Monthly Archives: November 2010

1. What are three things about research that I learned today?

1. Web of Science: how to determine the reliability and publicity of the authors of sources.
2. Google Scholar feature–source cited–is unreliable.
3. Yochai Benkler does not have a PhD.

What is the one thing about evaluation of sources that I’m still unclear or uncertain?

Few questions I have about evaluation of sources is: Is there a number of other work citing a source making that particular source reliable? Is it that 100, 300, or 500 of other working citing a particular article makes the article substantially reliable? Is it true that the greater the number means the source more reliable?

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.

Three things that I learned today was that I learned you can view how much an author is cited for a certain article or research paper. Two I learned that most professors have a CV which is basically their resume. And also I learned that Marquis Who’s Who database can be useful when you want to find certain information about an author or one of his papers.
One thing I am still unclear of is that if we cant find anything on any of the databases that pertains to how much an author is cited, and if google is not necessarily dependable, then what is the best option to locating how much something gets cited?

Today in class, I learned a very relevant tool for researching: What FIND IT! does. Countless times already, I have found sources for research that were not available. Today, I learned how to get these articles. I also learned today about the Who’s Who! Database and how that can provide brief overviews on a person’s profession, education, and past publications. Lastly, I learned that Google scholar is not the most reliable source since it allows more citing than necessary.

I would like to learn how to evaluate where an article got IT’s sources from. This way, I can put together better searches and rely on more accurate databases.

Today, we covered how to evaluate the quality of our sources and, more directly, the authors of them. I had known before that not every author could be trusted to cite in an academic paper, but before, I had only known ways of weeding out the most obvious examples of untrustworthy authors. However, I learned a few new techniques for determining which authors are reliable and which are not, past making a general assumption about them based on whether or not a civil war author has pictures of himself in a civil war reenactment setting posted on his blog right next to his “scholarly work.”

We covered two databases that could assist in weeding our unreliable authors: Web of Science and Marquis Who’s Who. Web of science looks like it will be more useful to me because it lists articles by the author and the number of times each of those articles was cited. Marquis Who’s Who will give information about an author that can be useful, but the arrangement it has with Baruch as a database might make accessing it difficult. There is also Google Scholar for looking at a record of citations, but I was told it was often unreliable. We also learned to analyze the other works published by an author and the author’s background – their profession, where they teach, etc – to see if they are relevant sources. I am still a little unclear about how an author’s profession would be a deciding factor in their quality, because oddly enough, some people who don’t have degrees might actually be very well-read and knowledgeable in their writing for one particular field, but I suppose that would come out based on references to them.

Three things that I learned about research today are: 1. you can use google to find biographical information about authors or professors. 2. By using the Who’s Who database, you can find a quick overview of the person you searched for. 3. You can also search different databases to see how many times, if at all, the person you searched for has been cited in another work.

Everything seems pretty clear on evaluation of sources.

There are many things I have learned in class today. Three of these things include how to determine how many times a certain author has been cited, what CV stands for, and Michael Buckland is a professor at Berkley University. One thing that I am still uncertain about regarding evaluating a source would be whether or not there was a database that could accurately list every single publication of an author; not through Google.

Did you like our screening of The Social Network yesterday? Then you might be interested in these:

• David Denby’s review of the movie in The New Yorker (4 October 2010)
• A profile in The New Yorker of Mark Zuckerberg in which he talks about the movie (20 September 2010)
• A book review published in The New York Review of Books by novelist Zadie Smith in which she talks about the movie and Facebook in general (25 November 2010)