HON 296a: Academic Research

It's always so difficult to get not just information, but information ABOUT information to the right people . . . it is in fact the case that you can ask for books (and maybe journals, too? I can't tell) to be delivered to DH Hill from other libraries, such as the Natural Resources Library and the Vet Med Library, through TripSaver. It's called "Campus Book Delivery."

On the other hand, they have rocking chairs in the Natural Resources Library. It's a nice place to visit. Even though once, several years ago, an eighteen-inch-long Egyptian Monitor Lizard was loose in the building for awhile.

Course evaluations are now online. (I for one am glad, although some people are worried about the same issues that always arise with moving from print to digital, such as protecting the privacy of the information.) Please visit ClassEval.ncsu.edu between Monday, April 16 (today) and Sunday, April 29. For help, e-mail ClassEval@help.ncsu.edu. Thanks.

In class, look up one of these "information scandals" on the web and/or in a database using these keywords. (You can change the keywords as you search.) Find the best source you can and post the full citation information (author, title, date, other info, link if possible), plus your original keywords, as a comment to this post.

• Stephen Glass and the New Republic
• Doris Kearns Goodwin and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys
• Stanley Pons, Martin Fleischmann, and cold fusion
• Alan Sokal and Social Text
• Woo-Suk Hwang and cloning
• Nicholson Baker and Double Fold
• Ellen Roche and Johns Hopkins University
• Antonio Arnaiz-Villena and Elsevier
• The CIA, the GPO, and Indonesia
• Jayme Sokolow and Eros and Modernization
• Dichloroacetate (DCA) and cancer
• SCIgen and the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics (WMSCI) 2005
• Martin Luther King and "Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman"
• Bryan Le Beau and commencement speech
• Hugh Trevor-Roper and the Hitler diaries

I have these further comments on plagiarism and patchwriting, important and therefore in bold.

• Copying someone's words is not always "wrong" in the sense of "immoral"; it depends on the context, the intent of the copier, and the viewpoint of the original author.


• In the academic context, there are (or should be) two kinds of plagiarism: deliberate plagiarism, which is wrong in the sense of "immoral," and patchwriting, which is wrong in the sense of "mistaken."


• Patchwriting is a mistake caused by being unwilling to use your own words. Unfortunately, sometimes it is also a mistake to use your own words: words that feel like "your own" are often too informal or too awkward for academic writing. It is also a mistake to quote too much.


• Commit those three mistakes in this order: 1) Use your own awkward words. 2) Quote too much. 3) Patchwrite, with full citation information.

Googling the first sentence of the Medium Blue article ("Many businesses recognize that search engines can bring volumes of highly targeted prospects to their website, typically at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing.") produces 468 results, of which Medium Blue is the second in the list. The results include the following:

• Selecting and Evaluating Keyphrases for Search Engine Marketing -- The top result, and the earliest version of either article I could find. From a newsletter put out by AddMe.com dated January 2003. Lists Scott Buresh as the author both at the top and the bottom of the page, and includes this paragraph with these links:

  "Scott Buresh is Co-founder and Principal of Medium Blue Internet Marketing. For monthly tips on how to get the most out of your internet presence, sign up for our Internet Marketing Newsletter."

  Meagan asked why companies do this; remember that if they can get you to sign up for the newsletter they can send you other promotional material by e-mail -- or sell your e-mail address.


• How to choose the right keywords for your web site. -- From a newsletter dated August 2003, this page cites Medium Blue and links to it at the bottom as follows: "Article by Scott Buresh."


• How to choose the right keywords for your site. in MaxLinks -- Full, exact text of the article, but with a different author and a different date: "Larry Potter, Sun Jul 9th, 2006." I'm sure there are many others among the 400+ web pages that list entirely different authors.

I plugged the sentence in to Google and told it not to look for "Buresh" (-Buresh) and got 459 results. Then I added the keyword "Buresh" (+Buresh) and got 54 results. I also searched for various years (2003, 2002, 2001, & 2000); the earliest example of the article I could find was that first Google result, which is dated January 2003. Searching on the last sentence of the article only brought up two results, both credited to Buresh. The first few sentences of the article were reproduced far, far more often than the later parts of the article.

Googling the first sentence of the Able Webs article ("Search engines are the vehicles that drive potential customers to your websites.") produced 508 results, with Able Webs sixth. The results include the following:

• Add Me.com #363 - Search Engine Keywords Selection -- Ta da! Presto! Open Sesame! The first result in Google for this sentence is from the SAME COMPANY NEWSLETTER that published the article we read on Medium Blue. The author is given as "Rajkumar," and the date is October 2005.

The same newsletter has published the same article twice, in other words. Literally in other words -- but not that other. Searching on the sentence plus "Rajkumar" produced only 4 results.

Most of the class thought that Able Webs plagiarized Medium Blue; I think that "the wisdom of crowds" has proven to be real wisdom yet again. I am confident that Scott Buresh was the one who actually wrote the article, the one that appeared on Medium Blue, way back in 2003. Of course, there might be other versions of the thing floating around that I haven't found yet! Feel free to research it yourself.

Also, Dylan's question led to an interesting experiment: in my version of MS Word, there's a feature called "Compare Documents" under Tools --> Track Changes --> Compare Documents. I made Word docs out of both sites, compared them, and lo and behold -- MS Word can't tell that one of them is plagiarized. It sees them as completely different from one another, even though the similarities are very obvious to all of us.

Below are two web pages with suspiciously similar language. Examine both, and answer the questions below.

• Able Webs -- Search Engine Keywords Selection
  
• Search Engine Phrases, Keywords, and Terms
  

1. Which one was plagiarized from the other?


2. How can you tell?


3. Is the plagiarism deliberate or accidental? In Howard's terms, is it plagiarism (deliberate) or is it patchwriting (accidental)?


4. Choose two sentences, one from each source, that are very similar. Underline the differences and circle the similarities.


5. In general, what are the differences between the two sites?


6. Is there any ethical difference between this example of plagiarism and deliberate plagiarism of a scholarly source? Explain.


7. Take the Conclusion paragraph from the "Medium Blue" site and rephrase it in your own words.

For Monday, please look at the following:

• The chapter on "Citing Sources, Avoiding Plagiarism, and Organizing References" in Stebbins's Student Guide to Research in the Digital Age


• The first 4 paragraphs (pp. 788-9) and the sections titled "A Proposed Policy on Plagiarism" and "Additional Advice for Students" (pp. 798-801) of Rebecca Howard's "Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty, from College English 57.7 (Nov 1995) 788-806.


• NCSU's Code of Student Conduct -- just sections 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11

Come to class prepared to discuss the following: How does Howard's proposed policy differ from NCSU's policy?

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?