Conducting Research for the White Paper (and beyond) 

Research Overview

Doing responsible, ethical, and effective research is something that requires the following:

• time and commitment to the act of researching

• creativity in the sense that you will need to figure out how to best word search terms and figure out where to conduct your searches

• patience to overcome times when you are unable to find what you want

• organization in terms of keeping accurate, detailed records of your searches and your search results

• critical thinking, reading, and writing to be able to assess the sources you find, their credibility, and how you might be able to use them in your essay

To achieve the above, we must recognize that when we sit down to write an essay—especially a long essay—it is very rare that what winds up on the paper is exactly what we intended to say at the outset. Writing is a gradual process, one that has been described as taking on a life of its own, and what we perceive as maybe relevant at one point may be very relevant later on. So, in short, keep your mind and ideas open when looking about and search through the different parts of databases, books, and, if necessary, web sites.

As a result of your university fees, the university has subscriptions to online databases, many of which contain full-text versions of print journals. These databses are expensive, with many containing thousands of journals in their catalog. We will use these (and some others that are online) to help us find articles, conferences preceedings, and other documents that we can use in our white papers. There are also free, online open source tools that can help us catalog and store the sources that we find.

Finding Scholarly Sources

When we are looking for "scholarly sources," we are looking for texts--journal articles, books, book chapters, conference preceedings, etc.-- that have been written by an expert(s) in the field. These texts have often been reviewed by other experts to verify the accurancy of the discussion and the quality of the writing. Though we may be conducting some of this research using the web, we must distinguish these sources from web sites that we find using Google and other search engines (see below for discussion of web research). Many of the items found using online library databses are merely electronic replicas of print journals.

Because of the variety of source types that are included in library databases, it is important to know exactly what kind of source you are looking at, what the differences are, and how the material is being presented. Some citations will have full-text PDFs, which you can download, save, and/or print. Some of these PDFs will have the complete citation information for the source, others will not. Therefore, it is VERY important that you record the following for EVERY SOURCE THAT YOU MIGHT USE:

• author(s) name(s)--first, last, or if only first initials are given, first initials and last name

• article or chapter title (for example, "Near-Memory Caching for Improved Energy Consumption")

• source title (for example, Technical Communication Quarterly or IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience)

• source type (journal, magazine, conference proceeding, book chapter, etc.)

• date (month, year, etc.)

• volume number

• issue number

• page numbers

• search terms you used to find the source

• databse used to find the source

Important Links

• Rowan Library Home Page

• Rowan Library Engineering Databases page: Rowan students and faculty online; list of engineering-specific databases, guides, and tutorials.

• Rowan Library E-Journal Finder page: Rowan students and faculty only; search for a specific journal title or browse by topic (such as, civil engineering, biology, etc.)

• Scirus Engineering Search database: "Scirus is the most comprehensive science-specific search engine on the Internet. Driven by the latest search engine technology, Scirus searches over 450 million science-specific Web pages." It allows you to search by "Journal sources," "Preferred web sources," and "other web sources."

• United States Patent and Trademark Office: "full-text since 1976, full-page images since 1790"

• European Patent Office

   

Cataloging and Storing Citations

The old-school method of storing references was to keep a paper notebook or bits of loose paper upon which one would write the citation information for a particular text. No longer does that have to be the case. The internet is providing multiple ways to store citations to that you have access them from any computer in the world and/or dynamically create bibliographies and references in Word. We will look at two such applications, both of which are free.

• CiteULike

   

  • "CiteULike is a free service to help you to store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser so there's no need to install any software. Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer with an Internet connection."

  • "The system currently supports: AIP Scitation, Amazon, American Chem. Soc. Publications, American Geophysical Union, Anthrosource, arXiv.org e-Print archive, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) portal, BioMed Central, Blackwell Synergy, BMJ, CiteSeer, Cryptology ePrint Archive, HighWire, IEEE Explore, informaworld, Ingenta, IngentaConnect, IoP Electronic Journals, IWA Publishing Online, JSTOR, MathSciNet, MetaPress, NASA Astrophysics Data System, National Bureau of Economic Research, Nature, New Scientist, Optical Society of America, Physical Review Online Archive, PLoS, PLoS Biology, Project MUSE, PubMed, PubMed Central, Royal Society, Science, ScienceDirect, Scopus, Social Science Research Network, SpringerLink, Usenix, Wiley InterScience, but you can post any other article from any non-supported site on the web - you'll just have to type the citation details in yourself."

• Zotero

  • "Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi)."

  • Take a look at the online tour: http://www.zotero.org/videos/tour/zotero_tour.htm

Conducting Internet Research

Due to the subjects of some of your white papers, you may find that you have to venture into the World Wide Web for some sources. These sources do not include full-text online journal articles or primary documents found using the library online database (though some of these could be found using Google Scholar). Rather, these sources are found using generic and meta-search engines, such as google and dogpile. You cannot use Wikipedia as a source in your essay, though Wikipedia can often point you in the direction of other, more reliable sources. The below material will introduce you to web site evaluation, and several different search engines. The list of sample site are designed to be used with a classroom exercise and discussion.

Evaluating Web Sites

The below critera--the CARS Checklist--are borrowed from Evaluating Internet Research Sources, by Robert Harris. Please read the entire document on your own time, as the below is merely a summary of a much more complex discussion.

The CARS Checklist (Credibility, Accuracy, Reasonableness, Support) is designed for ease of learning and use. Few sources will meet every criterion in the list, and even those that do may not possess the highest level of quality possible. But if you learn to use the criteria in this list, you will be much more likely to separate the high quality information from the poor quality information.

 

Credibility

trustworthy source, author’s credentials, evidence of quality control, known or respected authority, organizational support.

 

Goal: an authoritative source, a source that supplies some good evidence that allows you to trust it.

 

Accuracy

up to date, factual, detailed, exact, comprehensive, audience and purpose reflect intentions of completeness and accuracy.

 

Goal: a source that is correct today (not yesterday), a source that gives the whole truth.

 

Reasonableness

fair, balanced, objective, reasoned,no conflict of interest, absence of fallacies or slanted tone.

 

Goal: a source that engages the subject thoughtfully and reasonably, concerned with the truth.

 

Support

listed sources, contact information, available corroboration, claims supported, documentation supplied.

 

Goal: a source that provides convincing evidence for the claims made, a source you can triangulate (find at least two other sources that support it).

 

However, by looking only at the information presented on the page and not critically at how the information is being presented, we are taking away an integral part of Web research, which is reading the page itself. When we begin to read web pages, when we are able to look critically at the politics behind who is presenting the information, we are able to get to the heart of what is being presented. For example, conisder the possibility of coming across these three web pages about the oil company bp: bp sample 1, bp sample 2, bp sample 3.

Conducting Web Searches

There are two types of search engines: those that search online within their own database (google, yahoo, msn, and so forth), and those that search multiple search engines, or meta-search engines. See Meta-Search Engines from UC Berkeley for more information on meta-search engines. Regardless of which type of search engine you use, it is important to explore the results deeper than the first 20 results. Often gems are hidden deep within results pages. Below are links to various search engines:

• google

   

• doppile: meta-search

• mamma: meta-search

• ask: meta-search

• all the web fastsearch: meta-search

   

• google blog search

• icerocket blog search

• technorati blog search

For each web site that you come across, you MUST use the CARS Checklist to determine its reliability. If, after much scrutiny, you deem it to be reliable before you use it in your white paper you MUST ask me if I agree that it is reliable. If I agree that it is reliable, I will still press you to find a scholarly source instead--it is always better to have a scholarly source than not. If, after an exhaustive search, you cannot find a scholarly source, you can then use the web source.

Remember that for each of at least 5 of your sources, you must turn in a Research Process Form (research-process-form.doc). Fill in the CARS section of the form for web sites only.

Citations

How-to for IEEE citations -- this is a very helpful resource

IEEE Bibliography Builder -- Will build your reference list for Books, Journal Articles, and Book Chapters only

Author Date Citation Style -- from the Chicago Manual of Style, the premier style guide