RESEARCH AND REFERENCING

Using the Web for research

Drawbacks:
A lot of valuable electronic sources are only available by subscription.
Open-access web sources may be unreliable.
Web sources may be less stable than print sources (websites change and disappear).
Make sure you save or print out the information the first time you find a source.

Evaluating sources
Consider the following questions:
Does the source provide general or specialized view?
Is the source long enough to provide adequate detail?
Who is the source written for general readers, specialists, critics?
When was the source published?
(Although you should consult most up-to-date sources, older sources often establish theories
and principles on which later work is based)
Who is the source published by popular (commercial), academic or government sponsor?
Is the author an expert on the topic?
Is the author objective (does the author provide evidence for his/her claims)?

How to conduct web research

Search engines like Google are based on keywords.
The success of your search depends on the choice of keywords.
Remember that many words often describe the same topic e.g. if your topic is ecology, you
may find information under the keywords ecosystem, environment, pollution etc.
Wikis (of which Wikipedia is the best known example) offer different content contributed by
users.
Most instructors will not accept information from wikis as sources for papers.
Hints
Use quotation marks to specify exact phrases e.g. home schooling
Use + for terms that must appear in results e.g. home schooling + adults
Use for terms that should not appear in results e.g. home schooling adults
Use truncation drop the ending of the word and replace it with a symbol ?, * or # - the
results will contain all the words that begin in the same way as your word.
e.g. homeschool* - homeschooled, homeschooler, home schooling.
Use Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT (George Boole was a 19th century mathematician).
AND e.g. home schooling and California returns results that contain both terms (it narrows
the search).

OR e.g. school or education returns results that contain either the term school or the term
education or both (it broadens the search).
NOT e.g. education not adult returns references that contain the term education but not
the term adult.
Acknowledging sources
Information that does not need to be acknowledged:
Common knowledge (President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.)
Well-known quotations (To be or not to be)
Material that you created yourself.
Any other material must be acknowledged.
Visuals that were not created by you (pictures, charts, maps, drawings) need to be
acknowledged as well.
Plagiarism
Using sources
Methods: quoting, paraphrasing and summarizing.
Quoting - using the exact words from the source.
You can use italics to emphasize particular words (you must insert emphasis added in the
brackets).
E.g. According to a recent article, Plagiarism is a problem among journalists and scholars as
well as students (emphasis added).
When you omit words from a quotation, use ellipsis ()
Use brackets to add information.
Paraphrasing
In a paraphrase, the writer restates all the relevant information from the source without any
additional comments (no agreeing or disagreeing).
As the original and paraphrase share the same information, some key terms from the source
must be used.
However, you should avoid borrowing too many terms and repeating the same sentence
structure.

Summarizing
Summary presents only the main ideas from the source, leaving out examples and details.
Quotes, paraphrases and summaries must be acknowledged.

Acknowledging sources
There is no universally accepted system of acknowledging sources.
One of the most widely used systems is APA (American Psychological Association) style.

APA Basics
APA does not recommend the use of footnotes (unless you need to explain something).

For in-text citations, use the author-year system in the brackets e.g. She stated, "Students
often had difficulty using APA style" (Jones, 1998, p. 199).
If you are quoting directly, you need to provide the page number.
If you are paraphrasing or summarizing, it is not necessary.
To cite a work listed only by its title, use a shortened version of the title e.g.
An international pollution treaty still to be ratified would prohibit all plastic garbage from
being dumped at sea (Awash, 1987).

Writing a bibliography
Your bibliography should appear at the end of your paper.
Each source you cite in the paper must appear in your bibliography.
The entries should be alphabetized by the last name of the first author of each work.

Books
Author, A. A. (Year of publication). Title of work: Capital letter also for subtitle. Location:
Publisher.
Calfee, R. C., & Valencia, R. R. (1991). APA guide to preparing manuscripts for journal
publication. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Electronic sources
You should provide the following information:
E.g. American Cancer Society. (2003). How to fight teen smoking. Retrieved from
http://www.cancer.org
Name of author (if available) last name + first name initial
Date of publication or most recent update (if unavailable, use n.d. no date)
Title of document (in italics)
Publication information (if available e.g. the title of the journal)
Retrieval information (Retrieved from + web address)
Citing online encyclopaedias and dictionaries:
If the authors name is not available, move the entry name to the front.
Feminism. (n.d.). In Encyclopaedia Britannica online. Retrieved from
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/724633/feminism