During class today, I learned 3 things about research, the functions of the database Web of Knowledge, how to look for a creditable author using their publications as an example (CV), and how Google scholar shows the amount of citations for an article that may not be so accurate. Still unsure of how to evaluate the usage of a creditable author’s sources without reading every work they have published.
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Your question is a good one. Looking at the citation counts for a given author or for just one of his/her publications is just one indicator that you might take into consideration as you evaluate that author’s work overall or that one specific article. When researchers dive into a research project, they may discover that there are lots of articles already written in their specific area. It is a sign of good research when that researcher can identify which sources/authors are the leading figures in a given topic area. For example, if you are going to be writing about the process of evolution in a general way, you are certainly going to want to cite Charles Darwin as well as a handful of other leading thinkers/scholars in that field. Knowing who the key players are in a given topic area can take a long time and much reading. The deeper and deeper you read in a given topic area, the more you’ll get the sense of who the major figures are or which sources are the key ones that everyone refers to.
Doing some reading in background sources (encyclopedias, etc.) can often give you a jumpstart in figuring out who those important researchers are. Some scholarly disciplines have formal rules about the structure of journal articles and expect a “literature review” section near the start of the article; a section like this usually quickly outlines the key publications in the topic area the author is writing about.