Ten Hacks to Raise Your Research Paper Grade

1. What's Your question?
The most important step you make is defining what you are trying to find out, or in other words what question will your research answer. This is called Task Definition. An example of poor Task Definition would be "I need some information on drugs". The question needs to be more specific to focus your research and keep it manageable. An example of good Task Definition would be "What are the health risks of steroid use by high school athletes?" It is clear what question you are going to answer and this will help make it clear what sources you need to get. Next take the main concepts of your question and use them to make a list of keywords for your searches.

1. health risks or: side effects, dangers, complications, consequences
2. steroids or: performance enhancing drugs, illegal drugs, banned substances
3. high school athletes or: amateur athletes, young athletes, school sports, football, basketball
   

2. Favorite Article,
Once you find some sources, you can take the best source and search the library catalog, article databases and Google Scholar for other sources by the same author. You can also look at the bibliography or sources cited and use some of the sources the author used.

3. Do not cite encyclopedias,
As Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia said "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia,". Encyclopedias are useful as a general guide to familiarize yourself with a topic but it is not a research destination. You can familiarize yourself with anew topic, and use the bibliography and look for other sources by the article's author but do not use it as a source. If you do use an encyclopedia use the Encyclopedia Brittanica on Steen library's web site. It is a more authoritative source than Wikipedia which has at least a 42% error rate. To get an idea of the problems Wikipedia is facing go to their "Community Portal and look at their Help section. It lists thousands of errors, corrections and changes that Wikepedia community itself knows needs to be addressed.

5. Specialized Encyclopedias,
Sometimes you can use a specialized encyclopedia as a source. Some examples would be the Encyclopedia of New Media: An Essential Reference to Communication and Technology, or Environment Encyclopedia and Directory 2007, these are sometimes the best and most efficient sources for Specialized information.

6. Gov. Docs.,
Government Documents are a goldmine of information. Unfortunately finding anything in them and then accessing them can be as hard as mining for gold. However, if you locate a government document in the library catalog that is relevant, then ask a librarian to help you locate the document. Quote a piece of it in your paper and cite it correctly. You will have to use the style manual to find out how. Online citation web sites for the most part do not cover such esoteric sources. A correctly cited quote from a piece of government microfiche makes any bibliography look good. It also makes the researcher appear to have left no stone unturned.

7. Primary Sources, including interviews, personal conversations, correspondence and emails,
Primary sources are an excellent way to improve your bibliography and your grade. It is getting the information straight from the horse's mouth. Often we think of primary sources as old documents or diaries in the archives, but depending on your topic many things can be considered a primary source. If you are writing about the Great Depression or WWII and you talk with an older relative about their experiences and memories during those events, that conversation is a primary source. If you quote and then cite the conversation correctly, it shows initiative and attention to detail. If you have an email or snail mail correspondence with a witness or participant in an event, the originator of an idea, or the author of the book you are reviewing, those are also considered primary sources. However, you will have to check your style manual and cite it correctly or you will loose all your brownie points.

8. Spell Check Grammar Check, even if you have to cut and paste from different program,
Use the spell checker and grammar checker in Word or some other program. There is no point in losing points for something the computer can do for you. If these checkers are not turned on you can usually activate them with an option under the Tools menu.

9. Let your Mac, or MS Word or Adobe PDF read your paper to you,
Avoid typos and grammatical mistakes by listening to your writing reported in Lifehacker Listen to your writing. That's right you can get your computer to read your paper back to you. This is extremely helpful because after you have proofread a paper several times you start seeing things that aren't there. Often you mind will fill in a word that you meant to include but you never typed. It also helps to identify awkward phrases and wording. The links above can show how it is done.

10. Visit the AARC Writing Desk
Finally visit the AARC writing desk. You can always use a fresh set of eyes to look over your paper. Especially if those eyes have a brain behind them that got an "A" in English. The desk is free, you don't need an appointment, and all it can do is improve your grade. Take the time, make the time, and take your draft to the writing desk.

Putting off doing the work till the night before or even a couple of days before the deadline does not leave much of a chance of any of these suggestions making a difference. Your best options in that case are to ask for more time, ask a librarian for help, and visit the AARC desk. Obviously there is more to writing a research paper than these ten hacks. However, these hacks can improve your grade if you have not neglected the other work.

They day the Nacogdoches Rollergirls Made Hisory

I know this is off topic but it is just too awesome too pass up. The Rollerderby bout was awesome last night, maybe even turbo cool. Madame Furrie from the Iron Maidens in the NRG has a great post with some good comments at her blog "Strange Fruit" I'll quote from her blog because she is as great a writer as she is a skater.

But back to NRG. The Iron Maidens and the Brick Street Brawlers hit the rink raring to go. We basically skated as fast as we could and hit harder than we ever had before for the first five minutes. And then - exhaustion. .... Miss Glad Ass suffered a major injury in the first five minutes and was out for the rest of the bout. Today, we found out it was a broken collar bone.

... those last two minutes were brutal! Goody Nuff and Bad Apple were our last two jammers. The Maidens were ahead, but not by much, and the Brawlers weren't giving up without a fight. And what a fight it was! An all out kamikaze mission on quads and I'm surprised we didn't have more broken bones. But when the buzzer sounded and the smoke cleared, the final score was Brick Street Brawlers - 94; Iron Maidens - 107.

I am chalking last night up as a success, NRG's finest yet. And trust me - they are only going to keep getting better.

Love, Madame Furie

It was a blast we completely sold out of tickets

So what is the point with Wikipedia and Britannica?

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education Jimmy Wales "founder" of Wikipedia warned students about Wikipedia. He goes on to say "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia,".

When deciding to use Wikipedia or Britannica the first question is which can you get to? If I am at work at the library I will use Britannica. However if I am off campus and have to go through some kind of proxy verification or other hassle I will use Wikipedia. I would not use the free version of Britannica because of the excessive amount of advertising and the information provided is barely as much as you would find in a good biographical dictionary.

The problem is that this is not why I posted on Tuesday, December 5, 2006 The Tao of Searching: Wikipedia Britannica and missing the point. Or why even the Journal Nature missed the point. The point is: Encyclopedias are not a research destination. Encyclopedias are a starting point or a roadmap for research. Over the last few years web gurus have been using the term sticky (see Make Things Sticky) to describe a good web site. They don’t want users to just visit a page and then leave the site. They want them stay on the site. One problem with Wikipedia and Britannica is that they have great designers that adopted this philosophy. They too offer up more and more choices and links to keep the user on the site. The problem is when you are doing research you do not want to get stuck in an encyclopedia.

At Cornell University they put together a brief introduction on how to do research called “The Seven Steps of the Research Process”. Step two is: Look up your keywords in the indexes to subject encyclopedias. Read articles in these encyclopedias to set the context for your research. Note any relevant items in the bibliographies at the end of the encyclopedia articles.

This is how to use encyclopedias. If you will notice they specifically mentioned “subject encyclopedias”. Subject encyclopedias focus on one discipline or area of knowledge and therefore usually will cover a topic to a greater depth than a regular encyclopedia. It is also likely to be more authoritative in that particular field than a general encyclopedia. The quick and dirty way to find them at the library, is to go to the catalog and do a keyword search for “encyclopedia psychology” (or geology, religion or whatever your topic is). Then look for books with the word encyclopedia and your subject in the title Once you have a couple of call numbers, go to that section of the library and look at the encyclopedias you picked, also look at the books nearby. They will be on the same topic and there may be another book that will work better for you. Or you could just ASK A LIBRARIAN.

If you are on the web you can go to Google and type in “encyclopedia philosophy” (or whatever your topic is) and you should get a lot of results. When looking at the results you will want to look at the URL to see if it is a .com .org or an .edu site. A .com will probably be trying to sell you something. You will also want to read the description. Then visit a few of the sites and see which ones will work best for you. Better yet would be to go to The Open Directory Project (ODP) and type in encyclopedia and look at their collection. Or you could just ASK A LIBRARIAN.

Ultimately the only books that people claim inerrant are the Qur'an, Bible, and The Book of Mormon. Therefore, we may assume that everything else may have some errors and problems. Britannica has fewer errors by a wide margin. It is written and edited to professional academic standards, and it has years of experience in publishing encyclopedias. Unfortunately only a small portion is free, unless you have access through an institution like a library. This may involve proxy access or passwords or IP verification that may not work so well at your location or with your device. Of course you can buy access but an experienced researcher can probably find the equivalent amount and quality of information they need using the web, maybe even through Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is accessible from almost any type of web access device. It is free and is easy to use, and you can get sucked into editing entries on some of your favorite topics. It is surprising how enjoyable it is to contribute to or edit Wikipedia. On the downside any idiot like me can contribute or edit Wikipedia. It does have an unacceptable number of errors to be considered authoritative or equivalent to Britannica.

Despite the characteristics described here, the point again is that “the encyclopedia is not a research destination. Encyclopedias are a starting point or a roadmap for research.” It’s the things you discover along the way, the sense of accomplishment for finishing an assignment, or mastering a new area of knowledge, that is the destination.

Next maybe we will talk about how to pick out a book and then maybe how to evaluate information on web sites.

R Philip Reynolds

A Little More Wikipedia before we discuss research uses

From Shout Blog

Mediocre Top Ten List

I was reading an interesting bit in Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail about how top 10 lists of things that are spread thinly across multiple categories tend to be banal. His primary example is that of top 10 lists of artists from all genres. ... such a list–it’s simply a jumble of popular artists....

... I was reminded of a top 10 contest two my friends and I played ... in college. We had decided to create a list of the best songs of all time. We would each come up with 10 songs that we felt would make the list, and we would go down the line and eliminate songs from each others’ lists until we only had 10 left–presumably, the 10 best.

We were really excited, as if the final list would be a miracle list straight from the heavens.

We quickly went to the task of whittling down the 3 lists. One person would exclaim, “No way that song would ever be on my list. That’s out!” And thus, this went on ....

But, as the number of songs dwindled, we began to notice something. .... It started to look like a Billboard music chart.

We were horrified. .... Our tastes are eclectic and niche. The last thing we wanted was a final list that mirrored the pop charts.

The real problem underlying it all was that our tastes were different enough to cause a “graying” of the final list. Combining our tastes into one list resulted in a bland popular songs list, without any artists that delved deeply into a genre...."

I think this can be related to what Alexis De Tocqueville referred to as "The tyranny of the majority." In chpts. 15 and 16 "Democracy in America." This rule would also come into effect in Wikipedia where the majority opinion as opposed to objective research must ultimately rule. However, eventually it became the tyranny of the unemployed and teenagers with a lot of time on their hands, who could follow entries and change them immediately after someone made a correction. One of the founders Sanders describes things this way. "It's a relatively few, difficult to deal with people that cause the problems, and once a quorum of such people were at work on the Wikipedia system," . In chpt. 16 De Tocqueville states "When the central government which represents that majority has issued a decree, it must entrust the execution of its will to agents over whom it frequently has no control and whom it cannot perpetually direct. The townships, municipal bodies, and counties form so many concealed breakwaters, which check or part the tide of popular determination." Unfortunately in Wikipedia these checks come in the form of uninformed individuals, special interest groups, or incompetents. Sanders comments on the poor writing exhibited in some of the articles. "It's really that the skills to marshal an argument, and represent the facts correctly are all skills encouraged by a solid liberal arts education. It's a problem associated more with a lack of training in the liberal arts."

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education Jimmy Wales "founder" of Wikipedia warned students not to refer to Wikipedia, he goes on to say "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia,"

Ultimately web sites reflect the organization or entity that builds them. Wikipedia represents a wide swath of western democracy or the current western civilization's "hive mind" clearly and effectively. As such it is more a symptom of our culture especially the United States for the ages 14 - 44, than a simple problem of a few people writing some inaccurate information. That is why the debate is so heated. An indictment on Wikipedia is ultimately an indictment of "We the People" and an indictment on the entire Web 2.0 concept and the "hive mind". Unfortunately the "People" that choose to participate in Wikipedia appear to often be ill informed, biased and able to shout louder (post more often) than the more informed and moderate voices in our society, or in the Wikipedia project.

R Philip Reynolds

The greatest crisis facing us...

Hi, everyone :),

I am going to postpone the second half of the encyclopedia thing for a groundbreaking speech I read.

"The greatest crisis facing us is not Russia, not the Atom Bomb, not corruption in government, not encroaching hunger, nor the morals of the young. It is a crisis in the organization and accessibility of human knowledge. We own an enormous "encyclopedia" - which isn't even arranged alphabetically. Our "file cards" are spilled on the floor, nor were they ever in order. The answers we want mat be buried somewhere in the heap, but it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place them side by side and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need.
Call it the crisis of the Librarian.
We need a new "specialist" who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. (n) We need a new science to be a perfect secretary to all other sciences."

Who wrote this? David Lynch? Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin?
Nope

Robert A Heinlein in 1950 in a piece originally called "Where To?". In this piece Heinlein makes several predictions or extrapolations about the future. It was repeated as "Pandora's Box" in the book The Worlds of Robert A Heinlein published by Ace Books, New York in 1962. In the 1962 version after twelve years of thought and history had gone by he amended some of his predictions but this one remained the same. Then in 1980 it was again reprinted by Ace Books in Expanded Universe Robert A. Heinlein as "Where To?" (pp 317-371). He again had the opportunity after thirty years of reflection and history to revise his statements. Many of them were changed but this one was not. In his list of the forerunners of these "synthesists" that he makes in 1965 he mentions several job titles but does not include librarian as one of them.

In Snow Crash by Neal Stevenson, Bantam Books Paperback 1993 (p107) we read:

"The Librarian daemon looks like a pleasant, fiftyish,
silverhaired, bearded man with bright blue eyes, wearing
a V-neck sweater over a work shirt, with a coarsely
woven, tweedy-looking wool tie. The tie is loosened,
the sleeves pushed up. Even though he’s just a piece
of software, he has reason to be cheerful; he can move
through the nearly infinite stacks of information in the
Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a
vast web of cross references"

The "librarian is a piece of software that programs itself.
In her article I Librarian Hilda Kruger described "Having an agent methodically crawling the Web, gathering the information you’ve specified, is a bit like having a full-time reference librarian residing in your PC."
(INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | SEPTEMBER 2005 p124).
She talks about these Intelligent Software Agents (ISA) burrowing into our lives but we are way beyond that I have two different types of agents downloaded as add ons to my FireFox browser.

One is "Clearforest Gnosis" http://sws.clearforest.com/Blog/?page_id=32 its function is to:

ClearForest Gnosis uses advanced natural language processing techniques and ClearForests’s Semantic Web Service (SWS) to
extract meaning from the content of any web page.

With a single click, Gnosis will identify the people, companies, organizations, geographies and products on the page you are viewing. Using the built-in navigation sidebar you can gain immediate understanding of the page’s contents.

The other is "read4me" XUL http://read4me.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

"Client front end to read4me server. read4me is a Python feed-reading web service. It reads RSS or atom feeds and, using Bayesian statistics, reports how much you will like the articles. This project includes a server and a Firefox extension client."

Then I organize it all with Zotero

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources:

- Automatic capture of citation information from web pages

- Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages

- Flexible notetaking with autosave

- Fast, as-you-type search through your materials

- Playlist-like library organization, including saved searches (smart collections) and tags

- Platform for new forms of digital research that can be extended with other web tools and services

- Formatted citation export (style list to grow rapidly)"

In her abstract Kruger says "One of the main concerns of this paper is the continued relevance of information professionals as infomediaries in our future society." Maybe it has already gone from continued relevance to no relevance? Out of all of these books and articles being written there is a way forward offered in "Snow Crash" The Librarian states:

"I was not coded by a professional hacker, per se, but by a researcher at the Library of Congress who taught himself how to code. He devoted himself to sifting through vast amounts of irrelevant detail in order to find significant gems of information."

The hero of the story "Hiro Protaganist" replies "So he was kind of a meta-librarian." Is this our path? most of these projects including the two browser add ons I described are either open source or accept help from others in their development. The whole point behind Web 2.0 and Opensource software and publishing, is group participation. Do we follow their lead? It appears that the direction our profession has been to try and impose upon the web and its users, meta-data and proprietary databases and it was the wrong direction. Maybe it is time for a radical new direction. Maybe it is time for meta-librarians as programmers? If we can't take the lead in these new projects maybe we can at least make a valuable contribution.

Lets talk it over and I will make a list of new job duties for the meta-librarian and get back to that encyclopedia mess.

R Philip Reynolds