Week 12

For my project, I have focused on how-to conduct research for papers and projects in what would be considered the “scholarly” and correct way. While doing my research for this project, I have come across a few things that I thought were either interesting or things that I just had previously been oblivious to.

Wikipedia has always been my go to website in order to collect background information for a topic or even just somewhere to read about things that are of interest to me. But unfortunately for me, my teachers have always disallowed the use of Wikipedia as a credible source in papers or projects. I understood that they didn’t want it used because simply anyone could get on there and post a bunch of nonsense that could be inaccurate, so I just thought nothing else of it and didn’t even use the site at all for research. After researching for this project, I found out that Wikipedia could be used almost like a database for a topic. Since the contributors cite their sources usually at the bottom using footnotes, those footnotes could just be used as the source instead of the Wikipedia article. Going forward, this useful piece of advice I found from my research will come in really handy when teachers assign papers that need scholarly sources.

Like most teenagers and college students, I am frequently on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to follow friends and interact with others, but I did not realize that these sites could actually be cited in a research paper. I had thought that all those sites would fall in the Wikipedia category, since it is always active and constantly changing, but it’s actually different since one person is all that has access to a specific account and not just an open-ended platform like Wikipedia. These sites may not be much of a use in historical aspects, but in events that are current, it could be an important aspect that could be added to a paper. Personally, I think I will find it very useful as my college career continues on, as more and more people get on social media sites and treat them almost like personal press releases.

While I have been conducting my research for our class project, I have learned several new things that could be useful in the future as I conduct my own academic research. While I have learned some now, I will probably continue to gain more pointers before I finish the project.