Working with Sources: A Comprehensive Guide
Working with sources is an essential skill for academic success. It involves finding relevant sources, evaluating their credibility, and integrating them into your work with proper referencing. In this article, we will explore the importance of working with sources, how to find and evaluate sources, and how to 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:
- FunctionExample sentenceSignal words and phrases
- Neutral: You present the author’s position neutrally, without any special emphasis.
- Supportive: A position is taken in agreement with what came before.
- Argumentative: A position is taken for or against something, with the implication that the debate is ongoing.
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.
- Paraphrasing: This means putting another person’s ideas into your own words.
- Summarizing: This means giving an overview of the essential points of a source.
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:
- Citation Generator: Automatically generate accurate references and in-text citations using Scribbr’s APA Citation Generator, MLA Citation Generator, Harvard Referencing Generator, and Chicago Citation Generator.
- Plagiarism Checker: Detect plagiarism in your paper using the most accurate Scribbr plagiarism software available to students.
- AI Proofreader: Upload and improve unlimited documents and earn higher grades on your assignments.
- Paraphrasing tool: Avoid accidental plagiarism and make your text sound better.
- Grammar checker: Eliminate pesky spelling and grammar mistakes.
- Summarizer: Read more in less time. Distill lengthy and complex texts down to their key points.
- AI detector: Find out if your text was written with ChatGPT or any other AI writing tool.
- Proofreading services: Have a human editor improve your writing.
- Citation checker: Check your work for citation errors and missing citations.
- Knowledge Base: Explore hundreds of articles, bite-sized videos, time-saving templates, and handy checklists that guide you through the process of research, writing, and citation.