2.3 Understanding Sources

^[1]Scholarly Articles as Sources

Peer-Reviewed Sources

The most-respected scholarly journals are peer-reviewed, which means that experts in their field other than the author and editor check out each article before it can be published. It’s their responsibility to help guarantee that new material is presented in the context of what is already known, that the methods the researcher used are the right ones, and that the article contributes to the field.

For those reasons, peer-reviewed articles are more likely to be credible. Peer-reviewed journal articles are the official scholarly record, which means that if it’s an important development in research, it will probably turn up in a journal article eventually.

Parts of a Scholarly Article

The articles you use for your assignments must also be relevant to your research question—not just credible. Reading specific parts of an article can help save you time as you decide whether an article is relevant.

Reading a scholarly article usually takes some effort. According to Dr. Jennifer Raff, here is how you should do it.^[2]

Finding Scholarly Articles

Most scholarly articles are housed in specialized databases. Libraries (public, school, or company) often provide access to scholarly databases by paying a subscription fee for patrons. For instance, CSC Libraries provide access to many databases via its Research Databases List which is available for free to people affiliated with the college. You can search for a journal title in these databases or view a list of databases by subject. For more information, including how to search databases, see section 2.1 and the CSC Library Tutorial page.

News as a Source

News sources can provide insights that scholarly sources may not or that will take a long time to get into scholarly sources. For instance, news sources are excellent for finding out people’s reactions, opinions, and prevailing attitudes around the time of an event.

So whether news sources are good for your assignment depends on what your research question is.

News is a strange term because even when the information is old, it’s still news. Some sources are great for breaking news, some are great for aggregated (or compiled) news, and others are great for historical news.

While news was transmitted for centuries only in newspapers, news is now transmitted in all formats: via radio, television, and the Internet, in addition to print. Even most newspapers have Internet sites today.

News must be brief because much of it gets reported only moments after an event happens. News reports occur early in the Information Lifecycle.

Mainline and Non-Mainline News Sources

Mainline American news outlets stick with the tradition of trying to report the news as objectively as possible. That doesn’t mean their reports are perfectly objective, but they are more objective than the non-mainline sources. As a result, mainline news sources are more credible than non-mainline sources.

News from non-mainline American news outlets is often mixed with opinions. One way they frequently exhibit bias is that they leave out pertinent facts.

Types of News Sources

Press Services—News outlets (print, broadcast, and online) get a lot of their news from these services, such as Reuters or Associated Press (AP), which make it unnecessary for individual outlets to send their own reporters everywhere. Services are so broadly used that you may have to look at several news outlets to get a different take on an event or situation.

News aggregators—Aggregators don’t have reporters of their own but simply collect and transmit the news reported by others. Some sources pull news from a variety of places and provide a single place to search for and view multiple stories. You can browse stories or search for a topic. Aggregators tend to have current, but not archival news. Google News and Yahoo News are examples.

Newspaper sites – Many print newspapers also have their own websites. They vary as to how much news they provide for free.

News Databases – Search current, recent, and historical newspaper content in databases provided free by libraries. CSC Libraries offers several news databases to students, staff, and faculty. They include:

Broadcast News Sites – Although broadcast news (from radio and television) is generally consumed in real time, such organizations also offer archives of news stories on their websites. However, not all of their articles are provided by their own reporters: some originate from the press services, Reuters, and AP.

Social Media – Most of the news outlets listed above contribute to Twitter and Facebook. It’s customary for highly condensed announcements in this venue to lead you back to the news outlet’s website for more information. However, how credible tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google are with news is in serious doubt due to recent issues with how secure the platforms are and their ability to detect and prevent false news from being created and/or spreading.

Blogs – Sometimes these are good sources for breaking news, as well as commentary on current events and scholarship. Authors who write more objectively elsewhere can share more insights and opinions, more initial questions and findings about a study before they are ready to release definitive data and conclusions about their research.

Citizen Journalism – A growing number of sites cater to those members of the general public who want to report breaking news and submit their own photos and videos on a wide range of topics. The people who do this are often referred to as citizen journalists.

Data as Sources

• Learn more background information.
• Answer your research question. (The evidence that it provides can help you decide on the best answer for your question.)
• Convince your audience that your answer is correct. (it often gives you evidence that your answer is correct.)
• Describe the situation surrounding your research question.
• Report what others have said about your research question.

What is data?

The word means many things to many people. (Consider “data” as it relates to your phone contract, for instance)

Data observed, collected, or created for research purposes can be numbers, text, images, audio clips, and video clips. But in this section on using data as sources, we’re going to concentrate on numerical data.

For example, for a term paper about the research question “Why is there a gap in the number of people who qualify for food from foodbanks and the number of people who use foodbanks?,” you could find data on the website of Feeding America, the nation’s largest network of foodbanks. Some of that data may be the number of people who get food from a foodbank annually, with the number of seniors and children broken down. That data won’t answer your research question, but it will help you describe the situation around that question and help your audience develop a fuller understanding (i.e. context).

Similarly, for a project with the research question “How do some birds in Australia use ‘smart’ hunting techniques to flush out prey, including starting fires?,” you might find a journal article with data about how many people have observed these techniques and estimates of how frequently the techniques are used and by how many bird species.

Obtaining Data

There are two ways of obtaining data:

• Obtain data that already has been collected and analyzed. That’s what this section will cover.
• Collect data yourself. This can include activities such as making observations about your environment, conducting surveys or interviews, directly recording measurements in a lab or in the field, or even receiving electronic data recorded by computers/machines that gather the data. You will more than likely explore these activities in the courses you take.

Finding Data in Articles, Books, Web Pages, and More

Numeric search data can be found all over the place. A lot of it can be found as part of other sources such as books, journals, newspapers, magazine articles, and web pages. In these cases, these data do not stand alone as a distinct element, but instead are part of the larger work.

When searching for data in books and articles and on web pages, terms such as statistics or data may or may not be useful search terms. That’s because many writers don’t use those terms in their scholarly writing. They tend to use the words findings or results when discussing data that could be useful to you. In addition, statistics is a separate discipline, and using that term will turn up journals in that area, which, more than likely, won’t be helpful to you. So, use the search terms data and statistics with caution, especially when searching library catalogs.

Even without using those search terms, many scholarly sources you turn up are likely to contain data. Once you find potential sources, skim them for tables, graphs, or charts. These items are displays or illustrations of data gathered by researchers.  However, sometimes data and interpretations are solely in the body of the narrative text and may be included in sections called “Results” or “Findings.”

Depending on your research question, you may need to gather data from multiple sources to get everything you need to answer your research question and make your argument for it.

Finding Data, Data Depositories, and Directories

Sometimes the numeric research data you need may not be in the articles, books, and web sites that you’ve found. But that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been collected and packaged in a useable format. Governments and research institutions often publish data they have collected in discipline-specific data depositories that make data available online.

The United Nations and just about every country provide information as numeric data available online. Free and accessible data like this is called open data. The U.S. federal government, all states, and many local governments provide open data.

Other data are available through vendors who publish the data collected by researchers.

Evaluating Data as Sources

Evaluating data for relevance and credibility is just as important as evaluating any other source. Another thing that is the same with data is that there is never a 100% perfect source. So, you’ll have to make educated guesses (inferences) about whether the data are good enough for your purpose. We discuss how to do this in section 2.4.

Critical thinking as you evaluate sources is something your professors will expect. But you’ll benefit in other ways, too, because you’ll be practicing a skill necessary for the rest of your life, both in the workplace and in your personal life. It’s those skills that will keep you from being duped by fake news and taken advantage of by posts that are ignorant or, sometimes, simply scams.

To evaluate data, you’ll need to find out how it was collected. If the data are in another source, such as a book, web page, newspaper, magazine, or research journal article, evaluate that source in the usual way (see 2.4). If the book, newspaper, magazine, or web page got the data from somewhere else, do the same evaluation of the source from which the book or article got the data. The article, book, or web page should cite where the data came from. If it doesn’t, then that is a mark against using that data.^[4]

In addition, if the data are in a research journal article, read the entire article, including the section called Methodology, which tells how the data were collected. Then determine the data’s relevance to your research question by considering such questions as:

Citing Data

Data is not copyrightable, but the expression of data is. So as with any other information source, you should cite any data you use from a source, whether it appeared in an article or you downloaded the data from a repository on the Web.

Unfortunately, data citation standards do not exist in many disciplines Current workarounds include:

• Citing a “data paper,” where available.
• Citing a journal article that describes the dataset.
• Citing a book that includes the data.

Proper Use of Data

Once you have your data, you can examine them and make an interpretation. Sometimes, you can do so easily. But not always.

Many people have a tendency to look for data to prove their hypothesis or idea, as opposed to really answering their research questions. However, you may find that the opposite happens: the data may actually disprove your hypothesis. You should never manipulate data so that it gives credence to your desired outcome. While it may not be the answer you wanted to find, it is the answer that exists. You may, of course, look for other sources of data – perhaps there are multiple sources of data for the same topic with differing results. Inconclusive or conflicting findings do happen and can be the answer. Conflicting results on the same topic are common. This is the reality of research because, after all, the questions researchers are studying are complicated. When you have conflicting results you can’t just ignore the differences—you’ll have to do your best to explain why the differences occurred.

People as Sources

People don’t just create the sources we use. They are actually sources them-selves. Most of us use people as sources all the time in our private lives, such when we ask a friend for a restaurant recommendation or ask whether a movie is   worth watching. But you probably aren’t using people as sources very often in your assignments–unless you are a journalism major, of course.

So getting some experience using people as sources is likely to help you not just with a current research assignment but with your work in the future.

Important: Who’s an “Expert”?

Experts aren’t only researchers with Ph.Ds doing academic work. The question when trying to decide who can be a source is really always, who can speak with authority about any part of the subject? And the answer to that question is always contextual, a kind of “it depends.”

People can speak with authority for different reasons. According to the framework for information literacy, they can have subject expertise (say, having done scholarship in the field), societal position (maybe a public office or another relevant work title), or special experience (say, living or working in a particular situation of interest or having participated in a historical event).

Of course, such sources have to be evaluated just like any other. Could they be biased? Like any source, yes. We just have to keep that possible bias in mind as we use the information from such a source. That’s part of exercising the critical thinking that research assignments are famous for producing.

Potentially biased or not, sometimes a source’s firsthand experience can’t be beat. And recognizing what they offer can help us open up to diverse ideas and worldviews that we would otherwise miss. Don’t be surprised if this kind of source takes you off in completely new directions with your assignment, ones that turn out to be much more interesting than those you were following before. For many researchers, finding sources that open up a topic like that is one of the most rewarding—and fun—things about doing research.

Some Examples of People as Sources

You can interview a person as a source on the phone, in email, by Skype, or face-to-face. You’ll need to:

• Pay attention when reading other sources so you can identify whom to contact and know what they could have to offer.
• Prepare by learning enough about your topic so you can ask appropriate questions, know what your expert has done in relation to that topic so you don’t seem ignorant of their contribution, and know how to contact them. You might also want to do a practice interview with a friend.
• Contact your source to see if they are willing to talk with you and when that would be convenient. Then follow through.

Use good interview techniques, such as trying to put them at ease, using active listening techniques to encourage them to talk, asking follow up questions, and thanking them at the end of the interview.

Citing People as Sources

Like other sources, people should be cited in your research final product, depending on the citation style you’re using. For instance, in APA style, interviews, e-mail, and other personal communication (i.e. non-published interviews) should not appear in the reference list but should be in your main text only like this: (A. Authorslastname, personal communication, July 29, 2018).