Research Tips!!
What to know about research
You need to gather relevant information form both Print and Online
Gathering relevant information is extremely important. You need to make sure that it connects to the idea, and isn't completely off. One way you could know that the information is relevant online, is when we are on the databases, it should tell you before you open the article. On print, you could know if it is relevant or not, because if you skim through it, you should be able to see words that catch your eye, yet still connect to the topic you are looking at.
Keywords!!
Using keywords while searching is absolutely necessary. You can NOT use complete thoughts. If you do, you won't get the information that you need, you will actually get too much information, or information that isn't relevant to your topic. If you have a question, you can pick out the keywords, by looking to see what your main points are. For example, "What do Rabbits eat?" The keyword in that question is eat.
Credible and Accurate resources!
How do you know if a website, or resource is accurate and reliable?
You could always find out, by looking to see who the author is, the date that it was published, What the URL is, if it has any ads, who the sponsors are, if any, and more.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is the act of taking the thoughts, ideas, or words of another author, without giving any credit to them. You should DEFINITELY avoid plagiarism. You can avoid Plagiarism in many ways, such as paraphrasing, summarizing, or quoting. After doing one of those, you have to add citations. Citations tell the article, or website, and author, and the year everything was written. The Citation our class uses, is MLA.
Quoting, Paraphrasing, and summarizing, and Citation:
Quoting:
Quoting is a way of using another authors exact words in your writing. To quote, you have to use quotations, example "Hair apparently has a life of its own." (Maybe One Day, Melissa Kantor 158). For citing quotations, you could do in text citing, which is what you saw just a second ago. You could also cite it, in a bibliography, which is a list of citations.
Paraphrasing:
Paraphrasing is a way of taking the text, and putting it in your own words. You have to make sure that when you are doing this, you aren't twisting the meaning of the words. That is the most common mistake made in paraphrasing. When you do this, you also have to make sure that you are not only changing a few words, you need to fill it with your ideas, and change most of it. If you don't that could possibly be considered quoting. With paraphrasing, you also have to Cite your resources.
Summarizing:
Summarizing is basically taking the information you found, or the article you read, and putting all of the main parts together. For example, If you read about video games, you would want the summery to be about the main ideas of the article, like who created the video game, and why its so popular. You also have to cite in summarizing.
Citation:
When researching you have to use citation. Without it your writing would be considered plagiarizing, which you would get in trouble for. In our school the type of citation we use, is MLA. The format of this citation is the title of the article, the author, and if it is in text, the page number. If you want to put all the work cited on one page, you would use what is called a bibliography. In a bibliography, You would still use MLA citation, but you would put it all on this page, at the end of your writing.