Selecting Your Sources
Selecting Your Sources
As you gather sources for your research, you will need to know how to assess the validity and reliability of the materials you find.
Keep in mind that the sources you find have all been put out there by groups, organizations, corporations, or individuals who have some motivation for getting this information to you. To be a good researcher, you need to learn how to assess the materials you find and determine their reliability—before deciding if you want to use them and, if so, how you want to use them.
Whether you are examining material in books, journals, magazines, newspapers, or websites, you want to consider several issues before deciding if and how to use the material you have found. [1]
How Can You Find Original Research Articles?
Original research usually has these sections in the article:
- Literature Review or Background
- Methods
- Results
- Conclusions / Discussion
Other tips:
- Original research articles are written by the researchers who actually conducted the study.
- The researcher describes their hypothesis or research question and the purpose of the study.
- When you search a database this may help: In the first search box: put your topic or search term and in the second search box add: research or study
What is NOT original research:
- A review article summarizes someone else’s research. This can be a great starting point for understanding your topic and you can cite it in your paper, but it does not count as one of the 6 research articles.
- Press releases, newspapers, or magazine articles: These are reports to the general public sharing research results without the detailed Hypothesis, Methods and Results.
- Web Pages like Mayo Clinic, WebMD, Simply Psychology, Psycom.net, Psychology Today, VeryWell Mind are NOT sources for original research.
- While you may find some research articles on government websites, you will have to sort through a lot of articles aimed at consumers or review articles that summarize others’ findings.
- Professional organizations often have good information but not usually original research that we can use.
Finding Scholarly Sources
- Hatch Library Tour- Watch this brief [3:30] tour of the Hatch Library website, or you can watch the Extended version [10:45] to learn about search features, library hours, and other support services offered through the library.
- Hatch Library A-Z Databases-This link will bring you to the Hatch Library database list. The databases are listed in alphabetical order, and there are several search bars which allow you to filter by subject, database type, and vendors/providers.
- Excelsior Owl-Research Strategies-This website explains how to search for sources using databases and the internet. Included is a brief [1:33] video of a student explaining her research strategies.
- Excelsior Owl-Evaluating Sources– Once you have found your sources, it is important that you take the time to evaluate them to make sure they are relevant, reliable, and valid sources. The content on this site will describe the steps you can take to evaluate your sources.
- Excelsior Owl-Source Evaluation Checklist.– Students can use this interactive checklist to help determine the credibility of a source.
- Google Scholar- Google Scholar is a tool you can use to search for scholarly literature.
- This section adapted from Excelsior Online Writing Lab (OWL). (2022). Evaluating sources. Retrieved from https://owl.excelsior.edu/research/evaluating-sources/. Licensed under CC-BY-4.0. ↵