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Prof. Robert Baskerville's SOC: Research Process in a Nutshell

This guide is used in supplement with Prof. Baskerville's Soc class for Fall 2017 in order to augment materials and learning objectives.

Five Criteria for Sources

When you are looking at a source and it's not from one of the databases, it's important to think about whether or not you should rely on it.  Here are FIVE simple criteria to evaluate a source:

1) Authority

  • Who is the author?  Who is the sponsoring organization?  What is the author's credentials and experience?

2) Currency

  • Is the article or book current to the topic?  Is there newer material that may be more helpful?

3) Accuracy

  • Are the claims being made cited to studies, sources, other articles?  If so, have you at least checked some of them to see if the source is accurately representing the claims being made?

4) Relevance

  • Is this source actually on THE TOPIC you are dealing with or is it just generally in the SUBJECT AREA of your research?

5) Purpose

  • Is this a fact based news article or a persuasive essay?  Does the author or publication have a political position or bias with which it reports?  If so, can you identify it?  Remember, bias is not bad PER SE.  However, you should know what the position is so they you can go look for the alternative point of view so you can get a fuller picture.

Three Pronged Approach to Sources

Separate your sources out into different needs.  Look at the assignment and ask yourself:

What do I need in order to accomplish this assignment?

  • 2 rules of thumb--
    • for every page of a paper, have at least 1 unique source
    • for every unique source you get, pull out or note at least 3 points
      • a simple formula--for every point you pull from a source, you should be able to get one paragraph of text.  At most you will have 3 paragraphs a page of text.  This will get you to your goal.
  • Read the assignment at least twice and identify what is being asked for
    • Is it "articles" and by articles does the professor mean academic articles or popular articles or BOTH?
      • when in doubt, ask your professor; but you should always assume EVEN IF the professor says "any articles are fine" that you should mix up some academic and authoritative popular sources.  
      • academic articles also have richer citation lists you can look up and are longer, but you WILL 100% get the 3 points you need.

PRONG ONE--GET AN ENCYCLOPEDIA ARTICLE

My suggestion is go to the databases and look up the Gale eBooks.  Encyclopedia articles are good because they give you an overview of a topic and the specific names/places/events/people about a topic.  You can take the specifics from the encyclopedia article and then use them in the academic databases.

 

PRONG TWO--GO TO DATABASES AND GET ARTICLES

Essentially, there are two types of articles for your purposes--academic and popular.  Go to A - Z Databases list on the library's homepage, you will see some databases.  The main one I recommend is Academic Search Complete.  You can do searches and limit by different parameters such as academic articles only, by date, by subject, and other parameters.  These databases also have citation tools that will give you a citation you can drop into a word document for a bibliography.

 

PRONG THREE--BOOKS

For most assignments at this level, you want to be selective in how many books you read because you want to efficiently use time.  Reading three 300 page books for a 5 page paper when you have 4 other classes is simply not prudent.  My suggestion is go to OneSearch if you are interested in a book and then use the filters on the right hand side to limit to books.  Obviously, a book will give you far more than 3 points for a paper, but be prudent.