A Comprehensive Guide to Working with Sources
Working with sources is an essential skill for academic success, and it involves finding, evaluating, and integrating sources into your work with proper referencing. In this article, we will explore the importance of working with sources, how to find relevant sources, evaluate their credibility, and integrate them into your work.
Finding Relevant Sources
Sources commonly used in academic writing include academic journals, scholarly books, websites, newspapers, and encyclopedias. There are three main places to look for such sources:
- Research databases: Databases can be general or subject-specific. To get started, check out this list of databases by academic discipline. Another good starting point is Google Scholar.
- Your institution’s library: Use your library’s database to narrow down your search using keywords to find relevant articles, books, and newspapers matching your topic.
- Other online resources: Consult popular online sources like websites, blogs, or Wikipedia to find background information. Be sure to carefully evaluate the credibility of those online sources.
Evaluating Sources
In academic writing, your sources should be credible, up to date, and relevant to your research topic. Useful approaches to evaluating sources include the CRAAP test and lateral reading.
- CRAAP test: CRAAP is an abbreviation that reminds you of a set of questions to ask yourself when evaluating information.
- Currency: Does the source reflect recent research?
- Relevance: Is the source related to your research topic?
- Authority: Is it a respected publication? Is the author an expert in their field?
- Accuracy: Does the source support its arguments and conclusions with evidence?
- Purpose: What is the author’s intention?
- Lateral reading: Lateral reading means comparing your source to other sources. This allows you to:
- Verify evidence
- Contextualize information
- Find potential weaknesses
Integrating Sources into Your Work
Once you have found information that you want to include in your paper, signal phrases can help you to introduce it. Here are a few examples:
- Function: You present the author’s position neutrally, without any special emphasis.
- Example sentence: According to recent research, food services are responsible for one-third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
- Signal words and phrases: According to, analyzes, asks, describes, discusses, explains, in the words of, notes, observes, points out, reports, writes
Following the signal phrase, you can choose to quote, paraphrase or summarize the source.
- Quoting: This means including the exact words of another source in your paper. The quoted text must be enclosed in quotation marks or (for longer quotes) presented as a block quote.
- Paraphrasing: This means putting another person’s ideas into your own words. It allows you to integrate sources more smoothly into your text, maintaining a consistent voice.
- Summarizing: This means giving an overview of the essential points of a source. Summaries should be much shorter than the original text.
Citing Sources
Whenever you quote, paraphrase, or summarize a source, you must include a citation crediting the original author. Citing your sources is important because it:
- Allows you to avoid plagiarism
- Establishes the credentials of your sources
- Backs up your arguments with evidence
- Allows your reader to verify the legitimacy of your conclusions
The most common citation styles are APA, MLA, and Chicago style. Each citation style has specific rules for formatting citations.
Tools and Resources
Scribbr offers tons of tools and resources to make working with sources easier and faster. Take a look at our top picks:
