Research strategies badke 5th edition pdf

ELPROFESSORI ONLY

Discussion Board

Week 1

Please answer the following question:

What specific aspects of the career path you are pursuing would you like to research further and why? The reason for this question is to get you thinking about a potential area of research or topic you wish to work on throughout the term. It is all right to start with a broad topic at this time since you will have the opportunity to turn it into a viable more focused research question over the next few weeks. Just make sure that the topic you select is something you are interested in enough to work on extensively throughout the term. You will also be free to change this topic as you progress through the course.

Week 3

1.What are two of the most interesting and informative things that you learned from last week's [Week Two's] work? In a paragraph or two, explain why.

Online resources have given us access to more knowledge than ever before. We’re buried in data, and defi ning what is and what is not genuine information becomes more of a challenge all the time. In this fi fth edition of Research Strategies, author William Badke helps you make sense of all of the available information, shows you how to navigate and discern it, and details how to use it to your advantage to become a better researcher.

Badke focuses on informational research and provides a host of tips and advice not only for conducting research, but also for everything from fi nding a topic to writing an outline to documenting resources and polishing the fi nal draft. Study guides, practice exercises, and assignments at the end of each chapter help reinforce each lesson.

An experienced research instructor who has led thousands of students to become better researchers, Badke uses humor to help you gain a better understanding of today’s complex, technological world. Research Strategies provides the skills and strategies to effi ciently and eff ectively complete a research project from topic to fi nished product. It shows how research can be exciting and even fun.

William Badke is associate librarian for Associated Canadian Th eological Schools and Information Literacy at Trinity Western University, British Columbia Canada. Since the mid-1980s, he

has been teaching students the joy of research done well. His book, Research Strategies, now in its fi fth edition, is a leading resource for courses in informational research.

iUniverse LLC Bloomington

Research Strategies

Finding your Way through the Information Fog

William Badke

5th Edition 2014

Research Strategies Finding your Way through the Information Fog

Copyright © 2014 William Badke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only. Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-2233-6 (sc) ISBN: 978-1-4917-2234-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014901316

Printed in the United States of America.

iUniverse rev. date: 2/4/2014

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Acknowledgements, etc.

Thanks to EBSCO Publishing for permission to use screenshots from their databases.

See the Research Strategies Website for updates, live links, keys and teaching aids: https://sites.google.com/site/researchstrategiesweb/

See the Research Strategies Textbook site for courses, syllabi, rubrics, etc.: http://acts.twu.ca/Library/textbook.htm

Meet me on Facebook; search for: Research Strategies

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Contents

Preface xvii

1. Welcome to the Information Fog 1 1.1 Before there was print 3 1.2 Reading and inscription 4 1.3 The printing press 5 1.4 Enter the World Wide Web 8 1.5 Information today – The state of the art 10

1.5.1 Books 10 1.5.2 Journals and magazines 14 1.5.3 Government and corporate documents 16 1.5.4 The World Wide Web 16 1.5.5 Web 2.0 17

1.6 Primary and secondary information sources 18 Clearing the Fog – What’s all this talk about academic information? 19 1.7 Warning - Not all information is informative 20 1.8 For further study 21

Study guide 21

2. Taking Charge 22 2.1 Wrestling with a topic 24 2.2 Elements of inadequate research 25 2.3 The key to great research 26 2.4 A model for research 29 2.5 Getting started in research 30

2.5.1 Getting a working knowledge through reference sources 30 2.5.2 Excursus: Wikipedia, the professor’s dilemma 33 2.5.3 Full text reference tools 35

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2.6 Finding a good question 36 2.6.3 Thesis statements 37 2.6.4 Research questions - The bad and the ugly 38

Clearing the Fog – Research is a conversation, not a soliloquy 40 2.7 The preliminary outline 42 2.8 How about a few good examples? 44

2.8.1 “The thought of Erasmus of Rotterdam” 44 2.8.2 “Teenage Alcoholism” 44 2.8.3 “Climate Change” 44 2.8.4 “Behaviorism as a model for social engineering” 45

2.9 For further study 45 Study guide 45 Practice with research questions 46 Assignment for a research project of your own 46 Teaching tool 47

3. Database Searching with Keywords and Hierarchies 48 3.1 What’s a database? 49 3.2 Keyword searching 50

3.2.1 Database basics for keyword searching 50 3.2.2 Boolean searching 52

Clearing the Fog – What’s the best way to choose keywords? 59 3.3 Keyword searching with hierarchies 60

3.3.1 Hierarchies 60 3.3.2 Clustering search tools 64

3.4 Keyword searching – The good, bad, and ugly 65 3.5 For further study 66

Study guide 66 Practice with keywords and hierarchies 67 Suggested key to practice with keywords 68 Assignment for a research project of your own 70

4. Metadata and the Power of Controlled Vocabularies 71 4.1 It’s all about the metadata 72 4.2 Understanding metadata 73 4.3 Metadata in practice – The database record 75

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4.4 Controlled vocabularies 77 4.5 Library of Congress Subject Headings 78 Clearing the Fog – Subject headings are not keywords, no they’re not. 84 4.6 Working the angles—Identifying controlled vocabularies 85

4.6.1 Library catalogs 86 4.6.2 Other databases 87

4.7 Getting more creative—combining controlled vocabulary and keyword searching 88 4.8 Keeping on track with controlled vocabularies 90 4.9 For further study 91

Study guide 91 Practice with controlled vocabularies 91 Suggested key to practice with controlled vocabularies 92 Assignment for a research project of your own 93

5. Discovery Searches, Library Catalogs and Journal Databases 94 5.1 Discovery Searches 95 5.2 Library catalogs 97

5.1.1 Making the catalog work for you 98 5.2.2 E-Books 100

Clearing the Fog – How to create in-text citations from e-readers when page numbers are missing 102 5.3 Journal databases 104 Clearing the Fog – Do you know the difference between an article and a journal? 104

5.3.1 Some background on the journal scene 106 Clearing the Fog – Some tips on journal article citations 109

5.3.2 Introduction to journal databases 110 Clearing the Fog - Please stop treating academic databases like Google – You’re hurting their feelings 114

5.3.3 RSS feeds from journal databases 116 5.3.4 Table of contents alerts 116

5.4 Approaching journal databases – Tips and hints 116 5.4.1 Be prepared for challenges. 116 5.4.2 Read the interface. 117

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5.4.3 Be aware that databases tend to be something of a black hole. 117 5.4.4 Resist the urge to fill the search box with words. 117 5.4.5 Think about staging (faceting) your search. 118 5.4.6 Look for controlled vocabularies and advanced searches. 118 5.4.7 Think before you search. 118 5.4.8 Retrace your steps. 119 5.4.9 When in doubt, use the instructions. 119 5.4.10 Remain calm and get help if you need it. 119 5.4.11 Sometimes problems arise because you’re using the wrong database. 120 5.4.12 Check out the possibilities of interlibrary loan. 120

5.5 Citation searches, related articles and reference lists – Alternative ways of searching 121

5.5.1 Citation searches 121 5.5.2 Related articles 121 5.5.3 Reference lists 122

Clearing the Fog – What’s a doi? 122 5.6 Trying out a live journal database 123 5.7 Varieties of the journal database 126 5.8 Final pep talk 127 5.9 For further study 127

Study guide 127 Practice with journal databases 128 Assignment for a project of your own 128

6. Internet Research 130 6.1 A brief introduction to the Net 132 6.2 Google Scholar and other free academic search engines on the Net 133

6.2.1 Why start with academic search engines? 133 6.2.2 Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) 133

Clearing the Fog – Google Scholar may be more valuable for what surrounds a citation than for what is in it. 137

6.2.3 BASE (http://www.base-search.net/) 138

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6.2.4 Microsoft Academic Search (http://academic.research.microsoft.com/) 139 6.2.5 CiteSeerX (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/) 139 6.2.6 Scirius (http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/) 140 6.2.7 getCITED (http://www.getcited.org/) 140 6.2.8 Others 141

6.3 Search engines for the rest of humanity – Google and friends 142

6.3.1 Searching by search engine, using keywords 142 6.3.2 A basic introduction to the best search engines 144

Clearing the Fog – While you are searching Google, Google is searching you 148

6.3.3 RSS feeds from search engines 152 6.3.5 The coming semantic search engines 152

6.4 Searching by subject tree 153 6.5 Portals 153 6.6 The Hidden Internet 155

6.6.1 What do we mean by “Hidden?” 155 6.6.2 What’s in the Hidden Internet? 155 6.6.3 How do I find information on the Hidden Internet? 156

6.7 Evaluating information from the Internet 156 6.8 Some more Internet addresses valuable for research purposes 159

6.8.1 Reference sources 159 6.8.2 Searchable library catalogs 159 6.8.3 Phone directories 160

6.9 For further study 160 Study guide 160 Practice with the Internet 160 Assignment 161

7. Other Resources and Case Studies in Research 163 7.1 Seeing where you’ve been 164 Clearing the Fog – Step by step may not always be the best approach, but it can help you find your way 165 7.2 ERIC 166

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7.3 Government documents 169 7.4 Doctoral dissertations 170 7.5 Bibliographic managers 171

7.5.1 EndNote (http://www.endnoteweb.com/) 171 7.5.2 RefWorks (http://refworks.com/) 172 7.5.3 Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) 172

7.6 Consulting with friends, mentors and librarians 173 7.6.1 What are good friends for? 173 7.6.2 Consulting professors 173 7.6.3 Encountering librarians 174

7.7 Case studies in research 174 7.7.1 “Arctic Ice Issues Resulting from Climate Change” 174 7.7.2 “The First Crusade” 180

Clearing the Fog – Research is like a box of chocolates 184 7.8 For further study 185

Study guide 185 Practice with resources introduced in this chapter 185 Assignment 186

8. Learning How to Read for Research 188 8.1 Reading for the connoisseur and the glutton 189

8.1.1 Be ruthless 190 8.1.2 Get to know the material without reading it all 191 8.1.3 A final word on analytical reading 195

Clearing the Fog – On using more than the first three pages 196 8.2 Evaluation of research resources 196 8.3 Note taking 198

8.3.1 The determined photo-copier/printer/e-doc highlighter 199 8.3.2 The value of going all digital 201 8.3.3 The quoter 202 8.3.4 The summarizer 203 8.3.5 The paraphraser (not recommended in most cases) 204 8.3.6 Which method is best? 205

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8.4 Further notes on note-taking 205 Clearing the Fog – What if I’m not an organized person? 207 8.5 A gentle warning about the horrible crime of plagiarism 208

8.5.1 Why get stressed about plagiarism? 209 8.5.2 About getting caught 210 8.5.3 International students and plagiarism 211

8.6 For further study 212 Study guide 212 Practice / Assignment 213

9. Organizing Your Resources to Write your Paper 214 9.1 Your notes, photocopies and printouts 215

9.1.1 Organizing digital notes 215 9.1.2 Organizing your paper-based notes 216

9.2 Your bibliography 217 Clearing the Fog - How can I learn to read citations well? 218 9.3 Your subject index 220 9.4 A Second Method for Note Organization 223 9.5 Indexing your notes for larger assignments 226 9.6 For further study 227

Study guide 227 Practice/Assignment 228

10. Tips on Research Writing 229 10.1 The final outline 230

10.1.1 Step one: The research question/thesis statement 230 10.1.2 Step two: Preliminary outline headings 231 10.1.3 Step three: Organizing the headings 231

Clearing the Fog – What about creativity? 236 10.2 Some tips on research writing 237

10.2.1 Introduce your paper well 237 10.2.2 Be focused at all times 238 10.2.3 Always describe before you analyze. 238 10.2.4 Avoid ridicule. 238 10.2.5 Be logical. 238 10.2.6 Be explicit. 239 10.2.7 Aim for clear writing rather than erudition. 240

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10.2.8 Watch out for flawed arguments. 240 10.2.9 Know when to quote and when not to quote 242 10.2.10 Know some basic principles for quotations. 243 10.2.11 Know the uses of footnotes/endnotes/citations. 244

Clearing the Fog – Becoming a better academic writer 246 10.2.12 Watch your conclusions. 247 10.2.13 Give your final paper a professional look. 247

10.3 For further study 248 Study guide 248 Practice/Assignment 249

APPENDIX ONE – A Research Paper Clinic: More Tips and Troubleshooting for Development of Great Research Papers 250

A1.1 Research questions 251 A1.1.1 Why many research projects miss the target 251 A1.1.2 Getting focused by asking the right question 252 A1.1.3 The question that isn’t there 253 A1.1.4 The fuzzy question 254 A1.1.5 The multi-part question 256 A1.1.6 The open-ended question 258 A1.1.7 The question that will not fly 259

A1.1.8 Thesis statements 260 A1.2 Practice with research questions 260

A.2.1 The questions: 260 A.1.2.2 Suggested key for the questions: 261 A1.3 Types of research papers 263

A1.3.1 Descriptive paper 263 A1.3.2 Analytical or investigative paper 263 A1.3.3 Persuasive paper 264 A1.3.4 Literature review 265

A1.4 The outline as a research paper guidance system 266 A1.4.1 Why worry about an outline early in the research process? 266 A1.4.2 Steps to a good outline 267 A1.4.3 Practice with outlines 270 A1.4.4 Suggested key for practice with outlines 271

A1.5 Building the substance of the essay 274

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A1.5.1 Intent and direction 274 A1.5.2 Building the paper 274 A1.5.3 Using sources well 275 A1.5.4 Avoiding theft of other people’s work 277 A1.5.5 Practice with essay structure 279

A1.6 Bibliographic style 280 A1.6.1 Style software 281 A1.6.2 Crib sheets 283

A1.7 Conclusion 286

APPENDIX TWO – This Textbook and Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (ACRL) 287

Index 289

xvii

Preface

Everyone does research. Some just do it better than others. This book is definitely for you if you are:

! a university student whose term papers have been patented as a cure for insomnia;

! a Dilbert of industry who’s been told to do a feasibility study on the expansion potential of winter ice cream bar sales in Nome, Alaska;

! a simple honest person trying to find the truth behind the advertising so that the next car you buy won’t be like your last disaster-mobile, the car that made you persona non grata at the automobile association.

Are you ready for your next research project? Really ready? Do you have the skills and strategies to get the job done efficiently and effectively without panic attacks and the need for a long vacation when you’re done? Do you have confidence that you can start with a topic about which you know nothing and end with an understanding of it that is neither trite nor superficial? Are you prepared to enjoy the experience? [Yes, I did say “enjoy.”]

If the previous paragraph has left you feeling somewhat queasy, this book is for you. Even if you think you have significant research skills, you can learn better ones if you take the time to read on. You have the privilege of living in the information age, with boundless opportunities all around you to find out anything about anything. But faced with a humongous number of Internet sites, not to mention academic and commercial databases of increasing size and complexity, knowing how to navigate through the information fog isn’t something you can pick up easily on your own. Truth to tell,

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there is a ton of studies telling us that most people have vastly higher opinions about their research ability than actual tests of that ability can demonstrate.

Yet you can hardly call yourself educated if you don’t have really good skills to handle complex information systems and do research effectively, not in a world in which most careers are built more on what you can find out than what you already know.

Who am I to try to teach you about research? Just someone who has taught the strategies in this book to thousands of anxious university students, both undergraduate and graduate, for close to 30 years (making me a dinosaur?), and who likes nothing better than to walk people through the information fog. I am Associate Librarian for Associated Canadian Theological Schools and Information Literacy at Trinity Western University. Being the author of a number of books and scholarly articles myself (see my bio at http://www.acts.twu. ca/library/badke.htm), you can rest assured that I’ve devoted a lot of my life to doing research and not just teaching it. So I understand what you’re going through.

One caution: This book is about informational research. It won’t teach you how to do a science experiment or determine the best way to train a rat how to ride a bicycle (though it will help you do a literature review). But if you need to identify a problem, and then acquire and use information to address the problem, this book is for you.

Learning how to do research does not have to be painful. It can be fun. Honestly. Personally, research gives me so much pleasure that my family has to kidnap me out of the library whenever they want to go on an outing or buy groceries. You can have the same joy that I have. Read on.

Updates to the textbook will be posted at: https://sites.google.com/ site/researchstrategiesweb/home/updates

See the Research Strategies Website for live links, keys and teaching aids: https://sites.google.com/site/researchstrategiesweb/

http://www.acts.twu.ca/library/badke.htm
http://www.acts.twu.ca/library/badke.htm
https://sites.google.com/site/researchstrategiesweb/home/updates
https://sites.google.com/site/researchstrategiesweb/home/updates
https://sites.google.com/site/researchstrategiesweb/
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See the Research Strategies Textbook site for courses, syllabi, etc.: http://acts.twu.ca/Library/textbook.htm

Meet me on Facebook. Search for: Research Strategies

http://acts.twu.ca/Library/textbook.htm
1

1 Welcome to the Information Fog

We are living in the middle of a revolution. Not since the creation of the printing press (and maybe not ever) has our concept of information been so disrupted. The driving force of the information revolution is the World Wide Web, which has given us access to more knowledge than ever before in human history.

Information used to be scarce, thus creating a demand for experts who knew things and could share those things with the rest

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of us. Now we have Google, the information candy store, which makes information abundant and challenges the role of the expert. “Information candy store?” Yes. Google serves up lots of enticing stuff right there at our finger-tips, most of it looking good enough to devour. The down side of a candy store, if there ever could be a down side, is that candy tends to be loaded with empty calories.

No, I’m not down on Google or Bing or whatever search engine suits your fancy. We won’t be Google-bashing here. But there is so much more than Google. The revolution in information has led many of us to believe that Google is god, or at least the ultimate information source. But nothing is that simple. Fact is, we live in an era in which there is untold opportunity to go beyond Google. And we also live in an era that is much more complicated than it used to be.

At one time we thought we knew what information was. Now we’re not so sure. These days we’re buried in data, and defining what is and what is not genuine information is getting to be more of a challenge all the time.

Information is supposed to inform. That means it has to be reliable, relevant, current, and so on. There was a time when people believed that, given the right information, we could solve any problem the human race encountered. They thought that the power of reason could be used in a totally objective way to wade through all the data and come up with the right answers, even with the truth. Now we’re no longer even sure what the questions are (and we can’t remember last Tuesday).

To be sure, we’ve always known that some of what passes for information can’t be trusted. That’s why we have law courts to determine the truth of a matter, though the best liar often wins.

We’ve come to understand over the past hundred years that information is colored with subjectivity: What we know depends on how we interpret our information base. Even the best authors of information bring their own biases into the mix. Thus, for good or ill, we are no longer as trusting when it comes to interacting with information. It’s like buying a Rolex from a man in an alley – it might be a real Rolex coming from somebody down on his luck, but, unless you know Rolexes, you could well be getting a knock-off.

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I’d like to take a bit of time to trace the events that have led us to this place. Textbooks, after all, are supposed to lead you on a journey through history and philosophy-of-whatever before they get to the good stuff. But in the case of information, the next few pages really are essential to doing good research. Believe it or not, you need to understand our world of information if you want to do intelligent research within its often foggy terrain.

So how did we get here, to an age dominated by the World Wide Web?

1.1 Before there was print

Throughout the entire history of humanity, knowledge has been passed down from one generation to another. Before this was done in written form (and in non-literate societies today), speech and demonstration were the source of humanity’s information - historical tales told around campfires, children learning about agriculture by doing it with their parents, and so on. These were “traditional societies.” I use the word “traditional” not in the sense of 1920s country music and picket fences, but in the sense of knowledge viewed as a tradition to pass down from generation to generation, often for the very survival of the society.

Here’s an example of why these kinds of societies need traditional information: When I lived for a couple of years in Africa, people would point to this plant or that one and tell me, “You could eat this.” It happened often enough that I finally asked someone why it was so important for me to know what plants I could eat. He explained that during the recently ended civil war, the people had been forced from their city homes into the jungle. They were starving, because no one knew what was edible and what was deadly. Their ancestors had once carried this knowledge with them, but these city dwellers had stopped passing it on to their children, and the knowledge had died.

So the former urbanites, now living in the bush, cooked various plants and fed them to their chickens to see if the chickens would cluck or croak. And gradually they rebuilt their knowledge base. “We have decided,” my friend told me, “that we must never again forget what we can eat, so that’s why we tell one another what is edible.”

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Their traditions had meant the survival of their society. If you forgot what you could eat in the jungle, you might have to choose between potentially poisoning yourself and starving.

Clearly, though, traditional information has to be reliable. Thus, in societies that depend on their traditions, knowledge is passed down only by people qualified to do so, and unregulated production of new information is not encouraged. There is an emphasis within traditional societies on memorizing the information that exists rather than using existing information to create new knowledge. The development of new knowledge in such cultures is a deliberate and slow process performed with care and authorized only by experts in the existing tradition. Otherwise, the next plant you eat could well be your last.

1.2 Reading and inscription

The development of written language brought a number of changes to the world:

! Knowledge could be preserved in print. Thus there was less of a need to pass it on orally (though the oral element remained important in daily life), let alone a need to memorize huge amounts of information. Memorization continued, to be sure, but you didn’t need to know everything, because it was possible to look it up if you had access to written documents.

! Since the knowledge base was more secure, people could pay more attention to discovery, thus hopefully adding to the knowledge base.

! The keepers of knowledge (i.e., the tradition experts who actually had the books = the librarians) were more elite than they had been in an oral society. Now only the people who could read could stay close to the tradition. What is more, there were few copies, because everything had to be transcribed by hand. Thus a small group of people in society controlled the knowledge base, and these people (recognizing that knowledge is power) generally worked

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against the forces of discovery (who tend to take the power away from the people who control the knowledge base). As long as access to documents was controlled, most people continued to rely more on oral tradition. The full transition from oral to written cultures took many centuries.

1.3 The printing press

The Chinese actually invented the printing press centuries before the Europeans did (as was the case for many things, including gunpowder), but it was the Europeans who used it to revolutionize the use of information in society. In 1447, Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (Gutenberg for short) created a moveable type press, a development so revolutionary that the A & E Television Network in 1999 named him #1 in its list of “People of the Millennium.” The printing press was such a big deal because:

! From a “preservation of the tradition” standpoint, it meant that multiple copies could be produced, thus making the tradition more secure (previously, it would have taken only one match lit by a careless monk to burn the single manuscript that had everything you needed to know – sort of a medieval hard-drive crash, only more permanent).

! More people could actually get their hands on the knowledge base, thus creating a better-informed society that was not as dependent on oral tradition. The elitism of knowledge was undermined as “holders of the tradition” found they no longer had an exclusive right to control who saw the knowledge base and who added to it.

! The possibilities of discovery were greatly increased, because so many more people had access to existing knowledge. It was thus much more likely that new knowledge would be built on the foundation of the old.

Knowledge multiplied in the centuries that followed. In fact, the major discoveries and inventions that make our lives what they

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are owe most of their existence to the printing press. Yet there were pros and cons to this invention. The pros are obvious, the cons not as much.

First, on the con side, the printing press was only as useful as the population was literate. We are still working on that problem.

Second, a new form of elitism developed, and whether it was good or bad remains a matter of debate. It came from the fact that production of new information depended on two things: bright people to make the discoveries and money to publish their words. The bright people created the elitism of universities and the money people determined what would be published and what would not.

The money issue also put a limit on who could get his or her ideas into print. Publishers, wanting to be sure they didn’t lose their shirts, added “gatekeeping” processes to their requirements. Gatekeepers ask two key questions: First, is the information worthy to be published? This is a value judgment, usually based on level of scholarship or reliability or entertainment value, but sometimes focused on the aims of the publisher or the desires of the marketplace (thus the existence of romance novels). Second, will it sell? Many a worthy manuscript goes into the trash simply because the publisher doesn’t think there’s an audience to sell it to. Alternately, there might be a small audience that has to pay a large amount for each copy published (as with most scholarly books).

Gatekeeping is a good thing when it helps to preserve quality. No one wants our knowledge base to be filled with shoddy stuff that no one can trust (or so the wisdom of commercial publishing would tell us). On the other hand, gatekeeping has been used to censor valuable information, keeping it away from the very people who need it most. This has prevented perfectly good ideas from seeing the light of day, simply because someone viewed those ideas as unacceptable or there wasn’t a good market for them. Thus gatekeeping has tended to maintain the status quo or promote certain biases, because new, radical concepts (or concepts the publisher doesn’t like) are not as sure to sell as the tried and true. On this, see Brian Martin, The Politics of Research, www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/98il/il07.pdf.

Certainly, people have always been able to self-publish material that the gatekeepers rejected, but distributing self-published books

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can be a tough game. Would-be buyers often ask, “If this is such a good book, why didn’t the commercial publishers want it?” Thus self- published material tends to stay more or less underground, though much of it is of high quality.

More recently, several very entrepreneurial self-publishing companies have made it possible to produce your own book at minimal cost and without the need to stock thousands of copies in your basement. You even have the opportunity to publish it in multiple e-formats as well as print. Thus the self-publishing of books has come into its own, so much so that we now find that there are more self-published books on the market than there are commercially produced titles. Still, getting a self-published book into the hands of purchasers remains an uphill battle, even if you can upload your own book to Amazon Kindle for free.

Along with the rise of the printing press came the development of the “subject discipline,” allowing people to specialize in particular fields of discovery. The idea of a “discipline,” a defined subject area within which discovery is made, has its good points (the main one being the ability to focus narrowly to provide more depth of research) and its bad points (the main one being the separation of knowledge into categories that don’t talk much with each other). But the fact is that most advancement of knowledge these days is done within disciplines.

What does that mean for people doing research?

! Each discipline has its own “language” which is more than just its technical words but also involves the ways in which that discipline communicates information. A historian has a different mode of expression than that of a physicist (or an expert in the sex life of nematodes).

! Each discipline has its own method of doing research. While method, even in the humanities, has some connection with the scientific research process, there are distinct features that make research in English literature different from research in Korean history or in the biology of nematodes.

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William Badke

! Each discipline has its in-crowd, its elite group of highly regarded scholars. Knowing which writers and which works are the most highly regarded is very important to doing research without looking like an outsider.

1.4 Enter the World Wide Web

A revolution even more revolutionary than Gutenberg’s has happened within our own generation – the creation of the World Wide Web, a popular subset of the larger Internet. In the short span of time since the early 1990s, the WWW has blown the lid off much that we’ve known about information since the beginning of time. Why? Because it has pushed aside most of the boundaries that once prevented us from having all the information our knowledge-greedy little eyes could want.

It comes down to one basic fact - On the WWW, anyone can publish almost anything he or she wants to say, without impediment. Let me unpack this a bit:

! On the WWW, gatekeepers are no longer required. They still exist, and they still have great value, but we can publish without them. Whether or not it’s always advisable to do so is another issue, but for the first time in human history we can have our say without anybody editing our words or stopping us outright. The Internet, for good or ill, is the greatest vehicle for free speech the world has ever known.

! We can publish and acquire information at a level never before possible. The Web enables us to have access to so much, in fact, that we can easily become overwhelmed by it. As far as getting our own message out, we have a potential audience that can number in the millions. This means that information is no longer scarce but cheap and plentiful.

! What we lose (perhaps) is certainty. If anyone can publish on the WWW, we no longer have many of the normal checks and balances that once kept the world

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from being inundated by nonsense. This isn’t a new problem, because even with gatekept print material, readers should always be exercising discernment. But we now have the challenge that, for a large portion of Web- based information, no one except the author has done any gatekeeping at all. This is a classic two-edged sword - if anyone can publish on the Net, then we have an amazing resource for freedom of speech and the democratic way of life. The old elitism is gone. But it also means that we, the readers, have to become the gatekeepers to an extent never before seen, due to the lack of external quality control. This demands that we enhance our evaluation skills.

! One more concern – if we are not careful in our gatekeeping, the whole concept of authority can disappear. What do I mean by “authority?” Simply the fact that every field of knowledge has its experts, its wise voices, its people who understand that field better than the rest of us, because they have immersed themselves in it. We might want to resist authority, but the people who really know a subject area are assets who we can’t afford to ignore.

The WWW tends to level out authority. A Google search can bring you the work of an expert in the field as well as a website produced by Ms. Jackson’s third grade science class. To fail to discern the difference is to miss the power of getting our information from people who really know what they are writing about. This is not to say that every great scholar is right all the time. But ignoring that scholar in favor of a website on the same topic from your uncle Frank is going to put you at a disadvantage. Right now, the average person selects the first five results from a Google search and does very little evaluation of their relative quality. For more on this, see the excellent article by MaryBeth Meszaros, “Who’s in Charge Here? Authority, Authoritativeness, and the Undergraduate Researcher,” Communications in Information Literacy 4.1 (2010): 5-11. http:// tinyurl.com/ln6r49m. She has a bit of fun at my personal expense, but I forgive her.

http://tinyurl.com/ln6r49m
http://tinyurl.com/ln6r49m
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You might also want to look at the white paper produced by the anti-plagiarism service, Turnitin, which compiled data from millions of student papers to show that most of you are not really using high quality resources (don’t you just love it when data reveals the real you and it’s something unflattering?): http://pages.turnitin.com/ sources_in_writing_sec_2012.html

Before you accuse me of being overly simple-minded (something I’ve heard a lot), let me point out that it’s not as “either-or” as I may have implied, so that you either have to love the Net or hate it. You see, the WWW is really less a content-provider than a vehicle for information. Thus it is also used by publishers who still demand rigorous gatekeeping procedures. Commercial E-Books and scholarly articles are carried for a fee by the same system that provides us with a free copy of Aunt Bertha’s remedy for lumbago. Many of these resources are part of the “hidden” or “invisible” Internet (found behind password gates so that only authorized users can see them), but they have as much of a home on the WWW as your cousin’s jumpy YouTube video of river-rafting last summer.

1.5 Information today – The state of the art

Let’s look at the status of some of the main sources of information today:

1.5.1 Books

Book publishing is continuing, with no hint of a slowdown in the process. The big story in recent years has been the rise of the e-book. To say that the move to the e-book has been confusing/frustrating for both publishers and readers alike would be an understatement. In a short period of time, traditional hardcopy book publishing has been challenged like never before, starting with the creation of Amazon Kindle, followed shortly after by the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble nook, Kindle Fire, the iPad, numerous Android tablets, and so on. I don’t intend to spell out the wondrous features of each, but we need to understand what is going on here, if we are going to be able to make sense of the options and opportunities facing the e-book future.

http://pages.turnitin.com/sources_in_writing_sec_2012.html
http://pages.turnitin.com/sources_in_writing_sec_2012.html
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First, Kindle, then Sony Reader, NOOK, Kobo, etc. introduced a fairly old technology called “e-paper” but in a new way. E-paper is not a LED screen (as in tablets and cell phones), but something much more physical. Imagine a multitude of electronically charged particles squashed between a screen and a back plate. One type of charge will make these particles move toward the screen, making them appear white. Another type of charge will move particles to the back plate, making them look dark. Thus, if you program a book into the system, the particles get various charges that form dark areas and white areas - letters and background - making it possible to read words off the screen. The particles themselves are not light-emitting pixels, but real pieces of matter, so there is no glare.

One serious drawback of e-paper is that it is a lot like regular paper and thus is unable to function interactively like a screen on a phone or tablet. While some readers will allow you to do note-taking and highlighting, etc., the e-paper book readers lack the ability to function easily within the world of the Web the way an iPad or Android device can. The development of color e-paper readers since 2010 shows that the medium is still advancing, but it certainly has its limitations. The Kindle Fire was the first Kindle to be a tablet that doesn’t use e-paper.

Another path to e-book success is typified by the Apple iPad and various Android tablets, which use LED technology that enables all of the standard interactivity features found in smartphones and laptops. (Of course, by the time you read this, you’ll be using iPad10, and there will be 1267 similar products. Such is the speed of change in this area). The creation of these types of devices has paved the way for the so-called “enhanced e-book” that will embody, not just text, but video and audio clips, even gaming.

E-book interfaces will change over time as books move from static text to interactive experiences. From pages that will allow flipping similar to print books, but with additional options to make the flip even better (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVyBwz1- AiE&feature=youtu.be) to amazingly interactive adventures in reading and viewing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV- RvzXGH2Y), the e-book is due for a format revolution.

http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DrVyBwz1-AiE%26feature%3Dyoutu.be
http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DrVyBwz1-AiE%26feature%3Dyoutu.be
http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DLV-RvzXGH2Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DLV-RvzXGH2Y
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Meanwhile Google Books, though slowing down, continues to digitize large libraries of books, some of which are deliverable to your device for free, as long as they are not in copyright. Google, under its commercial name, Google Play, will sell you some of these, in whole or in part, in electronic form or even as cheap paperbacks (what irony - Google digitizes a paper book, then prints it and sells it as a paperback). Aiding e-book to paperback production is the Espresso Book Machine® which, looking somewhat like a snack food vending machine, will create a paperback book from a digital master on the spot at low cost (http://www.ondemandbooks.com/hardware.htm).

Large scale book digitizing projects are growing. Beyond Google Books, on a less commercial front, the Open Library, which is devoted to free access to public domain (out of copyright) books and to proper cataloging of them, has close to 2,000,000 books available for online viewing (http://openlibrary.org/). The Open Content Alliance (http://www.opencontentalliance.org/) is quietly snagging key contracts to supply out of copyright and open access e-books to major libraries and library systems that are uncomfortable with Google’s growing control in the e-book market. The Digital Public Library of America (http://www.dp.la/) has emerged out of The HathiTrust Digital Library and boasts millions of volumes. See its great new search interface at http://dp.la/bookshelf.

As of the end of 2007 (the last date for which statistics are available), the Universal Digital Library Million Book Project (https://archive.org/details/millionbooks), another non-commercial enterprise, with backing from Carnegie Mellon University and other groups, had 1.5 million book titles digitized. Items not in copyright are available in HTML, TIFF and a type of PDF format. Those under copyright offer only an abstract. A significant feature of this collection is the number of Chinese, Arabic and Indian language titles in it. The project has now been taken over by the Internet Archive. The Online Books Page (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/ books/) offers over a million books for free, though most are out of copyright and thus old. The Oxford Text Archive (http://ota.ahds. ac.uk/) offers several thousand carefully chosen books important to academic study. One of the oldest enterprises offering free e-books is Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page)

http://www.ondemandbooks.com/hardware.htm
http://openlibrary.org/
http://www.opencontentalliance.org/
http://www.dp.la/
http://dp.la/bookshelf
https://archive.org/details/millionbooks
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/
http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/
http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
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which has over 40,000 titles of its own and offers a further 100,000 free titles through its affiliates. Finally, Directory of Open Access Books (http://www.doabooks.org/) opened in 2012 and offers over a thousand peer reviewed academic books for free from close to 40 publishers.

What about the grand dream that every book will one day be online for anyone to read? Well, I think you can put that one to rest alongside the story of the baby alligators, once dumped into the sewers of New York, that have become twenty foot student- eating monsters. Even if all the books in the world were digitized, the full text of anything in copyright would only come to you at a cost. Authors like to get paid, and well they should, because they are all wonderful people who deserve it. Thus it is futile to believe that any book you want to have can be accessed electronically for free. Publishers won’t give away their books any more than music producers want to give away their songs, though it has happened anyway (and book piracy may one day make a liar out of me). As well, many older books are not commercially viable for digitization unless they end up in a project like Google Books.

Even with all these efforts, though, the e-book is still struggling to find its way. Students, for example, still generally prefer a print textbook to digital one (though having no textbook at all is their first choice, sigh…). Don’t expect that everything you need will soon be available to you electronically at home in the middle of the night while you’re munching on a pickle and desperately trying to finish that research project before the doom of morning strikes.

There is another growing movement, fed by newer “print on demand” technology, which supports self-publication without the enormous cost and distribution problems that once existed. You can now, for $1000 or less, publish your own book (even having it editorially reviewed) and have it distributed through normal book distribution channels without the need to have 5,000 copies in your basement. You can also publish e-books yourself through Amazon (Kindle), Scribd, and so on. Other than offering some editorial help, most such options have little if any real gatekeeping to them. Does quality suffer in the process? Possibly, though even without

http://www.doabooks.org/
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gatekeepers a lot of self-published authors are putting out high quality material that traditional publishers did not consider marketable.

1.5.2 Journals and magazines

The end is near for most paper versions of scholarly journals, magazines and newspapers. Virtually all scholarly journals now have electronic versions and offer subscribers the option to get a subscription in print or in electronic form. As the popularity of electronic versions grows (and it definitely is growing), more and more journals will appear electronically only.

Does all of this electronic publishing diminish quality? No. Most scholarly journals continue to use the gatekeeping process of peer review, by which submitted manuscripts are evaluated by scholars in the subject discipline in order to determine whether they are worthy to be published. This is a key distinction between a scholarly journal article and what you might find through the average Google search. A website on a topic may be as electronic as the journal article on the same topic, but the journal article has been evaluated by experts before it ever sees the light of day. Maybe those experts were biased or missed something important (like faked lab results), but on average the peer review process does provide more confidence that the article is reliable than you would have from a website on the same topic written by your Aunt Kate.

Before we get too far into this, though, we need to answer the more foundational question: What is a scholarly journal? The answer is not as simple as it once might have been. In general scholarly journals are publications from universities, academic societies and publishers devoted to producing academic work. The articles in them tend to be short on pictures and long on citations and reference lists (or bibliographies). In general, they are not accessible through a Google search and require you to search specialized academic databases available through academic libraries.

A serious challenge to the availability of scholarly journals has been price. The average annual journal subscription can range from fifty dollars to the cost of a new Toyota Corolla or more. In fact, the most expensive journals top $30,000 per year. Only the major universities can afford this kind of thing, thus limiting who can get

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access. A number of public bodies that fund research have done a double take and said, “Wait a minute. If we fund the research out of public money so that scholars can publish articles (getting paid nothing for doing so), and then publicly funded universities have to pay through the nose to acquire the journals that present the research we’ve already paid for once, where is the justice in it all?” Thus, increasingly, funding bodies are demanding that articles based on the research they have paid for must be made available online at no cost a set number of months after being published in a journal.

This open-access journal movement is growing in opposition to the outrageous costs of scholarly journals. Many new journals are being published directly online (after proper peer review) and are available for free to anyone who wants to read them. In this we have the best of the gatekeeping approach of traditional publishing and the free dissemination of information provided by the Internet. For searchable databases of open access journals, go to Directory of Open-Access Journals (over 4000 journals covered: http://www. doaj.org/), Open J-Gate (http://openj-gate.org/), or Electronic Journals Library (http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index. phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en). Cornell University has arXiv.org, a collection of hundreds of thousands of papers in the sciences, computer science, and finance. Two highly touted public open access sites for academic resources are Public Library of Science (PLOS - http://www.plos.org/), which has created its own super journals, and the similar Open Library of Humanities (http://www. openlibhums.org/), still under development. (There are, of course, fakes and charlatans out there who produce supposedly “academic” online journals that are anything but. Several scholars have published lists of such predatory enterprises to help you be aware of them, for example, http://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/.)

The pay vs. open access distinction may not mean much to you if you are a student in higher education, because your institution provides journals as part of those incredibly high tuition fees you pay. Once you have graduated, however, and no longer have access to the same databases, open access journals may well be a lifeline. Unrestricted availability of journals will increase over the next couple of decades due to open access initiatives. The Compact for Open-

http://www.doaj.org/
http://www.doaj.org/
http://openj-gate.org/
http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en
http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en
http://www.plos.org/
http://www.openlibhums.org/
http://www.openlibhums.org/
http://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/
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Access Publishing Equity (COPE - http://www.oacompact.org/) represents a movement within universities to provide scholars with funds to publish own their journal articles within open access venues, thus taking funds from expensive journal subscriptions and using the money to support open access.

I am noticing, as well, that an increasing number of scholars are self-archiving their published articles, putting them up on their own websites. A good tool to find such self-archived material is Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com).

Despite this growing trend toward open access (available for free) journals, the majority of journals and magazines are not accessible full text through a Google search. Using a search engine on the Net generally gets you a very different class of information than does using a journal database through an academic library database. That is why using a search engine like Google or Bing for a large portion of your academic research will greatly limit your ability to do good work.

While not quite in the category of “journal articles,” there is a growing interest in materials put into institutional repositories (think of electronic filing cabinets full of all kinds of academic information from in-house studies to dissertations). A great tool for finding such stuff is OpenDOAR – The Directory of Open Access Repositories (http://www.opendoar.org/).

1.5.3 Government and corporate documents

Governments and other corporate groups continue to publish vast amounts of information. Due to the convenience of the WWW as a vehicle, more and more government information is moving to an online environment, where it is usually freely available. For directories to such resources, go to the International Government Information site at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/government/world. html.

1.5.4 The World Wide Web

We have already looked at advantages and challenges of the Web. Ongoing issues include use of the Web for highly negative purposes (terrorism, child pornography, etc.), quality challenges which become

http://www.oacompact.org/
http://scholar.google.com
http://www.opendoar.org/
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/government/world.html
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/government/world.html
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evaluation skill problems, the need to catalog the more important websites in order to provide better searchability, a demand for search engines that are better able to identify the information we most need, and a requirement for increased instruction for users so that they can optimize the Web experience.

1.5.5 Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is really a concept rather than a defined area of the Internet. If you imagine the average web page to be a publication, a one-way communication from the author to the reader, Web 2.0 forms those parts of the WWW that are interactive. We can include here social networking sites, blogs, wikis, online office tools like Google Docs, RSS feeds, forums, chat, messaging, e-mail, and so on. As a concept, Web 2.0 doesn’t mean too much unless we look at what it does for information.

Take the wiki, software that enables you to create web pages that others can edit. One scholarly use for a wiki is in collaborative research projects where several people contribute to an article or some other piece of writing. Another is embodied in Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that is shaped and revised by its users (and its smaller but more upscale cousin, Citizendium). More recently, sites like Draft (https://draftin.com/) are bringing a level of sophistication to collaborative writing, enabling each partner to save his/her own drafts of work done together.

Blogs offer opportunity for one person to post ideas and others to comment on those posts. Forums and chat enable two or more people to share information that can then be revised as the discussion proceeds. Social networking websites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are enhancing opportunities for people to group-think about information that is of interest to them.

Web 2.0 assumes that connectivity and collaboration create better ideas and make a better world than did one-way communication. This, of course, is not a new insight. Those pre-literate people who recounted their history around the campfire so many centuries ago were doing the same thing, but without our technology. We need to be careful, however, not to put Web 2.0 above Web 1.0 and traditional publishing as if collaboration gives our information an

https://draftin.com/
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edge or credibility that one-way publication could not do. Certainly, a meeting of minds can often result in something better, but that is only the case if the collaborators actually know what they are talking about in the first place.

Truth to tell, much of what you find on Web 2.0 is simply the same old shallow thinking you find in a lot of person to person conversations. Information is no more valuable than the ability of its authors to know something about their subject and to think well. One thing a researcher must guard against is the assumption that because a number of people believe something, it is actually to be believed. Shared opinion is not fact. To move to a level of certainty you can live with, you need to evaluate information by acceptable standards.

[Some people are now discussing Web 3.0, which is essentially artificial intelligence -the ability of our technology to learn our preferences and anticipate our needs. While not yet a reality in most situations, 3.0, also sometimes called “The Semantic Web,” will be a growing interest in the information world].

1.6 Primary and secondary information sources

Books and articles that come right from the context of a subject, straight out of the horse’s mouth, so to speak, are primary sources. Books or articles that comment on the work of pioneers in a subject are called secondary sources.

Here are some examples:

Primary Secondary Text of Homer’s Iliad A modern scholarly study of Homer’s

Iliad A scientific report written by the

researcher Someone else’s analysis of the report

Firsthand account by a witness of 9/11 Book on 9/11 by someone not there Street person’s account of street life Analysis of research about street

people Text of the Trials of Galileo Commentary on the Trials of Galileo

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Your professor may well want you to consult primary sources on your topic. The key to figuring out what is primary and what is secondary is to ask whether it is an eyewitness account, comes from the subject’s time period, is written by a key scholar who developed the subject area, is a direct report of an experiment done by the author of the report, and so on. If so, you have a primary source. It’s right from “the horse’s mouth.” If not, you likely have a secondary source. Secondary sources, in general, comment on, analyze or explain the material you would find in a primary source.

Clearing the Fog – What’s all this talk about academic information?

[This is the first of a number of vignettes in this book that will answer specific issues in the research process. Each will come under the moniker of “Clearing the Fog.” I hope you find them helpful.]

When Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz discovered she was now in the Land of Oz, she told her dog Toto, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” If you’ve recently come into (or come back to) higher education, one of the first things to recognize is that this isn’t Kansas, this is Academia. It has new rules, new players, new sources of information and new ways of doing research.

Some students decide that, if Google and Wikipedia were good enough for Kansas, they’re good enough for Academia. But most soon discover that these tools just don’t work very well for academic information. Why do I mean by “academic” in this sense? I could tell you that it’s written by people with higher degrees (Ph.D.) or that it’s peer reviewed (checked out by other scholars in the field before it can be published) or that it has to have notes and bibliographies.

But let’s get the inside story: A piece of information is Academic if it is accepted as Academic by those in the field (like your professor). Each scholarly discipline has its favored sources of information, favored scholars, favored rules for doing research, favored rules of evidence, and so on. So your professor will tell you to make use of academic or scholarly or peer reviewed literature, and anything else will probably give you problems. In this environment, Google and

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