14 How Can I Use Sources in My Research?
Some of the information in this chapter was remixed from “Sources and Information Needs” by Teaching & Learning and University Libraries, licensed CC BY 4.0.
Now that you know about the different kinds of sources you can use for your research, you need to think about why you need these sources and how you will use them.
Information needs are why you need sources. Meeting those needs is what you’re going to do with sources as you complete your research project.
Here are those needs:
- To learn more background information.
- To answer your research question(s).
- To convince your audience that your answer is correct or, at least, the most reasonable answer.
- 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.
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, answer, convince, describe, and report. But you won’t be doing any of that alone.
While your ideas certainly matter, your sources will give you information you can use to support your ideas. They’ll also give you direct quotes 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.
You Try It
Needs and Final Products
Background information may seldom appear directly in any final product. But meeting each of the other information needs will result in written sections of a term paper. For final products other than term papers (such as a presentation or a poster), you’ll have the same needs and will use sources to meet them. But not all needs will result in a section of your final product.
Sources to Meet Needs
Because there are several types of sources (see previous chapter), the options you have to meet your information needs can seem complex.
Pay attention to when only primary and secondary sources are required to meet a need and to when only professional and scholarly sources will work. If your research project is in the arts, also pay attention to when you must use popular sources such as movies, books, or other media, because popular sources are often primary sources in the arts.
These descriptions and summaries of when to use what kind of source should help.
To Learn Background Information
When you first get a research assignment and perhaps for a considerable time afterward, you will almost always have to learn some background information as you develop your research question and explore how to answer it.
Sources from any category and from any subgroup within a category except peer reviewed journal articles can meet students’ need to learn background information and understand a variety of perspectives. Journal articles, are usually too specific to be background. From easy-to-understand to more complex sources, read and/or view those that advance your knowledge and understanding.
For instance, especially while you are getting started, secondary sources that synthesize an event or work of art and tertiary sources such as guidebooks can be a big help. Wikipedia is a good tertiary source of background information. While you should not cite Wikipedia in your research, it can be a great place to start, and you may be able to use and cite some of the sources that the Wikipedia article cites.
Similarly, you should not cite ChatGPT or another chatbot for background information, though as noted above, you may use these tools to gain some background knowledge or to suggest background knowledge you may need to answer your research question. Remember that chatbots can make things up, so you’ll always want to verify information with a trusted source.
Sources you use for background information don’t have to be sources that you cite in your final report, although some may be.
Sources to Learn Background Information
- Quantitative or Qualitative: Either—whatever advances your knowledge.
- Fact or Opinion: Any—whatever advances your knowledge.
- Scholarly, Professional, or Popular: Any—whatever advances your knowledge.
- Primary, Secondary, or Tertiary: Any—whatever advances your knowledge.
- Publication Format: Any—whatever advances your knowledge.
One important reason for finding background information is to learn the language that professionals and scholars have used when writing about your research question. That language will help you later, particularly when you’re searching for sources to answer your research question.
To identify that language, you can always type the word glossary and then the discipline for which you’re doing your assignment in the search engine search box.
Here are two examples to try:
Putting a phrase in quotes in most search boxes insures that the phrase will be searched rather than individual words.
You can try the same exercise by asking a generative AI chatbot to provide you with background information.
To Answer Your Research Question
You have to be much pickier with sources to meet this need because only certain choices can do the job. Whether you can use quantitative or qualitative data depends on what your research question requires.
Only primary and secondary sources can be used to answer your research question and, these sources need to be professional and/or scholarly sources for most disciplines (humanities, social sciences, and sciences). As we noted above, the arts often require popular sources as primary or secondary sources to answer research questions.
Remember that your purpose for most disciplines should be to educate and inform. As we learned, primary sources are those created at the same time as an event you are researching or that offer something original, such as an original performance or a journal article reporting original research. Secondary sources analyze or otherwise react to both primary and secondary sources. Because of the information lifecycle, the most current secondary sources are often the best because their creators have had time for better analysis and more information to incorporate. If you use a source older than seven years, you should be prepared to explain why the source is still valid and credible for your research question. For example, the source may be an important theoretical model that shaped subsequent research.
Example: Quantitative or Qualitative Data
Suppose your research question is “How did a a particular king of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, work to modernize his country?”
That question may lend itself to qualitative descriptive judgments—about what are considered the components of modernization, including, for instance, what were his thoughts about the place of women in society.
But it may also be helped by some quantitative data, such as those that would let you compare the numbers of women attending higher education when Abdullah became king and those attending at the time of his death or, for instance, whether manufacturing increased while he reigned.
So looking for sources that provide both quantitative and qualitative information (not necessarily in the same resource) is usually a good idea.
If it is not clear to you from the formats of sources you are assigned to read for your course, ask your professor which formats are acceptable to your discipline for answering your research question.
Sources to Answer Your Research Question
- Quantitative or Qualitative: Will be determined by the question itself.
- Fact or Opinion: Professional and scholarly for most disciplines; the arts often use popular, as well.
- Scholarly, Professional, or Popular: Professional and scholarly for most disciplines; the arts often use popular, as well.
- Primary, Secondary, or Tertiary: Primary and secondary.
- Publication Format: Those acceptable to your discipline.
To Convince Your Audience
In exploratory research, we are merely answering our research question. However, it’s important to ensure that your sources are high-quality as we prepare to write a persuasive argument essay, where you’ll need to convince your audience that your solution to a problem is the best one. Convincing your audience is similar to convincing yourself and takes the same kinds of sources—as long as your audience is made up of people like you and your professor, which is often true in academic writing. That means using many of those sources you used to answer your research question.
When your audience isn’t very much like you and your professor, you can adjust your choice of sources to meet this need. Perhaps you will include more that are secondary sources rather than primary, some that are popular or professional rather than scholarly, and some whose author intent may not be to educate and inform.
Sources to Convince Your Audience
- Quantitative or Qualitative Data: Same as what you used to answer your research question if your audience is like you and your professor. (If you have a different audience, use what is convincing to them.)
- Fact or Opinion: Those with the purpose(s) you used to answer your research question if your audience is like you and your professor. (If you have a different audience, you may be better off including some sources intended to entertain or sell.)
- Scholarly, Professional or Popular: Those with the same expertise level as you used to answer the question if your audience is like you and your professor. (If you have a different audience, you may be better off including some popular.)
- Publication Mode: Primary and secondary sources if your audience is like you and your professor. If you have a different audience, you may be better off including more secondary sources than primary.
- Publication Format: Those acceptable to your discipline, if your audience is like you and your professor.
To Describe the Situation
Choosing what kinds of sources you’ll need to meet this need is pretty simple—you should almost always use what’s going to be clear and compelling to your audience. Nonetheless, sources intended to educate and inform may play an out-sized role here.
But even then, they don’t always have to educate and inform formally, which opens the door to using sources such as fiction or the other arts and formats that you might not use with some other information needs.
Sources to Describe the Situation
- Quantitative or Qualitative: Whatever you think will make the description most clear and compelling and your question important to your audience.
- Fact or Opinion: Often to educate and inform, but sources don’t have to do that formally here, so they can also be to entertain or sell.
- Scholarly, Professional, or Popular: Whatever you think will make the description most clear and compelling and your question important to your audience.
- Primary, Secondary or Tertiary: Whatever you think will make the description most clear and compelling and your question important to your audience. Some disciplines will not accept tertiary for this need.
- Publication Format: Whatever you think will make the description most clear and compelling and your question important to your audience. Some discipline will accept only particular formats, so check for your discipline.
To Report What Others Have Said
The choices here about kinds of sources are easy: just use the same or similar sources that you used to answer your research question that you also think will be the most convincing to your audience.
Sources to Report What Others Have Said
- Quantitative or Qualitative: Those sources that you used to answer your research question that you think will be most convincing to your audience.
- Fact or Opinion: Those sources that you used to answer your research question that you think will be most convincing to your audience.
- Scholarly, Professional, or Popular: Those sources that you used to answer your research question that you think will be most convincing to your audience.
- Primary, Secondary, or Tertiary: Those sources that you used to answer your research question that you think will be most convincing to your audience.
- Publication Format: Those sources that you used to answer your research question that you think will be most convincing to your audience.
Planning Your Sources
Once you know what kinds of sources you need to meet your information needs, where should you look for them? Once more, thinking about types of sources can help.
Where sources are located is generally organized by audience expertise level—by whether they are popular, professional, or scholarly sources. Popular and professional are often grouped together. But scholarly sources tend to hang out by themselves. That’s why searching Google Scholar locates more of them than just plain old Google, and an academic library has more scholarly sources than a public library. Increasingly, generative AI is providing sources to answer questions, but these are often not high-quality enough to be used for anything other than background research. As we saw in the previous chapter, Perplexity.ai is a good generative AI tool to locate high quality research. Source Locator can help you see where sources of every audience expertise level (popular, professional, and scholarly) are located. Check it out.
Your college library and librarians are your allies in locating high-quality sources. You may also consider talking to experts in your field to get some ideas of where you can look.
Research Organizer
Organizing your research is critical to your success. We will use a research organizer to ensure that you have the information you need for your final paper. The research organizer will help you to collect the source links, APA reference, and at least one direct quote you can use in your final paper. You will also use this tool to write summaries of your five required sources. The research organizer section that collects your sources is designed as a literature review. Peer reviewed academic articles generally start with a literature review that positions the new research question within existing research. I have included an example of how to fill out the research organizer below.
Literature Review (APA style)
Source One
| Full Reference: Author (date). Title of article. Publication. URL.
Radez, J., Reardon, T., Creswell, C., Lawrence, P. J., Evdoka-Burton, G., & Waite, P. (2021). Why do children and adolescents (not) seek and access professional help for their mental health problems? A systematic review of quantitative and qualitative studies. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 30(2), 183–211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-019-01469-4 |
| In text citation: (Author, date): (Radez et al., 2021). |
| Direct quote: See Write What Matters for how to integrate a quote using They Say/I Say techniques
According to Radez et al. (2021), “If we want to close the gap between high prevalence of mental health disorders and low treatment utilization[sic], sufficient service provision and professional support must be widely available for young people” (p. 207).
|
| Summary: See Write What Matters for information on how to write a summary of an article.
Barriers to effective treatment are a considerable challenge for children and adolescents with mental health disorders. In a review of 53 studies on children’s and adolescent’s mental health services, Radez et al. (2021) discussed the multiple barriers to care that younger patients in Europe experience. Looking at both qualitative and quantitative data, the researchers identified four main themes that may keep children and adolescents from accessing mental health services. These barriers include lack of knowledge about mental health (96%), stigma and other social factors (92%), concerns about trust in their relationships with mental health professionals (68%), and systemic problems like costs or lack of available care (58%). The authors concluded that there is not an easy solution to the multiple barriers they identified, arguing that early intervention may help children and teens to better access mental healthcare. |
You should complete your research organizer references and summaries for your five required sources.
You Try It!
Generative AI tools can summarize articles–but should you have them do it for you? Knowing how to summarize an academic article is a valuable skill that you may need in future courses. I recommend that you practice doing it for your own sources rather than outsourcing this task to a chatbot. However, you may want to use the chatbot to write a summary and compare your own summary to the one the chatbot creates. This can help you to assess your own effectiveness at writing summaries.
Another good use of generative AI is to ask it to review your APA references. Google Scholar and your college library both have pretty reliable citation generators that you should use for your peer reviewed sources, but you can also ask the chatbot to check for errors. You can also use it to help you create APA references for news articles or YouTube videos. Here is an example of a prompt you could use: You are an expert in creating APA style references. Please create/check a reference for this source. Here is the information I have:________________.
If you’re already skilled with using chatbots and have access to a ChatGPT or Claude account, you may want to create a custom GPT or Project that helps you to do this so that you don’t have to rewrite your prompt every time.
