Jamal began to worry about his paper. He did web searches on a few topics he was considering, but all he could find was information from generalized websites. He knew enough to know that if an article did not list sources, the information could be unreliable. How could Jamal find reliable information at the standard needed for a college-level course?
Jamal is in luck. With a little bit of knowledge, Jamal will be able to find most, if not all, of the information he needs, even without the benefit of a physical library.
Academic Research--an Overview
In high school, a research paper usually requires three to five sources. Encyclopedias, magazines, newspapers, and websites are all fair game, and teachers are more concerned with the form of the paper than they are with the quality of the information it's based on.In college, though, professors assume that students know the basics of writing research papers. They expect that your paper will be well organized, and that your works cited page will be correct in form. When you write an academic paper, you'll be graded on the quality of your thinking and how well you've proven your points through research.
Not only is the quality of your thinking more heavily weighted than the number of sentences in your introduction, but your professors expect you to become an expert in your subject. Before you even start writing, you're expected to have familiarity with every important journal article and book discussing your topic.
If you're a home-based student, it can sound like an impossible challenge. Your biggest tool is, of course, the Internet, but how can you decide which sources are important, and then find every one of them?
Sources that Count
While you're expected to have read everything important that's been written on your topic, it's neither expected nor necessary to have read every word that's been published about the subject. You only have to read the best information.Primary sources are considered the best place to gather academic research. Primary sources are the journals and books where academics and scientists publish the results of their experiments and studies. The articles in these journals are written by the people who did the studies or by experts who have studied a topic for decades. These are the journals and books that you are expected to use for academic research. Government websites and websites run my managing organizations (such as the website for the American Ivy Society, for a paper on ivy) are also considered primary research, so don't overlook these sources.
Popular magazines, websites, books, and newspapers are secondary sources of information. They take the information published in scholarly journals and make it available to consumers. They usually quote the scholarly journals or books that published the information originally, adding explanations to make the information easier to understand or relate to. In high school, your teachers probably didn't mind if you used secondary sources in your research projects. Now, though, they are off-limits. You may use their lists of references to find the names of the scholarly journals that you should use for your research, but you don't have to use them at all.
Using Online Informational Databases
Happily, most scholarly journals and popular magazines can be found online. You will be able to search articles and read abstracts for free, but without an affiliation with a university library, you may have to pay to read the articles you choose to use in your paper. If you choose your school carefully, though, you'll have an online library that gives students free access to several databases filled with both primary and secondary sources. Some of the most useful databases include:Gale Group--Gives access to millions of full-text articles from thousands of journals. The Gale Group owns a variety of databases, including InfoTrac, Health Reference Center, and Academic ASAP. Proquest--Use this database to find the full text of articles from nursing, social science, and psychology journals.
Newsbank--A good database to use if you are looking for social, economic, government, environmental, sports, health, or science news articles. Newsbank includes over 500 local and national newspapers in its database.
