Researched Writing: Finding Sources
John Lovas
I like to distinguish between writing a report and doing a research paper. Most students have written reports from elementary school on, and the report is a kind of writing that says find out what the most important product in Peru is and tell us about it. And you can go to a couple encyclopedias, or you can go to some other general information source, and you find out that the most important product is tomatoes or something. This is a useful kind of thing, but it's not really research. It's searching, gathering information, and putting it down on paper. Research has another step; research involves critical thinking, research involves an argument, a hypothesis, a claim, and evidence.

Betsy Klimasmith
I suggest talking to a librarian because one of the things that you'll find at a big university is that there are lots and lots of materials that you could potentially use to answer your question. There are, I mean…ranging from newspapers and magazines to scholarly articles in journals, to books. But on a big campus you need the help of an expert to tell you where all those materials are—what kinds of things are available to you, and I know that for many students that's really intimidating.

Sarah Blakeslee
A lot of students come to the reference desk and they aren't clear as to what's the difference between a scholarly article or a scholarly periodical and a popular periodical. Their instructors told them you need to have a scholarly journal. Well there's several different ways that you can identify what's a scholarly journal and what's not. I have some examples here. I have two periodicals: one is called "Golf" and one is called The International Journal of Sports Psychology. The lead article in the golf magazine is: The Only Way to Fix Your Slice is Right Here. Now, if you're a golfer, this looks like a pretty good article, you might want to dive right in. The article about golf in the International Journal of Sports Psychology is entitled, "Differences Between Actual and Imagined Putting Movements in Golf: A Chronometric Analysis." Quite a difference in the way that those two titles engage you or what you might think you want to read for entertainment versus for scholarly research. So this is one of the examples that I use, is read the titles. You can kind of get a feel from those as to what's scholarly and what's not.

Thomas Fox
The problem with the Internet really is a problem that there's tons of evidence, there's so much evidence, there's so much information out there, that it's easy to get anything to support any kind of point of view. Which is different than, when I used to teach research 15 years ago, I think what I taught was how to find information. Well you really don't have to teach that, we have a search engine now. And that's how you find information and that takes about five seconds to teach. Then you get, though, this enormous amount of information. And instead of teaching how to get information now, I think it's really important for you to discriminate among the information. What's good information.