I interviewed one of my teammates who is a senior. He had to do a research paper on the effects of marijuana on your body's overall health. He stated that is was very hard to find factual information. He said his professor only let them use information from work that was peer-reviewed. My teammate also mentioned that he used Google's scholar tab. Many people are unaware of that feature of Google. It is a research database that only contains peer-reviewed and scholarly work. The scholar tool can be very helpful when trying to find authentic information on a certain topic. He also stated that he used Galileo. This a well known database that has legitimate information on pretty much every topic. Everything on there is peer-reviewed! I'm pretty sure every college student has used this database at least once. One thing that surprised me is that he said the professor wanted them to cite every website they looked at. Even if they didn't use information from that website. Sounds crazy to me. If you didn't use information from the website, why should you have to cite it?
i did not know about the peer review either, and the google scholar tab. All this information is very useful not only for me but for anyone else who reads this post and was unaware. i have personally used Galileo and enjoyed it very much, it is quite useful when doing a research paper or just want general information.
ReplyDeleteWe'll start talking about peer-reviewed sources and using Galileo soon!
ReplyDeleteWhen you do research, even if you're not directly quoting a source, you're gathering ideas from a lot of different sources and those ideas are shaping the way you present the material. When you look at a website about a specific topic, you evaluate the information there -- either it says the same thing everyone else has said (adding credibility to those other sources), it says something completely wacky that you reject as not credible, or it phrases something in a way that sounds really good and that you want to quote directly. In any of those cases, you're using the information to inform your overall argument, even if you don't quote the material directly.
We'll talk more about this later, but the main purpose of citing your sources is to show what influences shaped your thinking on the topic.