Documenting Your Research Findings

Your research plan should include how you’ll document and file your findings. This will help you organize your research and avoid committing plagiarism—misrepresenting others’ works as your own.

Organizing Your Research.Develop a consistent approach to documenting and filing the information you find. People tend to keep their research in several forms, including paper, digital, e-mail, and handwritten notes (Jones, Bruce, Foxley, & Munat, 2006). This approach can make it difficult to find specific pieces of information. To better organize your research, follow these guidelines:

  1. Know the documentation style required. Your instructor will usually require that you document your sources in a standard format, such as APA, MLA, or Chicago. Before you start your research, look up the proper citation style, and develop the habit of collecting complete bibliographic information for every source you use. If your library’s databases provide a source citation option when you download or print an article, use it. Having consistent and accurate citations will help you when you write the references page for your speech outline.
  2. Create a filing system. Whether for maintaining handwritten notes, printed articles, or online sources, you will need a way to organize your findings. Create a digital or print folder system with meaningful subfolders, so you can easily find the materials you’ll need:
    General Folder MySpeechStuff
    Subfolder Backgrd_Info (documents with background information)
    Subfolder Stat_Info (documents with statistical information)
    Subfolder Quotes_Ex (documents with useful quotes and examples)
    Subfolder VisAid (graphs and charts)

    You can also keep notes, documents, and online sources organized in note management apps like Evernote (evernote.com).

  3. Use online bookmarking systems. To organize information you find on the Web, use social bookmarking—free Web-based services that let you save, organize, and keep brief notes about your online resources. Useful social bookmarking services for academic work are Delicious (www.delicious.com), CiteULike (www.citeulike.org), and Diigo (www.diigo.com).

Avoiding Plagiarism.Documenting your research will also help you avoid plagiarism, a major academic, ethical, and legal error. Plagiarism is misrepresenting others’ works as your own. You commit plagiarism when you use exact words from someone else’s work or summarize a unique idea without crediting the source. You have an ethical and a legal responsibility to credit any work that has been created by others, including written texts and spoken words. When you write a paper, you include source information to let your readers know where you found specific information or ideas. You must also do this for speeches by orally citing your sources during a presentation. Even if you unintentionally use others’ ideas without proper credit, you’re still committing plagiarism. Plagiarizing can have terrible consequences, including receiving a failing grade, being put on academic probation, or—in the professional world—losing a job.

You are more likely to plagiarize when pressed for time and when your source materials are disorganized. To reduce your chances of plagiarizing, use the following strategies (see Figure 13.3):

  1. Start early on the assignment. Rushing to prepare a speech can lead you to make mistakes in documenting and orally citing your research sources.
  2. Document everything. Develop the habit of putting clear source documentation on all your research findings. Do this even if you’re just summarizing ideas. You don’t want to face a situation in which you have great information to include in your speech but can’t recall where you got it.
  3. When in doubt, drop it. Don’t include information in your speech if you’ve lost the source documentation.

To be an ethical communicator, you want to clearly credit your sources during your speech. The How to Communicate feature on pages 332–333 presents steps for orally citing your sources. When you are unsure about whether to orally cite the source of an idea, it is better to err on the side of caution and give a citation rather than risk plagiarism. Additionally, when preparing your speech, you can ask your instructor for direction if you’re confused about whether a particular idea in your speech requires an oral citation.