10 Pieces of Advice

1. take advantage of the school’s paid subscription databases
2. wikipedia is great for background info
3. but never use wikipedia as a source
4. google scholar is very useful for determining how cited and scholarly an author is
5. use boolean operators when searching
6. learn how to vary your search terms and search fields
7. take advantage of controlled vocabularies when searching
8. be sure to do a little background research on authors to determine how reputable their work is
9. when doing research projects, be sure to make concept maps to organize your info
10. when doing research projects, use different types of sources and don’t forget to cite them

Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Print.

Yardi, Sarita, and Danah Boyd. “Dynamic Debates: An Analysis of Group Polarization Over Time on Twitter.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30.5 (2010): 316-327. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 29 Nov. 2010.

Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13.1 (2007). Web. 29 Nov. 2010.

The New York World’s Fair, 1939-40 – Treasures of The New York Public Library. 01 October 2008. Youtube. Web. 29 November 2010.

Facebook. “Facebook’s Privacy Policy.” Facebook.com. October 5, 2010.  Facebook. 29 November 2010. <http://www.facebook.com/policy.php>.

Sisario, Ben. “U.S. Shuts Down Web Sites in Piracy Crackdown.” The New York Times. 26 November 2010. Web. 29 November 2010.

Today, I learned that the author of a source is just as important as the source you are using. If the author’s credentials aren’t up to par, he/she may not not be a credible enough source to cite when doing research. Another thing that I learned about today was how to assess the credentials of authors to determine how reliable the author might be. Things, such as their work history and publications, are good indicators to how credible they might be. Something else that I learned today was how a search engine sorts the results. The more a link is cited, the higher it would appear in a search.

One thing I’m a little skeptical about is whether we learned accurate tests of determining the most reliable and scholarly sources. What if someone published an article that introduced some very interesting topics, but he didn’t cite any scholarly peer-reviewed sources? Would his work be any less valuable, even though his information is just as valid, as someone whose work is peer reviewed and written using scholarly sources?

When I typed in information technology, I immediately noticed how broad of a topic it was. There were dozens of sub topics within information technology about locations, education, law, etc. It was all alphabetized and lead down even further into other more specific topics.