arguments
4. Try to have topic openers or transition statements that are not cited. If you are making a mini-thesis statement that you are about to give evidence for then you do not need to cite.