What Sources to Use When
Ohio State University Libraries Teaching & Learning and Claire Nickerson
Sometimes students hate assignments that require sources to meet their research projects’ information needs. But if you didn’t use sources to meet those needs, you would have to make everything up yourself. Just think of the work! And then, would your audience believe you? So don’t lament that you need sources. They are a huge help, not an unnecessary bother, and you can learn to handle them.
A big way we can help is to let you know when to use which important categories of sources covered in Chapter 4 to meet your project’s information needs. And some of those needs are pretty choosey.
You complete your project by defining and meeting your information needs. Here are those needs:
- To learn more background information about your topic and research question.
- To develop your research question(s).
- To describe the situation surrounding your research question for your audience and explain why it’s important.
- To report what others have said about your question, including any different answers to your research question.
- To answer your research question(s).
- To convince your audience that your answer is correct or, at least, the most reasonable answer.
The verbs in the list of information needs above tell you exactly how you’ll use sources to carry out your research and create your final product: to learn, develop, describe, report, answer, and convince. But you won’t be doing any of that alone.
Your sources will be giving you information to do all that. They’ll also give you direct quotes (use quotes sparingly[1]) and information to summarize and paraphrase as you create your final product. In other words, your sources will support you every step of the way during your research project.
That’s true even when you find sources that disagree. Don’t ignore this—it happens often. Instead, address their differences within your report of what sources have said about your research question. That’s a good way to show your audience that you considered your research question from multiple perspectives. Showing different perspectives will actually strengthen your argument that your answer is correct or at least the most reasonable answer.
Tip:
For another way to think about the work your sources do, see the section on Roles of Research Sources.
From Information Needs to Final Products
Background information seldom appears directly in any final product. But meeting each of the other information needs will usually result in written sections of a research paper or essay. For example, in a paper, you usually include your research question, its context, what others have said about your topic, the answer you came up with, and why you think it is correct.
In college, your final product is often a paper, but for some assignments, you may have to create a different product, such as a video, infographic, or poster. For final products other than research papers and essays, you will still use sources to meet the same information needs. But, some of the work you do to meet those information needs may stay behind the scenes, especially for a shorter final product. In other words, you may not explicitly state the answer to each information need listed above in your final product.
Example Where you Can Address all Information Needs: Annotated Bibliography
Provided that you cite enough sources, an annotated bibliography can address all of the information needs listed above. You will have sources that provide background information, explain the context surrounding your research question, provide varying answers to your research question, and agree with or disagree with your preferred answer(s). In your annotations, you can explain why you think each answer is or is not reasonable, as well as how each source contributes to your overall discussion of the question. To read more about how we use sources, see Chapter 14. To read more about annotated bibliographies, see Chapter 15.
Example Where you Can’t Address all Information Needs: Poster
On a poster about your own original research, you aren’t likely to have room to describe the situation surrounding your research question and why the question is important. That same lack of space may also mean you do not report what others have said about your research question. (Maybe you’ll just add footnotes with no further explanation.) But that doesn’t mean you didn’t meet those information needs and others as your carried out your research. Unlike a research paper, essay, or journal article, the poster format in which you reported it just had less space.
For instance, to justify doing the research to yourself and your professor, you probably started by meeting the information need to describe the situation around your research question and why it is important. Your instructor may have had you turn in that justification. And to do research based on what has already been found out, you will have studied what others have already reported about your research question. You may also have had to do that in order to make your answer to your research question more correct and believable. All that is without having room on your poster to report that you met those needs. But all your decisions about the information that is on your poster will have been informed by meeting those information needs.
Here’s a helpful ebook about developing a research poster ⧉ in the sciences.
Activity: Sources and Information Needs
- Quotes are frequently used when writing about literature. In K-12 education in the United States, students usually learn to write in English class, so college students tend to want to over-use quotes. When writing in non-literary disciplines, you should use quotes only when the phrasing is important. If the idea, not the phrasing, is the important part, then you should paraphrase. Paraphrasing shows that you understand the information and is less jarring for the reader. ↵
A list of citations for resources related to a specific topic, with a summary, analysis, and reflection on the utility of each resource
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