HON 296a: Academic Research

For this week, please locate one useful specialized information resource for your discipline, one that doesn't quite fall under any of the categories of information we've worked with in the blog assignments. Identify clearly what the resource is, describe it in detail, tell us how you found it, and explain how it is or might be useful for your research topic.

By "specialized information resource" I just mean a book, database, website, or document that contains a kind of information that we haven't really gone over in class, a kind of information that's specific to your discipline or topic. Patrick, for instance, has been using SciFinder Scholar, which lets you find chemical structures.

Here are some examples of specialized information:

• Primary sources: manuscripts and archival records, also known as "special collections"


• Genealogical / biographical sources


• Laws and legal sources


• Government documents


• Pre-prints


• Theses and dissertations


• Financial information


• Technical reports


• Images


• Maps and atlases


• Data collections: geospatial, numeric, genomics


• Patents and trademarks


• Standards

One very good place to find specific resources for these kinds of information is in the chapters of Stebbins's Student Guide to Research in the Digital Age that we haven't read. Other good places to start are the Search the Collection page and the Browse Subjects page of the NCSU Libraries' website. Sometimes it's fun as well as useful to see "even more" from Google. Or, since people are ultimately the best sources of information (and in fact people are ultimately the ONLY sources of information), you might ask your expert, a professor, or a librarian for your discipline to suggest a resource.

Then, as usual, reflect on this assignment and on your research in general. Now might be a good time to ask for help on anything, anything at all.

Here are the presentation dates folks signed up for today. Please use the comments to this post to work out who'll take that fifth slot on 4/16! Otherwise, I'll move someone from 4/23 to 4/16 by fiat.

Monday, 4/16

• Joseph Barton


• Maggie Hennessy


• Genevieve Pike


• Diana Tysinger

Wednesday, 4/18

• Jeremy Bartucca


• Nicolette Harris


• Amber Joyner


• Tria Metzler


• Amy Stepp

Monday, 4/23

• Myra Fulp


• Adam Nock


• Chris Padgett


• Patrick Proctor


• Dylan Selinger


• Meagan Stewart

Due Friday, May 4 (11:59pm) by e-mail to amanda_french@ncsu.edu

30% of overall grade

Goal

Pose and answer a significant academic research question.

Instructions

Write a report that summarizes the sources you consulted and states an answer to your research question based on those sources.

The research question should be a significant and interesting question to researchers in a particular academic field.

The report should be clear, focused, and organized, and it should state a definite answer to the research question. If any aspects of the answer are uncertain, however, the report should also acknowledge this. The report may speculate on how future research could best answer the research question. The report should be understandable to others in the same field or with similar interests.

The report should be approximately 2-5 pages long, typed, double-spaced, and with pages numbered, and should be e-mailed to the instructor in MS Word, WordPerfect, PDF, or plain text. It should clearly cite all sources consulted in a citation style that is appropriate for your field. It should also include a bibliography of the sources cited, and, if appropriate, the sources consulted but not cited. The report should be free of spelling, punctuation, grammar, and style errors.

Due in class on Monday, April 16; Wednesday, April 18; or Monday, April 23

10% of overall grade

Goal

To summarize and clearly communicate what you have learned about doing research in your discipline.

Instructions

Carefully prepare a 10- to 15-minute oral presentation to the class on what you learned over the course of the semester about doing research in your discipline.

Criteria for Grading

The presentation should be well prepared, clear, succinct, and enlightening for the listener. Your research question and your answer to it should be briefly summarized in terms that all listeners can understand.

The presentation should indicate that the student has thought deeply about the process of doing academic research, can identify some of the major challenges of doing academic research, and has reached significant conclusions about the best way to do academic research in a particular discipline.

The presenter should seem confident in giving the presentation, and the presentation should not go over time.

This week, please use a single search string related to your research topic and plug it into Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Dogpile, and Vivisimo. List the three (3) websites that most commonly appear in the top results for each of those searches. Visit each website and assess the quality of the information using the criteria given on the class handout for Monday: Is the website created by an authoritative, credentialed source? Does it seem objective, or else make its bias clear? Is it current? Does the website give sources so that you can confirm its information?

Then, describe some of the differences and similarities you saw in the results. Which result list seemed to put the best information highest in the rankings? Which result list led you to potentially useful new websites? Did you discover new keywords from these searches? What kinds of information are on the open web? Is it useful information for your research?

You might also want to visit these sites and do some exploration:

• NCSU Guide to Websearching -- evaluation criteria, search string formation, and links to web searching tools


• Librarian's Internet Index -- filtered and categorized index of websites


• Grokker -- allows you to see results visually


• Thumbshots Ranking -- allows you to compare search strings in one search engine or to compare results from different search engines


• Complete Planet -- index of "deep web" databases available on the open web


• Technorati -- blog search engine

Also mentioned in class: RefGrab-it, a downloadable plug-in which allows you to keep track of websites using RefWorks.

The blog assignment for this week isn't related to what we've been studying this past week, as it usually is, but you should be able to do it fairly easily anyway, and I hope you'll find it useful and interesting. E-mail me if you have trouble.

This week, please give as much information as you can about what seems to be the most important peer-reviewed journal for your research question. (Please don't do either Science or Nature: those journals are very important, but they cover many disciplines.) List at least the following:

1. The full title of the journal


2. The name of the scholarly association that puts out the journal


3. The name or names of the chief editors of the journal (up to 3)


4. The year the journal was first published


5. How often it comes out (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.)


6. What years are available online through the NCSU Libraries databases


7. What years are available in print in the NCSU Libraries stacks


8. The name of the company that publishes the journal


9. The cost for an individual to subscribe to the journal (assume that the individual wants to get the whole journal both in print and online)


10. The cost for a library or institution to subscribe to the journal (assume that the library wants to get the whole journal both in print and online)

Most of that information should be available in the NCSU Libraries Catalog (remember you can limit by "Journal, Magazine or Serial" using the left-hand links) or on the journal's website. If it isn't, then get a bound, printed copy of the journal and look inside the cover.

11. In addition, do the following: Look up your journal title in either Journal Citation Reports: Science Edition or Journal Citation Reports: Social Science Edition. (Unfortunately, we don't subscribe to the Humanities Edition.) Give both the Total Cites and the Impact Factor for that journal for 2005.

Roughly speaking, the higher your journal's "impact factor" is, the more important the journal is. Just as an author who is frequently cited by others is probably an important author, a journal that is frequently cited in other journals is probably an important journal.

Finally, as usual, tell us how your research in general is going, and reflect on this particular assignment. For instance, you might browse through the journals in your field in Journal Citation Reports and compare the journal you chose to look up with other journals -- how does it stack up? How many articles have you found from that journal? Would you ever consider subscribing to it yourself? Does the journal's mission statement identify a particular method or approach, and is that method or approach consistent with what you think is the best way to address your research question? Did you find out anything about the journal that surprised you?

Utopian and Dystopian visions of the technology-drenched future (plus one of the technology-drenched medieval past). I've added a couple here that we didn't watch in class, and I've included some links to brief online articles about the videos we did watch.

The first three, which we watched in class, deal particularly with the issue of replacing traditional information authorities (the Encyclopedia Britannica, the New York Times, the library as the organizer of knowledge) with "the wisdom of crowds".

• Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Movie -- Programmer, blogger, and journalist Jon Udell's screencast of an evolving Wikipedia article. Also see learning technologist Michael Feldstein's comments on what to emphasize when showing this video to professors.


• The Machine is Us/ing Us -- Professor Michael Wesch's take on the cultural anthropology of the Web; Inside Higher Ed calls it "A Lesson in Viral Video".


• EPIC 2014 -- Bloggers and journalists Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson's dystopian vision of the death of the New York Times and its replacement by socially-authored news distributed via technology. They tell the story behind the video on a trade website for journalists.


• ACLU - Pizza -- The American Civil Liberties Union's comic vision of what it might be like to order a pizza if private information were not protected.


• Introducing the Book -- English-subtitled Norwegian comedy sketch that satirizes either computers or computer users, I'm not quite sure which.

Who is doing the work on your research topic? Give the names of at least three (3) of the most important scholars who are publishing work on your topic other than the expert you interviewed. You might choose authors of articles you've found, authors of works you've seen cited, or names your expert mentioned.

Look up each person using a web search engine (e.g., Google) and/or a biographical dictionary such as Who's Who in Science and Engineering. For each person, give their place of employment, exact job title, exact field of study, and any other professional / biographical facts that are interesting to you. Also, plug the person's name into the author field of Google Scholar's Advanced Search; give the article and journal or book title, date, and number of citations of the person's most-cited work. (Google Scholar is much easier to use for this purpose than Web of Science, though it's probably less accurate. You can try to use Web of Science's "Author Finder" if you like, or you can use a different database if it has a citation-tracking feature.)

As usual, please describe exactly what you did and reflect on what you found out. For instance: Do any of these researchers know or cite one another? How long have they been doing this research? Does finding out about the people behind the publications help you understand their writing better? Can you imagine e-mailing or calling this person or speaking to them at a conference? If so, what would you ask them or say to them?

NOTE: COMMENTS ARE NOW TURNED BACK ON. -- Monday, March 12, 2007

For Monday, 3/12, please use the "Cited Ref Search" in Web of Science to create a "citation tree" with three "branches." See instructions below.

Also, as usual, reflect on the current state of your research in general and on this assignment in particular. What stands out for you? What's surprising or interesting about your "tree"? What picture of scholarly knowledge do you get? Did you find any new useful sources? Are you beginning to recognize authors or journals? Did you play with any of the other Web of Science analytical features, and if so, what did you find?

Instructions

1. Pick an important article (or book) citation from your research and plug it into the Cited Ref Search.


2. Go as far forward and backward in one "branch" from that citation as you can. For this assignment, you must pick hyperlinked, frequently cited citations if you can -- preferably ones that interest you.


3. Pick a citation from the first "branch" and follow it as far forward and backward as you can in a different direction.


4. Pick a citation from the second branch and follow it as far forward and backward as you can in a different direction.


5. List the citations in three separate branches, clearly labeled. Within each branch, put the citations in chronological order from newest to oldest. Put two asterisks next to the three "stem" citations.


6. Use exactly the following citation style: First Author's Last Name, "Title of article," JOURNAL OR BOOK TITLE, Year.
   

Example

BRANCH 1

Bartley, "Imagining the future in the 'Awakening,' " COLLEGE ENGLISH, 2000.

LeBlanc, "The metaphorical lesbian: Edna Pontellier in the 'Awakening,' " TULSA STUDIES IN WOMEN'S LITERATURE, 1996.

Seidel, "Art is an unnatural act: Mademoiselle Reisz in the 'Awakening,' " MISSISSIPPI QUARTERLY, 1993.

**Ellmann, OSCAR WILDE, 1987.

BRANCH 2

**Bartley, "Imagining the future in the 'Awakening,' " COLLEGE ENGLISH, 2000.

Buell, "In pursuit of ethics -- Introduction (Ethics and Literary Studies)," PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, 1999.

Derrida, "Adieu + The funeral oration for Emmanuel Levinas on December 28 1995," CRITICAL INQUIRY, 1995.

Blanchot, ENTRETIEN INFINI, 1969.

BRANCH 3

Cook, "Geographies of food: following," PROGRESS IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, 2006.

Hughes, "Geographies of exchange and circulation: transnational trade and governance," PROGRESS IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, 2006.

Hughes, "Geographies of exchange and circulation: alternative trading spaces," PROGRESS IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, 2005.

Bryant RL, "Consuming narratives: the political ecology of 'alternative' consumption," TRANSACTIONS OF THE INSTITUTE OF BRITISH GEOGRAPHERS, 2004.

Popke, "Poststructuralist ethics: subjectivity, responsibility and the space of community," PROGRESS IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, 2003.

Sanders, "Reading lessons (Ethics, politics, literary studies)," DIACRITICS: A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM, 1999.

**Buell, "In pursuit of ethics -- Introduction (Ethics and Literary Studies)," PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, 1999.

Nealon, "The ethics of dialogue: Bakhtin and Levinas," COLLEGE ENGLISH, 1997.

Hale, "Bakhtin in African-American literary theory," ELH: ENGLISH LITERARY HISTORY, 1994.

Bruce, "W.E.B. Dubois and the idea of double consciousness," AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1992.

Holt, "The political uses of alienation - W.E.B. Dubois on politics, race, and culture, 1903-1940," AMERICAN QUARTERLY, 1990.

Appiah, RACE, WRITING, AND DIFFERENCE, 1986.

Please do three things for Monday, 2/26:

1. Bring a printed copy of an article relevant to your research to class -- we will be working on evaluating articles, so you'll want to work on one that's relevant to you.


2. Bring the name of the expert you will interview for the expert interview assignment to class, plus your list of questions. You might choose one of your professors, or you might choose the author of a book or article you've found. The web is great for finding contact information, but if you can't find it on the web, then look for a directory of experts in your discipline in the NCSU catalog. Directories are a type of reference work we didn't go over, but they can be very useful.


3. Do this week's blog assignment.

List potentially important keywords and phrases for finding information about your topic in proprietary scholarly databases. Be sure to include synonyms, broader terms, and narrower terms. You can use the terms you generated for class and recorded on your worksheet.

As usual, reflect on the process: Which of these keywords are most useful? Which need truncating? Which need quotation marks around them? Also, how is your research going in general?

Expert Interview

Due March 19

20% of overall grade

Goal

Learn and reflect on how an expert researcher in your field finds, retrieves, analyzes, and shares information.

Instructions

Identify an expert researcher in a field that interests you--most likely a field related to your research question, major, and/or Capstone Project. Contact this researcher and make an appointment to interview him or her over the phone or in person (not by email). Prepare a list of 10-15 questions to ask the researcher designed to find out how that expert does research and communicates with other researchers. Conduct the interview, then write a report with the following three parts:

1. Introduction of the expert: What are this expert's qualifications? Why did you choose this person to interview? (1-2 paragraphs)


2. List of questions you asked and the answers the expert gave: Draw up the list of questions beforehand, and make sure to take good notes on the expert's answers. (1-2 pages)


3. General conclusions drawn from your interview with the expert: What did you learn from meeting with the expert? Was anything surprising? Do you think this expert might be unaware of resources or methods that you've learned about in this class? What factors might have affected this particular researcher's habits of research and communication? What other observations do you have? (1-2 pages)

Come to class on March 19th prepared to discuss your findings.

Possible Interview Questions

1. What are your main sources of information?


2. How do you decide whether to use a source of information?


3. How has your information-seeking process changed over the years?


4. Do you get most of your information from printed or electronic sources?


5. How useful do you find the following sources of information? (Cite examples.)


6. Do you think your information-seeking methods are typical of other researchers in your field?


7. Is there anything that prevents you from getting the best information that you can?


8. I?m considering doing a research project on [topic]. Do you have any advice for me about how to go about retrieving and analyzing information on that topic?


9. What are your main methods of communicating with other researchers?


10. Do you have any thoughts about the process of communicating with other researchers?

I forgot to post the assignment last week! Mea culpa. Please do contribute this week's assignment by class time on Wednesday February 21. It's exacty what we've been doing, anyway.

Please post here everything you listed on your Database Exploration worksheet for the database you explored. Also, as usual, reflect on this particular research exercise, and on your research process in general. Be sure to read everyone else's database reports to see if their databases might be useful for you.

I posted the third blog assignment a bit late this week (on Saturday at noon), and the blogs were apparently down yesterday and possibly this morning, as well. You may therefore have until the end of the day (11:59pm) to post your assignment -- everything seems to be working now.

Use WorldCat, Open WorldCat, and/or the NCSU Libraries Catalog to find three (3) books (NOT reference books) that will be helpful for your topic. You might choose a book written by a single author (a "monograph"), or a book of papers delivered at a scholarly conference (a "conference proceeding"), or a book of essays and articles.

Describe exactly how you found these sources, explain why you think they are the best sources available to you, and reflect on your research process so far.

NOTE: Be sure to leave TWO lines between paragraphs in your comment to make paragraphs clearer.