Sources

Citing and Referencing

University of Algiers 2

English Department

Master Two Didactics

Research Project Writing

1.0
October, 27th, 2022
 Table of contents

I - Finding Relevant Sources 3

1. Reliable Sources ......................................................................................................................................................... 3

2. Online Search .............................................................................................................................................................. 5

2.1. Using Boolean Expressions in Online Sources ...................................................................................................................... 5

2.2. Identifying Reputable Online Sources .................................................................................................................................... 7

Conclusion 9
 Finding Relevant Sources

I Finding Relevant Sources

1. Reliable Sources
Depending on the research scope, a researcher may come across numerous sources, which vary in reliability, yet
owing to the lack of relevant sources, it may be possible to utilize less reliable sources. The following illustration
reveals the order of reliable sources

Order of Reliable Sources

Biographies: Most notable figures have several websites devoted to them that include articles by and about them.

Refer to biography for these reasons:

1. To verify the standing and reputation of somebody you want to paraphrase or quote in your paper.

2. To provide biographical details in your introduction. For example, the primary topic may be Carl Jung's
psychological theories of the unconscious, but information about Jung's career might be appropriate in the paper.

3. To discuss a creative writer's life in relation to his or her work. That is, Jamaica Kincaid's personal life may shed
some light on your reading

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Reliable Sources

of her stories or novels.

Scholarly Articles: Articles can be identified in many ways

1. The journal does not have a colorful cover; in fact, the table of contents is often displayed on the cover.

2. No colorful drawings or photography introduce each journal article, just a title and the name of the author(s).

3. The word journal often appears in the title (e.g., American Journal of Sociology).

4. The yearly issues of a journal are bound into a book.

5. Usually, the pages of a journal are numbered continuously through all issues for a year (unlike magazines, which
are paged anew with

each issue).

Sponsored Websites: The Internet supplies both excellent information and some that is questionable in value.
Judgments about the validity of these materials are made via asking few questions about any article from a website:

Is it appropriate to my work?

Is it reliable and authoritative?

Is it sponsored by an institution or organization?

Interviews with knowledgeable people provide excellent information for a research paper. Whether conducted in
person or by e-mail, the interview brings a personal, expert perspective to your work. The key element, of course, is
the expertise of the person.

Trade books seldom treat with depth a scholarly subject. Trade books have specific targets—the cook, the gardener,
the antique dealer. In addition, trade books, in general, receive no rigorous prepublication scrutiny like scholarly
books and textbooks do. For example, if the topic is “dieting” with a focus on “fad diets,” plenty of diet books can be
found at the local bookstore and on commercial websites.

Encyclopedias contain brief surveys of well-known persons, events, places, and accomplishments. They serve well
during preliminary investigation, but most instructors prefer going beyond encyclopedias in order to cite from scholarly
books and journal articles. Encyclopedias seldom have the critical perspective gained from books and journal articles.

Magazines: Like trade books, magazines have a targeted audience—young women, wrestling fans, computer
connoisseurs, travelers. The articles are written rather quickly and seldom face critical review by a panel of experts.
Therefore, exercise caution when reading a popular commercial magazine.

Newspapers: Some newspaper articles are not carefully researched or peer reviewed, but major newspapers offer
carefully fact-checked information and rigorously researched stories. Generally, newspapers offer an excellent source
of information, especially of local information that may not be found elsewhere.

Listservs: E-mail information via listserv deserves consideration when it focuses on an academic issue, such as
British Romantic literature or, more specifically, the poetry of Robert Browning. In many cases, listservs originate from
a college or scholarly organization. In fact, many instructors establish their own listserv sites for individual classes.
Online courses usually feature a listserv site for exchange of ideas and peer review. These listservs can be a great
way to seek out possible topics and learn what literature teachers or sociologists are talking about these days.

- Caution: Use the listserv to generate ideas, not as a source for facts to use in quotations.

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 Online Search

Usenet: Usenet newsgroups post information on a site. Like call-in radio shows; they invite opinions from a vast cross
section of people; some are reliable and some not. In most cases, participants employ an anonymous username,
rendering their ideas useless for a documented paper.

Internet Chat Conversations: Chat rooms, anonymous in general, have almost no value for academic research, and
the conversations are seldom about scholarly issues.

2. Online Search

The Internet, with its speed and ubiquity, has made research much easier than it once was. Thanks to the
Internet, a library of millions of sources is at everyone's disposal 24 hours a day.

This abundance of research, however, can be overwhelming. Today the problem is not how to find research
material but how to work the way through the thousands (or even millions) of documents that turn up in a search.
Entering a search word or phrase about a topic, any topic, into Google, Yahoo, or whatever a favorite search
engine might be, and in seconds there will be a presentation with pages upon pages of two-line summaries of
articles that contain it. Google and other search engines “weight” the results by putting the most likely matches
at the top, but the chore of finding the perfect source to meet your research needs is still left to you.

2.1. Using Boolean Expressions in Online Sources

Boolean Expressions

Using Boolean expressions or Boolean operators with keywords enables narrowing a search even more by
stipulating which words and phrases can appear in the results, which words must appear, or which terms must not
appear in the search results. Most electronic databases and Internet search engines allow the use of Boolean search
expressions, specifically AND or the + (“plus”) symbol, NOT or the – (“minus”) symbol, and OR. Placed between
keywords, Boolean expressions instruct the search engine to display only those websites in which a specific research
terms appear in certain combinations, and to ignore others.

■ Alternate spellings: Use alternate and “sound-alike” spellings when you are unsure of names or the exact spelling
of other terms.

Examples: Gabriel LaBoiteaux, LaBoytoe, Labertew

■ Quotation marks (“ “): Use quotation marks to restrict your search to exact names and unique phrases inside the
quotes.

Examples: “Patrick Henry” “American Revolution” “Give me liberty or give me death”

■ And: Use and to find articles that include both of the terms that it links.

Example: “Patrick Henry” and “Give me liberty or give me death.”This search will find only articles in which Patrick
Henry's name and the full phrase,“Give me liberty or give me death,” appear.

■ Or: Use or to find articles that include one term or the other.

Example: “Patrick Henry” or “Give me liberty or give me death.”This search will find articles that mention Patrick
Henry, articles that include the phrase,“Give me liberty or give me death,” and articles that include both.

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Identifying Reputable Online Sources

■ Not ... and not: Use not or and not to deliberately exclude terms from your search.

Example: “Patrick Henry” not “Give me liberty or give me death”. This search will find articles that mention Patrick
Henry but will exclude articles where his name appears with the phrase,“Give me liberty or give me death.”

Wildcard searches use symbols to search for the various forms of a basic, root word. Rather than conducting several
searches for the same basic word—such as child, children, childhood, and so on—you can focus your keyword
search to find a term with variant spelling or endings by using an asterisk (*) or a question mark (?) as the wildcard or
truncation symbol.

The asterisk (*) usually takes the place of one or more characters at the end of a word.

Example: diet* Results: diet, diets, dietary, dietician, dietetics

The question mark (?) usually takes the place of a single character in a word.

Example: ne?t Results: neat, nest, next

Some databases and search engines use different wildcard symbols such as (!), ($), or (:). Consult the help section in
the database or Internet

search site to learn which wildcard symbols are supported.

 Complement:Advanced Search

You can also control your search for information on the Internet by using the advanced search feature that is offered
by many of the search engines. Advanced search essentially does what operators do, but, instead of entering the
operators as part of your keyword search, you enter your search terms into a form. These forms can be very specific,
even allowing you to restrict searches by the domain, number of finds you want returned on each page, and the time
frame in which the material was posted to the Web.

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 Websites

2.2. Identifying Reputable Online Sources

2.2.1. Websites

Websites Components

The Internet employs a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Most URLs include the server www for World Wide Web,
which is the global Internet service that connects the multitude of computers and the Internet files.

- The protocol (http://) transmits data.

- The domain (catalogue.pearsoned.co.uk) names the organization feeding information into the server with a suffix
to label the type of organization: .co (commercial), .edu (educational), .gov ( government), .mil (military), .net
(network organization), and .org (organization).
- The directory/file (educator/discipline/Psychology) finds one of the server's directories and then a specific file.
- The hypertext markup language (html) names the computer language used to write the file.

2.2.2. Evaluating Online Sources

 Fundamental:Evaluating Online Sources

The Internet and other online sources supply huge amounts of material, some of it excellent and some not so good.
You must make judgments about the validity and veracity of these materials. In addition to your commonsense
judgment, here are a few guidelines:

1. Prefer the .edu and .org sites. Usually, these are domains developed by an educational institution, such as
Ohio State University, or by a professional organization, such as the American Philosophical Association. Of
course, .edu sites also include many student papers, which can include unreliable information.
2. The .gov (government) and .mil (military) sites are generally considered to be reliable, but look closely at any
information that involves politically sensitive materials.
3. The .com (commercial) sites are generally developed by for profit organizations. Keep in mind that (a) they are
selling advertising space, (b) they often charge you for access to their files, (c) they can be ISP sites (Internet
Service Provider) that people pay to use and to post their “material.” Although some .com sites contain good
information (for example, reputable newspaper and magazine sites), use these sites with caution unless you
can verify their reliability.
4. Look for the professional affiliation of the writer, which you will find in the opening credits or an e-mail address.
Search for the writer's home page: Type the writer's name into a search engine to see how many results are
listed, including a list of his or her books. If you find no information on the writer, you will need to rely on a
sponsored website. That is, if the site is not sponsored by an organization or institution, you should probably
abandon the source and look elsewhere.
5. Look for a bibliography that accompanies the article, which will indicate the scholarly nature of this writer's
work.
6. Usenet discussion groups offer valuable information at times, but some articles lack sound, fundamental
reasoning, or evidence to support the opinions.
7. Look for the timeliness of the information on the site. Check dates of publication and how often the information
is updated.
8. Treat e-mail messages as mail, not scholarly articles. A similar rule applies to chat.

9.

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Evaluating Online Sources

9. Does the site contain hypertext links to other professional sites or to commercial sites? Links to other
educational sites serve as a modern bibliography to more reliable sources. Links to commercial sites are often
attempts to sell you something.
10. Learn to distinguish from among the different types of websites, such as advocacy pages, personal home
pages, informational pages, and business and marketing pages.

 Complement:Checklist for Online Sources

1. Does it come from a source my audience will recognize as an authority on the subject?
2. Does it meet the requirements of the assignment?
3. Will it meet my instructor's expectations?
4. Am I getting facts or opinion?
5. Does the information have a commercial purpose? Is it advertising, a press release, or promotional copy?
6. Do the author's arguments seem logical, or do they overgeneralize or oversimplify?
7. How well researched was the article?
8. Are the sources of the article's information evident? What are they?
9. What is the author's name? Avoid using sources by unnamed authors or authors using anonymous or fictitious
“handles.”
10. What is the person's background? Does the author possess the experience, education, or authority to
comment intelligently on the subject?
11. Who is the publisher or the sponsoring organization?
12. If it is an organization, what is its mission?
13. When was the article written?
14. Based on what you already know, does the article appear to make exaggerated claims?

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 Conclusion

In short, the selected sources should be relevant and reliable. The internet includes a large number of sources.
Researchers are constantly evaluating the online sources, especially their respective websites.