Research process
What's it look like?
Be Critical
Critically Analyzing Information Sources (Cornell)
Doing good research requires different skills than searching. Searching online encourages ways of thinking that can create false expectations and poor research results. Here are a few tips:
- Slow down.
- Look at the advanced search page
- Iterative searching
- Learn from the search results
- Too many results? Too few?
- Look at citations from good sources
- Try
- Various keywords
- Various subjects
- Multiple databases (information silos!)
Searching for scholarly sources
- choose the right database
- limit results to "peer-reviewed" sources
Cite your sources
- Citing Your Sources - a brief online guide to the main citation styles and a brief discussion on what constitutes plagiarism.
- Cite Right: A Quick Guide to Citation Styles--MLA, APA, Chicago, the Sciences, Professions, and More (UCB-only access) Charles Lipson. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006.
Many print editions throughout the libraries. - MLA handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th edition. New York : Modern Language Association of America, 2009.
Doe Reference Reference Hall LB2369 .G53 2009
Main Gardner Stacks LB2369 .G53 2009
Many older editions available throughout the UCB libraries.
Open access publishing
Short definition: Free availability and unrestricted use.
More complete definition from the Budapest Open Access Intiative:
By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Last Update: October 30, 2012 10:29