Hello Everyone! In this week’s module we focused a lot on the differences between doing a search for a topic and researching that topic. On slide 3 of Lesson Module 6, it stated that searching can be an important part in learning because it can help find information that you may have missed. Researching, however, involves growing your understanding of a topic. Knowing the difference of these two things is very important when it comes to writing papers in college. Most college classes are going to require you to write a paper at some point that will be more in depth and require credible sources to be cited where you obtained your information from.
While we are about credible sources, it is important to know how to find out if your source is credible. Another main topic in this week’s module was exactly that. A source has three categories you should look at when deciding if it is credible: Reliability, quality, and utility. Is your source reliable? Ask yourself these questions: Does the author have proper qualifications on the subject? Can you contact them for more questions? Or is the articles source reputable? Next, does the article show good quality? Is the article well written, concise, up to date, and free of bias? Lastly, is the information related to my subject and meant for the right audience? These three areas will help you determine if you have a good resource for your academic writings.
The last thing I want to talk about with this week’s module is type of search engine to find those resources for your paper. I, myself, had no idea there were different types of search engines. For instance, google.com is a keyword search engine, yahoo.com is a category search engine, and search.com is a metasearch, meaning it compiles various engines. This can be helpful depending on what kind of search you are doing. My latest discovery, thanks to this week’s module, is google scholar. Google scholar lets you search for published literatures regarding your topic. This video will help explain how to use google scholar more in depth. I believe that this search engine will help me more when writing research papers.
This week’s module has been very helpful for me with my other academic classes right now! In one of my classes I am currently writing a chapter of a book that will be published as an eBook through OSU. I plan to use the google scholar search in order to help me find more credible sources for my chapter after I get feedback on my rough draft later this week. I cannot wait to apply what I have learned this week with my other classes! Hopefully some of the things that I have found useful this week can help you out as well! Let me know if you have any other tips or tricks to help with researching or if you have any questions!
