Transcript Research and Reading

Dr. Stephanie Hester
Faculty of Arts Study Skills Clinic, [email protected]
Research, Reading and Referencing
In this presentation:
Research and Referencing
The Big Picture:
 What Academic Research is and how it’s relevant to you
 What kind of research you will be doing for the next few years
 Gathering Data
 Reading
 Analyzing Data
 Referencing
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Research
• You research things every day.
• When you were choosing where to study and what to
study, chances are you did quite a bit of research into
your options.
• Now you are about to commence a degree that puts
a high value on research.
• Your lecturers and tutors are also active researchers.
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The purpose of academic research
• The purpose of academic research has been defined by the
HERDC as:
‘the creation of new knowledge and/or the use of
existing knowledge in a new and creative way so as to
generate new concepts … and understandings.’
Why is this relevant to you?
Life Impact The University of Adelaide
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Your mission, if you choose to accept it...
is to work towards becoming researchers who can independently
follow the steps required to ‘use and / or create new
knowledge’:
• Devise a question / hypothesis
• Gather data
• Analyse data
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The Good News...
• At first year level, you will most likely be asked to focus on
stages two and three of the Research Process:
• Gathering data
• Analysing data
• You won’t generally have to devise a research question of your
own in at least the first year of your study.
• You just need to take care of the three Rs, which are…
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Which of these marking criteria relate to
a)researching, b)reading and c)referencing?
RESEARCH / READING
READING
REFERENCING
University of Adelaide
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Finding Appropriate and Varied Readings
• Suppose you choose this question to research (first essay topic
for the Arts of Engagement Core Course):
Does national security override free speech?
• How are you going to get an understanding of what this
question means?
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Key Terms
What are the key term/s in this question?
Does national security override free speech?
• Where can you get an overview of these key terms?
• What do you do with the key terms?
University of Adelaide
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The Library
You don’t even need to leave the comfort of your bedroom. This
address will take you to library homepage:
– http://www.adelaide.edu.au/library/
• The Search Engine for the library is in the middle of the
homepage.
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Using Key Terms in a Boolean search
• The best way to use a search engine is to do a ‘Boolean’
search.
• There’s a tutorial you can take about Boolean searching (go to
http://libguides.adelaide.edu.au/home).
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Boolean Search
Which phrase would you use to ensure you have search
results that cover our key phrases (national security) /
(free speech):
– AND
– OR
– NOT
And how do you use the library search engine to do a
Boolean search?
University of Adelaide
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Narrowing a search
• Typing in the phrases like ‘national security’ and ‘free speech’
still brings up a huge number of entries.
• You can narrow these by using the ‘Show Only’ or ‘Refine my
results’ functions.
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Peer Reviewed Journals
• If you are looking at journals, a particularly important option
to pick, is the ‘Peer-Reviewed Journals’ option.
• ‘Peer Reviewed’ means that the article is published in an
academic source, and has been reviewed by a collection of
academic ‘peers’ who have endorsed it. (They may not agree
with it, but they have decided it’s well-researched and
argued).
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Help in the library
• The library is staffed by a wonderful team of Research
Librarians.
• They create homepages for every discipline you will be
studying in.
• Major first year courses often have their own pages.
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Source Reliability
3rd: POPULAR
MAGAZINES:
Which of the following are the most / least ‘reliable’?
These can be
4th: WIKIPEDIA: No
excellent for
1st
or
2nd:
BOOKS:
way to verify
facts, especially
‘Reliability’ determined
information; use
about recent
by age of text and the
mainly as a first step
events, but are
subject
matter
of
the
to getting key terms
not peer
course (You’d generally
reviewed
find more recent sources
than a book written in
the early 1990s for an
essay on contemporary
China, for example)
1st: GOOGLE
SCHOLAR: 1. Up
to date, peerreviewed journal
articles
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Source Analysis and Critical Reading
• Once you have your sources, you need to analyze
them.
– This means that when you are reading texts, you want to be reading
them critically.
• You aren’t just reading to find faults.
• Critical reading involves asking yourself what a text
means, and / or what its author is doing, and why.
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Reading: Tricks and Techniques
It can often be difficult to adjust to the language of scholarly
sources.
Think of the process as similar to learning another language.
If you read sources with an aim of understanding at least parts of
them, rather than feeling you need to comprehend everything
being discussed, you should find you can pick up most of what is
being said.
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Reading
Read the title, abstract and introduction of the source: These
should give you a sense of what the source is discussing and
arguing.
Make note of subtitles/headings of sections and topic
sentences: The headings of sections, and the topic sentence of
every paragraph (usually the first sentence in a paragraph),
should give you a sense of what key point is being made in each
section / paragraph. You can use this to get a sense of the
source’s overall argument.
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Critical Reading Basics and Literature Reviews
There are some basic questions that you can, and should, ask
yourself about the text you are analysing, or reading; these can
get you thinking about critical reading:
1) The main purpose or function of this article / excerpt / artifact is
________________________.
2) The key message / impression the author or creator wants to convey
(whether stated or unstated) is __________________. They do this by
________________________.
3) The most important and / or interesting information in this article /
excerpt / artifact is ____________.
Many of you will be asked to do Annotated Bibliographies and
literature reviews, which are short summaries of a range of texts;
you will want to address these points as part of that.
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Using Referencing Fully and Correctly
• Acknowledging both the ideas and written material you have
gained from other sources is crucial to your development as a
scholar.
• Not acknowledging sources properly can lead to your essays
being determined to contain plagiarized material when you
submit them through Turnitin.
• Citing scholars fully can also make you look more sophisticated
as a scholar yourself. Many students worry they are citing too
many sources. Full and correct citation, however, is more likely
to make you look like a well read scholar yourself.
Citation Styles Used in the Faculty
There are a range of citation styles. The most popular for this
Faculty include:
• Harvard (Author-Date) – Used by the majority of disciplines
in the Faculty.
• MLA – Used by English and Creative Writing Disciplines.
• Chicago (Footnote) Style – Used by History.
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Referencing: In Text and Works Cited
• A reference comes in two parts: an ‘In-text’ citation and a
bibliographic reference, which comes in the ‘Works Cited’ list
at the end of the essay.
• You only usually put the basics (Author and Page No. for MLA,
Author, Date and Page Number for Harvard) in the actual
essay; most of the bibliographic details go at the end in the
Works Cited List.
– In-Text Citation [using MLA]: (Reed 3)
– Works Cited Reference [using MLA]: Reed, John. “Dickens and
Personification.” Dickens Quarterly 24.1 (2007): 3-17. EBSCOhost. 25
Feb 2013.
Ways to Quote ‘In-Text’: MLA Style
• If you have written the author’s name in the body
of your essay, you don’t have to repeat it in the
citation.
– It has been suggested that “one feature of Dickens’
writing that might have been off-putting for a critic
demanding greater realism was his frequent use of
personification” (Reed 3).
– Reed (3) suggests that “one feature of Dickens’ writing
that might have been off-putting for a critic demanding
greater realism was his frequent use of personification.”
Ways to Quote ‘In-Text’: Harvard (Author-Date)
Style
When using Harvard Style, you also give the year of
publication in the citation (hence the ‘Author-Date’
title). As with MLA, if you have written the author’s
name in the text, it doesn’t need to be in the citation.
– McKenna (2007, p.17) suggests the Anzac Spirit is
“universal.”
– It has been suggested that the Anzac Spirit is “universal”
(McKenna 2007, p.17).
Paraphrasing
• It’s important to note that even when you are just
referring to an idea that you have read about, you
still acknowledge the author of the idea.
– It could be said that the Anzac Spirit actually appears in
many nations (McKenna 2007, p.17)
• When you are talking about the overall work (such as
a book) or research interests of a scholar you can just
reference that book.
– McKenna (2007) is interested in the dark side of patriotism.
Assumed Knowledge
• There are some things that can be said to be assumed
knowledge and to not need referencing; you wouldn’t, for
example, cite the date World War II broke out (as scholars agree
it was September 1939) or the fact that Sydney is in NSW.
• ‘Assumed Knowledge’ is a tricky term. The excellent Purdue Owl
resource has a list of ‘Assumed Knowledge’ points
(https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/589/02/.)
Works Cited
Some key points to remember about a Works Cited list:
• List the works you have cited from in Alphabetical Order (by
Author Surname)
• Only list the works you have quoted or paraphrased or for any
reason cited in your essay
• Make sure that everything is listed using the correct style
(Harvard, MLA, Chicago and other Referencing Styles all have
their own format)
• Make sure the work is referenced in the correct style for the
kind of document it is (there are different ways to reference
different types of documents, including books, journals and
electronic documents)
Referencing Help is at hand!
Referencing is the bane of many a student’s existence. The good news is that
there is help at hand.
• For MLA, try the UofA English Guide
(http://www.hss.adelaide.edu.au/english/studentinfo/reference/)
• For Harvard, try the Guide in the Academic Skills Resources folder on My
Uni (go to Referencing and Avoiding Plagiarism / Referencing Guide for
Arts Courses)
• For Chicago (Footnote) Style, try the Online Guide:
(http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/16/ch14/ch14_sec245.html)
There are also a range of Style Guides supplied by the Writing Centre:
http://www.adelaide.edu.au/writingcentre/referencing_guides/