Research Tips
By: Alex Ware
How to Avoid Plagiarism
Plagiarism is a thing where someone goes on the internet to find information or research and is lazy so they decide to copy and paste the information into their research. This seems fine and all until they learn that this is illegal. So that the next time you have a research project use these tips. First of all use citations. These will give credit to who came up with the ideas. Another thing you should do is paraphrase the info. This is just changing the information but not just changing the words order. So next time you get some research make sure you do these two things.
The difference between Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing
Quoting is taking what someone said and putting " " around it so that people know that someone said it. Paraphrasing is when you want to use someone else's ideas and you change the format and how it is written but it is still the same idea. Finally, summarizing is when you take many ideas and lots of different info and you compress it so that it smaller and includes the main idea and important details.
How to Decide if a Website is Credable
First off, you can usually tell if the website is credible from if the authors name is somewhere on the piece. On some occasions the authors name will not be there and it will be credible. This is how you can decide if those sites are credible. If the URL has things like .com, .org, .edu, or .net you should probably go with .org or .edu. These domains are the best for correct information. Finally if the website has ads this means that the website is trying to get money. So it depends if the ads are covering the entire page or if there is just one or two, those are better.
Using Key-Words
When you are researching for a topic you probably put questions in the search engine. This is not the way to go. If you are researching you need to use key-words. To do this you can think of you topic. Lets say where was JFK assassinated. You could type words in such as, "John F Kennedy" and "assassination". If you were to type these words in a search engine, you are more than likely to get your answer.
What are MLA Citations?
MLA citations are the Modern Language Association. This is acknowledgment for research sources. The first way you can do it is by doing in-text citations. You can do this when you write your paper that when you include a quote. This is an example of in text citations. "Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning." (Albert Einstein) That is how to do in text citations. Finally for MLA, a MLA works cited page. This is a separate paper or document in which you must type and/or write all of the sources used in the paper. You can do this by citing websites then copy and pasting it into your MLA works cited page.
How to Gather Relevant info from Hard Copy or Digitally.
To gather relevant info from a hard copy you can take a highlighter and a credible source of info and you can highlight the information that you want to use.
These are some websites that you can use find credible information.
- https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
- http://www.timeforkids.com/
- http://www.ducksters.com/biography/
- http://www.mymcpl.org/online-information/homework-help
- http://search.ebscohost.com
These are all credible sources.