 All right. So welcome. Today in the UT Libraries Workshop Wednesday series, we're talking about deciding what to cite. Go ahead and introduce ourselves. My name is Grace Therrell. I use she, her pronouns. I am an online learning librarian in the libraries. And my job is basically creating online learning materials. And then I also work with students in various ways. This is my email address, gtherrell at utk.edu. If you have questions after today or you want to set up a consultation for help with research, anything like that, feel free to reach out to me. And hey everybody, I'm Brittany Norwood. I'm one of our common librarians. And I also use she, her pronouns. So I work in public services. So you'll often see me at front desk on Thursdays and Fridays. I do a lot of research assistants. So if you chat in, sometimes be one of the people that you're talking to. I also help with some of the libraries programming and our instruction. And my email is included as well. All right. So this is just kind of a breakdown of the time that we're going to have today, what we're going to be doing. So just overall, we're going to have a 30 minute kind of presentation with slides. Again, feel free to type questions into chat as we go along. And then after that 30 minutes, we will stop the recording and we will have a question and answer period. So at that point, we'll answer more questions. We can kind of work through some issues or talk about some things if, if you've got some questions for us. Specifically in that 30 minute workshop block of time words. Here's what we're going to be doing during that the next 25 ish minutes. First, I'm going to talk to you about different source types and when you might use each one. So when you're looking at a source and you're trying to decide what you want to cite for your paper, we're going to talk about the different types of sources that you might encounter and when you might want to use those. Then Brittany is going to talk about the different ways for you to evaluate information. So once you've got a source in front of you, what does that look like? Credibility, reliability, how do you know that you want to cite the specific source? So that's what Brittany is going to talk about in the second half. And then again, we'll have that question and answer period at the end. So first up is source types and when you might use them. So when you're doing a research paper, research assignment, any kind of research, obviously, you're going to be using sources and you're going to be pulling different types of information from different types of sources. So we're just going to go over some of those that you might use and maybe some of the contexts that you might want to use them. Full disclosure, I'm a big fan of the Great British Bake Off. It has brought me a lot of joy in this very strange time. So all of the sources we're going to be looking at today are all about bake off, which I think is really fun. I'm sorry if you don't like baking. But that's how it is. So here we go. So the first kinds of sources that you might encounter are blog posts and social media, which I'm sure you're very familiar with. Over here on the top right, that's obviously a Twitter post. And then your other option is the blog post. Oh, great. Someone else who loves it. Awesome. So obviously, you're familiar with blog posts and social media. These can be written by anyone, right? So you don't have to have a certain type of degree. It's everyday people, right? I'm on Twitter. Other people are on Twitter. Politicians, celebrities, brands like this, a television show, local businesses, libraries, the UT libraries has a Twitter account. Anybody can have a blog or social media. Anybody can write a blog post or a social media post. There's not really a review process, right? Other than just your own kind of your own ideas. You just type away and you send. For the most part, obviously with things like brands or businesses, there could be some level of editing. But as a general rule, when you and I are writing Twitter posts or we're posting something on Facebook, or we write a blog post that's not going through anybody else. These source types are really good. If you're looking for personal experience, right? If you want to hear from somebody who's involved, if you want appeal, appealings, opinions or feelings. If you're looking for like jokes like this hilarious bake off tweet. Social media and blog posts could also be marketing tactics, though. They could also be advertisements. So other things to look out for. So these are, again, those are just some of the characteristics of these types of sources, which I'm sure most of us, if not all of us, have encountered. The second that we're looking at is the news and magazine article category, right? So just kind of like press in general. So these are usually written by journalists or writers, people who have that credential. Maybe they went to school for those things or they have a lot of experience writing. They're generally reviewed by an editor. Mostly they're reviewed for things like style and grammar and conciseness. Like, does this make sense? Is everything following? Is the most important information at the front? A lot of things like that are really important in these kinds of sources. Obviously news and magazine articles are pretty descriptive. They're usually describing events that have happened or sometimes providing commentary on those or giving maybe more informed perspective on things. So you can kind of see that in these two, from the New York Times and then from Slate. Sometimes they involve more opinionated pieces. This one from Slate, I don't believe, is an opinion piece, but it definitely has more of an obvious perspective than or, you know, bias towards the current iteration of the Great British Baking Show. And, you know, comes from that like specific perspective. So sometimes you'll have that in news and magazine articles. Other times it'll look more objective. And the content of these can be, you know, obviously like world information. It could be more like state and local issues, pop culture, business, all sorts of things. They kind of run the gamut and they usually use everyday language. So when you look at a news or magazine article, even though they're written by writers and journalists, you'll probably be able to understand what they're saying. And then this last source type that we're going to talk about is a scholarly and peer reviewed source. If you have not been asked to find one of these yet, it is coming. If you have been asked to find a scholarly or peer reviewed source, then these probably look pretty familiar to you. So these are different than the first two sources. And that usually these are written by experts, researchers, scholars, people who are really in that field. They're usually reviewed by other experts in a process called peer review. So that's where that peer review comes from. They look at the content, the argument, they review the data, they review the structure. And that usually mean goes through several rounds. So it'll take a while for that to get published. A lot of times, the scholarly and peer reviewed sources can be research or like a study, they might have like a method section results discussion. Other times they're going to look more like analysis this, and they might include other research articles or other sources like they might pull in blog posts or social media or things like that, and offer some sort of scholarly bent on those. And I think one of the most important things to remember about scholarly and peer reviewed sources is they're written for other experts, right? So a lot of times they're very specific, sometimes really niche. And they talk about they talk about their topics with a much more like formal tone, they might use jargon or discipline specific words. So these are good sources, but just remember that they are written for like a very specific audience usually so they're going to be much more narrow in their scope. So those are kind of the three general categories of sources that you might use. These are just examples of when you could use these and kind of how the characteristics might match up. The thing to remember with sources and source types is that the context and the purpose of your research are the most important thing to consider. There is no best source to use. There is no like, you know, when you're doing your research, it's not like, Oh, I need to only look for this type of source because it's the best one out there. All of these can be useful in their own context, whatever you need them for. So for blog posts and social media, it might be something when you want to hear straight from the voices who are involved, or you want to hear lots of different perspectives, those are good sources to use them. The magazine and news articles are really great when you want something current, or even if you want to look at change over time and see how current events have been reported, that's a good use of those. And then when you want like some facts and you want maybe more of an objective viewpoint, and then the scholarly and peer reviewed sources are really great. Again, when you're looking for that expert knowledge, and then when you're kind of researching a specific topic. So these are kind of questions to ask if you need guidance when you're picking your sources, to kind of identify what the context and purpose is, just so you can pick sources that really work for you. So obviously one of the most important things is what are your assignment requirements? That's going to be, you know, what your professor or your instructor asks for in the assignment is going to be the most important. But the next two are also really important for you to consider once you've determined what your assignment requirements are in terms of sources. So the next thing you want to look at is, you know, what really makes sense for your topic. If you're doing research on something like, you know, the Great British Baking Show, or you're doing research on current activism, or something that's really popular in the media, there might not be scholarly articles or peer reviewed articles yet on those topics. So it might make more sense to do, to use new sources to use social media to use blog posts, those kinds of things. And then also another important question to ask is what's going to give me different perspectives and allow you to hear from multiple voices. Again, that's one of the reasons that blog posts and social media posts can be really useful and really impactful in some research is because you're able to hear directly from people involved. So those are just, again, some questions to ask as you're going through your research, as you're trying to decide what types of sources you want to look at, and what types of sources you want to find. Again, no best source. The best source is the one that you look at, you decide you want to trust and you decide is useful for your research. So now I'm going to hand things over to Brittany to talk about evaluating. And as muted of course. Anyway, sounds good. And I'm going to be talking about how you can evaluate the different sources you find and the different approaches that you can use to do this evaluation. I'm great, you can go ahead and change. Thanks. So the whole point of being able to evaluate your sources is to be able to determine if something is credible enough or not for you to go to the effort to put it in your paper or to use it to make some decisions for whatever purpose you're going for. It's important to know, though, that you know how when you're a kid, you're always told you couldn't compare apples and oranges. It's kind of the same thing with some of these sources when you're trying to evaluate them. So although there are some general strategies that you can use pretty much across the board, you do need to be considerate of what your source type is when you're thinking about how you want to move forward with determining if it's credible enough or not. So some overall questions that you can consider are why was the source created and when was it created. So this when was it created can get to whether or not the information might be really outdated or if it might be so current that it's not been backed up yet. You also want to look and see if you can identify any potential bias in the source. So this could be explicit and the writing of the content itself, but it can also be more subtle. So it could be the fact that somebody, some company or organization has funded research and so the authors may have had an incentive to make their results a bit more in line with the company's overall theme. You also want to check and make sure if your information has been backed up by other sources and you want to see if it sites other sources. So not everything that you're going to look at is necessarily going to site other sources. As you know, some new sources and they have people who are speaking to them under the promise that they're going to remain anonymous and sometimes you're reading an opinion piece that the person, they're just commenting on a situation. So those sources may not be citing anything, but generally you want to see if a source does and if those sources that are being cited also seem to be reliable. It kind of gets to the idea that the paper is being built on these sorts of things and you don't want the foundation of the paper to be shaky because that could impact what you're writing about later on. Okay Grace, so next couple of slides are just some basic charts. If you want to go back to this recording and look at them for yourself, then you'll have a more broad overview of how to evaluate sources and we really have the time to go over in this time period. So this first one is from UT Libraries and it's a pretty good general guide to source evaluation goes into a bit more detail particularly about author qualifications, sources, audience, things like that. Okay Grace, so these next two I've taken from the IFLA and from Corey Shepard's website. So this first one is particularly talking about how to evaluate new sources and something that I feel is really important about this graphic is the visitor element right here. So sometimes people are being hyperbolic just to make a point and the same thing goes for satirical articles or farcical articles and also sometimes credible publications release things that are like April Fool's jokes. So I don't know if you all know this but at one point in time Australian Geographic actually released an April Fool's article targeted to a non-Australian audience that was supposedly a study that proved the existence of drop bears. So that was a really fun article to read but it was obviously quite a joke. So when you're looking into something that might seem too good to be true I'll be thinking in the back of your mind are they playing me? Is this actually a real thing? And once again you want to make sure that you're checking your date especially when it comes to new sources. So if something is breaking news and it's pretty common knowledge that there's going to be facts that are going to be portrayed wrong. People are going to say the wrong things or run into the wrong numbers especially if the breaking news is something that's highly emotional. The sources that are going to be occurring a bit after the fact are the ones that are more than likely going to have the correct information. So although that breaking news is still an important artifact you definitely want to be checking it alongside these older articles so that you get a better idea of what the a more true holistic version of the events were. And Corey Shepard's infographic here and I'm pretty sure he didn't design this test but it's something that's pretty much often used because it's an acronym that's really easy to remember. It's really good for a generally print and web sources as well. Next slide please Grace. And this one I found from comcam.com. So this is definitely one that you're going to want to back later on and maybe take a screenshot of or pause the screen because I feel like this is a really great way to evaluate those peer reviewed studies and empirical research. So I know often when you're first getting started with evaluating your sources these sorts of ones can be very tricky because it feels like so much work has been put in them and they seem so formal and so comprehensive to a point that don't necessarily know what to look for how to determine if this is something you can trust or not. But just because other people look at it and have felt that it's okay to put into their journal it doesn't mean that this course isn't valuable. Even some really highly respectable journals like the Lancet have had articles that they've later denounced. Very prominent authors have retracted work that they've done. So just because something accepted at one point in time doesn't mean that it continues to be so. So something to look for in these empirical sources is how your data is represented. So sometimes the person who's analyzing the data can misinterpret the results. They may look at their statistical task through the through the lens of what they're already wanting to see. And so that's how they work the results if it looks if all the numbers are showing are close enough to what they're wanting to see. They could also misrepresent their data either intentionally or unintentionally. Something else you can do is look at those results and then look further into the discussion and conclusions and see if the numbers that they're giving you fit with what they later say those numbers mean. And also look to see if what their conclusions are aren't so much of a stretch from what they actually found. Finally, once you become more familiar with statistical analysis in your type of field, you'll be able to know a bit more about the methods of researchers you use to do this data. So when you become comfortable that something that you want to be able to do is look at the different statistical tasks that researchers have used to see if they're a good fit for what they're wanting to find. Because sometimes you can use a an easier statistical test or one that's not necessarily appropriate for what you're looking for. And the results you're going to get are going to be completely different from what you would have expected. If you'd use something that was more in line with what you should be using. And finally, and this is one that might be a little bit easier to start out with, you want to see if the results of the article have also been supported by other researchers. So just because maybe one article is saying something different from everybody else that doesn't necessarily mean that they did bad science. It could be the case that their sample, the people that they were interviewing, could have been very different from what everybody else had been looking at. Maybe everybody else had a more generalizable sample. But these people were looking at a very specific population. So something being anomalous isn't necessarily reason to throw it out completely. But it is something that you probably want to take note of. Generally, if the more and more people have found it, that means that those results are replicable. And they are considered to be a bit more trustworthy than the sort of off-the-wall results. OK, great. So I'm ready for the next slide. OK, so that's the end of my section. Here are some important links that you can refer to later. If you ever need any help finding sources or evaluating things or just doing your research in general, feel free to use the library's chat function at this link. And if you feel like you want some more in-depth research help, you can always try to schedule a consultation via email through this second link. And now it is, oh, yes, thank you, Amber, for putting that in the chat for us. And now it is time for our end of survey session. So everybody, please go to this tiny URL and fill out the quick survey. And remember to join us next Monday, October 21st, for our session on who has access to information and our full schedule is listed at this link. So lib.tk.edu slash construct slash first year. Now, any questions?