Speaker 1: Hello students, today we're going to talk a little bit about conducting academic research and applying APA style. When we research we have access to multiple different types of sources. We have scholarly peer-reviewed periodicals and we also have non peer-reviewed periodicals. Now periodical just means a publication that comes out periodically at a time that we can expect to see it. So for example a newspaper might be a daily paper, it might be a weekly paper, monthly, magazine, right? So those are all periodicals but the ones I just mentioned, like newspapers and glossy magazines, those are not peer-reviewed periodicals. Scholarly or what we call academic peer-reviewed periodicals means these are written by experts in a particular field for a journal that publishes work in that field and their work has to be reviewed by fellow experts in their field. So it's not enough to have a PhD in your field and many years experience and have been published before. Your work goes through this strict revision process with fellow experts before it gets published into one of those journals. So that's about as reliable as you're going to get. So any academic college level work of writing and research should include scholarly or academic peer-reviewed periodicals. That doesn't mean you can't have any other kinds of sources, it would depend on whether or not it's appropriate for your topic, but without those academic sources there it's not really college level academic writing. So non-periodical websites, most websites are not periodical, they are updated by a webmaster whenever he or she chooses to and then books, those still exist, you still have access to them at your local library and if you don't have a library card it's a really useful thing to have. Accessing books for free is still great and lots of trusted information to be found in there. You can also these days actually check out books electronically from your library like to your iPad or your Kindle. So of all of these sources of information the least trusted would be, as you probably would guess, the non-periodical websites. That doesn't mean you can't use any of them but we're going to discuss which ones would be appropriate and which would not be. Okay, so we talked about the fact that you know you need to have some scholarly sources in your academic writing, so where would you find those? You would find those in the library databases. So all universities have library database access for their students and their faculty. These are not the kinds of sources that you could access for free on the internet. Most scholarly journals that publish the kinds of articles we're talking about are subscription-based and normally if you find one of those articles online you're probably just finding the abstract which is the summary of that article and then you get some kind of link to either purchase that article or to sign up for a subscription to the journal that's publishing that article. So obviously you don't want to be paying for these sources. As a university student you have access to them. So that is why the library databases are so particularly beneficial for research and academic work. Now we also have Google Scholar so you could visit scholar.google.com and when you're in there and you do a Google search you're going to get much more academic sources because of the way that Google Scholar filters the sources as opposed to the sort of popularity contest that like a regular search engine would be. So you might find some useful things on there as well but again oftentimes you'll click on something and you'll only get the abstract and then have to actually pay for the source. Occasionally you'll get a full article and if you do great you can go ahead and use it if it's a scholarly journal article but when you access articles in the library databases then you know that you do actually have those available. So let's say that you've already done your academic research you also feel like you need some more general basic kind of sources from a Google search then how do you know which websites to trust? For starters you want to look at the URL. It can end in .org, .gov or .edu. I would eliminate anything else. So definitely .com, .net but there are also other URLs that you would want to avoid. So if it doesn't end in .org, .gov or .edu just go ahead and eliminate it it makes your life a little bit easier. .gov is official government information so say for example that you're getting information from you know the State Department. .edu would be an educational institution and .org should be a reliable organization. Now .org is the only one of these three that you could potentially start a .org and not really be an organization so you still want to be a little bit careful when you look at it but you'll start to recognize whether or not certain organizations are reliable within your field. So for instance in the field of medicine we know that the World Health Organization is reliable that the Mayo Clinic is reliable right so with the .org if you have any doubts you can of course always ask your professor. Then you want to make sure that you can identify some kind of author for this article that that author is credentialed. So if you see Joe Smith on there then who is this Joe Smith? You can always conduct a Google search for that person if you don't get any information about him on the website and you know does he have the kind of degree and the kind of publications that make him reliable to talk about that particular topic. And if there's no human author listed that doesn't mean you don't have an author. So for instance if you were checking out a article from the World Health Organization and they didn't list their author then your author is the World Health Organization. So your author can be the name of the organization or the government agency or the educational institution that is responsible for that information. You use that as your author if and only if there was no author listed. And then lastly you guys are expected to cite all of your sources and if you don't do that accurately you can be slammed for plagiarism. So shouldn't you expect your own sources to do the same? Your web article probably does not have all original information. It probably took information from other parts of the web from other articles often from scholarly journal articles as well. So they should also be citing their sources. Now don't expect them to necessarily do that in APA style or in a particular style. Oftentimes on websites what you'll see is like a little superscript number at the end of a sentence that will lead you down to a matching number with a link or a reference for where that information came from. They don't have to be using APA but you have to have see some sort of evidence that they're trying to give credit for where they got their information from. Okay so you've got your research you want to start using it in your writing. So now we need to talk a little bit about quoting versus paraphrasing because these are the only two ways that we incorporate information from our research into our papers. So what is the main difference between these? Well a quote is a word-for-word sentence or phrase from the original text. I say here sentence or phrase because often what people do is they'll read a sentence from their article and they'll say I want to use that word for word and they'll you know copy the entire sentence and then put quotation marks around that sentence and their citation and that's perfectly fine that's a quote. However sometimes you just took part of a sentence word-for- word. If part of the sentence is word-for-word even though it's not the entire sentence that part still needs to be in quotation marks unless the part is something like you know the words autism spectrum disorder for example. There's nothing else I could have called that that is what that's called so I don't have to put quotation marks around it just because my article calls it the same thing or if I use a statistic or something like that I'm not allowed to change that number but whenever you're using words that you could have said differently but you did not you should be quoting that. And then a paraphrase is a passage from the original text expressed in your own words. So here I say a passage because again a lot of people when they think of paraphrasing they think I'll take this sentence and then I will say that sentence in my own words in my paper. Can that be a paraphrase? Sure but you can also take a bigger chunk of text it could be a few sentences together it could be a whole paragraph and you and one sentence could give me the gist of what was in that paragraph. That could also be a paraphrase and that is often actually pretty effective. So should you be quoting more or should you be paraphrasing more? Definitely paraphrasing. The main reason for this is that it shows that you've actually understood and been able to apply that information. So if you think about it the best sign that you understand something really well is your ability to teach it to someone else. So think of your paraphrasing as you teaching me what you read in a particular article and when you're doing that well then that demonstrates your understanding and that's a strong paraphrase. So what you don't want to do is to just substitute some words here and there for synonyms for words that mean the same thing within that sentence and then take a little part out that you don't really need and then suddenly call that a paraphrase. You were just kind of playing a little chess game there with your sentence. It doesn't really demonstrate that you understand what you read. What you really should be doing is reading the original closely enough, slowly enough, enough times if that's what's required for you to have that light bulb moment of tomorrow I can come up to my professor and explain to her what I just read in this article today and I wouldn't need to have it in front of me. I could just kind of talk from the top of my head about what I read. Once you're able to do that then you've truly understood it and you can write it truly in your own words. You don't even remember exactly how it was said initially. So when you're writing a paraphrase you really shouldn't be looking back at the original sentence at all in order for it to be truly a good paraphrase. So just to reiterate, make sure that the language and the sentence structure are truly your own and to do that it helps to not really be looking back at that original passage when you're paraphrasing it. Just FYI, if you feel like you need further help at some point with researching for your paper, you're having trouble finding academic sources or you feel like you're not finding enough of them and you need some further orientation with how to use the library databases effectively, the library is a really great resource for you. You can come to campus, you can meet one-on-one with a librarian who can sit with you and provide some tips and tricks on using the databases and help you find some sources that are relevant to your specific topic. Of course I'm also available if you need any help with researching skills in general so feel free to reach out. Good luck with your researching and the APA portion of this will be a separate video so look out for that as well.