Identifying the Best Sources of Information for Your Research Paper

Finding suitable sources of information is probably the most time-consuming and downright difficult part of working on any research paper, no matter what discipline you study. You not only have to find data, which is tricky enough, but also find out if this information can be trusted, relevant, and suitable for your research. Many students fail at exactly this stage, either because they fail to find enough information or because they put too much trust in the sources that do not deserve it. In this article, we will tell you what you can do to find the best possible sources for any research paper, on any subject.

Finding the Sources for Your Paper

Your best bet is to ask your supervisor – s/he will recommend to you a set of publications you can start out with. Then look through their bibliographies for relevant sources of information and the names that appear in more than one literature list – these are going to be your main authorities.

Go to your college library and ask a librarian for help – it is their job, after all. If your library has dedicated librarians working with your field of study, it is even better – they will be able to give you more specific advice.

Do not forget about online databases and academic search engines like Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, and EBSCO – they not only contain relevant information about the latest scholarly publications but also can help you limit your search for the papers you can more or less trust, unlike what you find on the Internet in general.

Do not shy away from using Wikipedia – not for the information in the articles themselves, but for the lists of literature at the bottom of the page. They often contain links and references to top-notch books and articles on a variety of topics.

Evaluating the Quality of Your Sources

Now that you have gathered a fair number of sources, you can start sifting through them, as research is where quality trumps quantity every time. There are many approaches to evaluating information sources, but all of them more or less boil down to checking them for:

❏    Purpose. Why was the publication created? For whom is it written? What is its goal? A publication aimed at the general public that clearly promotes a specific point of view should be treated differently from a research paper aimed at a scholastic audience with the purpose of informing them about an experiment;

• Authority. Who is the author? Does s/he have the necessary credentials to talk about the subject matter? Does s/he have any experience with the topic (other publications on related subjects)? Who is the publisher? Does it have a reputation for publishing high-quality content?
• Accuracy. Does the author provide sufficient evidence for his information? Did s/he do enough research? Does the source contain references to the sources supporting this information? Does it contain factual and statistical data? Does it contain original research?
• Currency. How old is the publication? Were there any significant breakthroughs in the research area since it was published? How dependent is your topic on the currency of the information?
• Objectivity. Does the author show clear signs of bias? Is s/he or the publisher known for promoting a specific point of view in face of contrary evidence? Is the source based on opinions or facts? Does the source promote an agenda or advertise something?

Other Features to Pay Attention to in a Source

One of the best ways to evaluate the quality of the source is to check the number of times it has been referred to in peer-reviewed papers – the higher the number of references, the more you can trust the material presented in it (although you still should carefully study it, because nobody is secured from mistakes).

Another thing you have to pay attention to is the h-index of the publication’s author. H-index is the number that determines both how authoritative and how active the author is in his/her field. It denotes the number of publications that have been cited at least the same number of times. I.e., an author with an h-index of 9 has at least 9 publications, that have been cited at least 9 times each.

Of course, if you start experiencing problems with writing a paper as early as on the stage of gathering information, you can always pay for research papers and buy them from a reliable writing service. Thus, you can get high-quality content without having to spend nearly as much time working on the topic. However, knowing how to look for sources can be useful even if you employ somebody else to write the actual paper – you can give the content you found to the writer to help him produce a better piece of writing.

 

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