 Hi, my name is Ryan Guy, and the following lecture will explore some of the techniques that you can take to conduct better research. So without further ado, let's get started. So a brief overview of today's lecture. First I'm going to start by going over some of the basics of looking at sources and how you can determine good sources from bad sources, but mostly avoiding bad sources. From there, I'm going to go over a process known as the funnel method that talks about taking very general research and condensing that down into actual good research. Finally, specifically for Butte College students, we're going to take a little tour of the library and focus on some of the digital resources that are available to you as a student. Let's go ahead and get started. So first thing, avoiding bad sources. As I've gone through my years as an educator and I've tried to help students do good research, I discovered that one of the problems students have is determining good sources from bad sources. So one of the ways that I've helped to deal with this is I've put together this following method. So be consider the broad spectrum of sources that are available out there. There are definitely good sources and there are bad sources. So if you look at the chart here, you can see the sources that are highlighted in green are what we would consider to be good sources. So peer-reviewed journal articles, and when I talk about peer-reviewed review, I'm talking about journals that have gone through the rigorous process of being looked at by other scholars and by the time they've gone through that rewrite and revision process, you've got a pretty good source. From there, we consider things like books written by subject experts, particularly if you're looking at something that's on the cutting edge, kind of new. Books can be a good place to go to, but you want to make sure that in your writing or in your presentation that you make sure to establish the credibility of the authors of those books, because there are some books out there that are written by subject experts that I don't know how credible they actually are. So just make sure that when you look at those sources, you investigate some of the credentials that the authors hold. From that, we drop down into government statistics. Government statistics can be a great place to look. There are a variety of websites out there for different government agencies that have the statistics on them. You should go and check those out, and you can gain a lot of insight and understanding about that. From there, we kind of move on to the next zone, which is kind of the pretty good, but not as good as the green zone, which is the ones that I've got highlighted in yellow. Here we talk about sites such as third party research statistics. There's a lot of private organizations out there that do both quantitative and qualitative data research, and they publish their statistics online. So still pretty good, maybe not quite as good as some of the others, but still decent sources. From there, you start to drift into things like news and contextual sources. Higher up on the scale are our top tier news articles. So these are articles that come from easily recognizable news sources. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, things like that, things that are easily known that people have heard of. From there, you start to kind of drift to the fringes when you get into first person accounts. For the most part, these can still be pretty good, particularly if you're talking about a current event or recent phenomena. It can be nice sometimes to have the context of someone who has lived through that and bringing their story in will allow you to do that. Again, just like with the books written by subject experts, you need to establish the credibility of those first person accounts. Why is this person credible to talk on the source? Unlike the academic topic above, this person is credible because they've lived through it, but you need to make sure that you explain that in your writing or your presentation. This point, we start to drift into the less okay zone. Here, you start to run into obscure news sources. If it's really necessary to include one, that can be understandable. However, you should go out and search and see if you can't find the same news story, the same topic on a more reliable news source. If it's something hyperspecific, perhaps you're researching a local issue, then bringing a local paper would be understandable. But always look to see if there's a top tier news source before you use a lower tier news source for context. Next, talk about advocacy organizations. There's a whole variety of groups out there that have websites that provide information. However, you really should avoid these unless it's to gain general understanding. For the most part, this is not something that you're going to want to cite in your research. The reason for that is advocacy organizations tend to be pretty biased. So there's typically better research out there than what's on those sites. If you're creating some sort of persuasive project, sometimes these are good places to look for for advocacy or calls to action. But not something you typically want to include inside a part of the research paper. Then finally, the red zone things that we really should avoid. General websites should be avoided unless it has a connection to an organization or a government agency. General websites that people put up are not a good idea and really shouldn't be cited in your research. And then finally, something that I've run into, surprisingly, what is people citing things from their lives? Like, you know, my dad said this or my roommate told me that. It's problematic if your dad, mother, roommate, whatever is credible on a source, then they kind of fall back into that first person accounts or maybe even books written by subjects that cite the credentials of the person and not your relationship. All right, now that we've explored the full continuum of sources that are out there, let's go ahead and move on and talk a little bit about how the funnel process or method actually works. So the basic idea behind the funnel method is starting with general research, things like Wikipedia, Google, and CQ researcher that can provide you some general understanding and general knowledge and then narrowing that down, searching inside those sources for good research and kind of going on this narrowing quest that will lead you to good research. And I'm going to go through this step by step and more detail after exploration of these more general sources. All right, so the first thing is using Wikipedia. Now, chances are you've had professors that have completely lamented the growth of Wikipedia. So this day, I remember the first day I heard about Wikipedia. I was in the same position that you guys were sitting in a class at my community college. They brought a librarian in to talk to us about research methods and they brought up this concept of Wikipedia as this evil thing that was out there and it should be avoided at all costs. I remember making a note about it, looking at it at home and being like, wow, this is awesome. I don't really share that view. I think Wikipedia is a useful resource, but it needs to be utilized correctly and that's what I'm going to talk about. So a little bit about Wikipedia. Wikipedia is great for understanding background on a topic. Particularly if you're researching something that you've never looked at before, Wikipedia can be great for just gaining general understanding about that topic and learning a little bit more before you begin your research process. In general, try to think of Wikipedia as a starting place. This is the point where your research begins. It should not, however, be the place that your research ends. So that means you never actually want to cite Wikipedia. You want to look at it as a place to gain understanding and hunt for further sources. The other thing to consider is that Wikipedia can be incorrect. What Wikipedia is, is a socially maintained collaboratively created body of knowledge. Users from all over the world get together, they edit articles, they update things, they try to source them. And for the most part, that creates a pretty useful body of knowledge. However, it is possible for someone like me to log in and make incorrect or erroneous statements on Wikipedia articles. And those can be left out for no long periods of time. In general, the collaboration method works pretty good and errors like that are fixed. However, it is possible that they're not and things can be wrong. If you want to watch a funny video about this phenomenon, go ahead and Google the Colbert rapport and look up wikiality and there's a pretty funny clip. Also, if you download the PDF of this lecture, I've included a link to it on this slide. So Wikipedia, good place to start, bad place to finish, can be wrong, never ever cite it. All right, so moving on, I want to talk to you guys a little bit about the process of hunting down sources on Wikipedia. So the way this works is you go out and you've got a topic, something that you're interested in researching. See if you can find an article about that topic or related to that topic and search for it on Wikipedia. First thing you do, read through that article, gain understanding, and pay close attention to the brackets. So you look up here on our presentation, you can see that I've got this in VitroMeets article app, and as you go through every time claims or facts are given, you've got the citation. If you click on the citation, it brings you down to a reference page and you can actually see some good journal articles. As you're engaging in that research process and you're looking at those sources, you look for the ones that kind of fall into that green category that I mentioned before. So journal articles, books written by subject areas, government statistics. If you see those cited, that usually means that they're worthwhile to go ahead and seek out. And I've got an example about how that process works in a little bit. All right, so another source that's available out there to you that is similar, but still quite a bit different from Wikipedia, is that of CQ Researcher. CQ Researcher is a resource that's available to you through the university website. And basically what it is, is a series of research reports. So you kind of think of CQ Researcher as a more academic version of Wikipedia. In these research reports, they cover a whole variety of topics going back like the last 20 years. Like Wikipedia, CQ Researcher is something that you want to use as more of a starting point. These reports are very useful and informative and can gain a lot of general understanding. However, they kind of lack that rigorous peer-reviewed expert written quality that we look for in good sources. So if you read through these reports, you can read through them just like you go to Wikipedia article, gain understanding, and the really useful part is at the bottom in the bibliography section. If you can find an article on your topic in that bibliography, you're going to find a variety of books that are listed in there. You're going to find newspaper articles, journal articles, government statistics, all broken down by type. So you can check those out. Again, like Wikipedia, CQ Researcher is not something you want to cite in your research. It's a place that you want to look for for that general understanding and find other sources. All right, so on that note, let's talk a little bit about how that process of finding other sources works. Now there is a variety of different ways and different tools available to you to go ahead and search out sources. However, in Myers as a researcher, the thing that I have found most useful is using Google Scholar to assist with that process. However, to do that, you need to set up the Google Scholar library links. What this will do is it'll allow you to build a link between the Google Scholar database that covers a whole variety of sources and the resources that are available to you as a View College student. So I've got a short video here that will demonstrate how this process works. And I'll just go ahead and talk you through it. So the first thing that you want to do is go ahead and navigate to the Google Scholar website, scholar.google.com. Up in the right-hand corner, you'll see that there is a little gear icon. Click on that and scroll down to Preferences. There's a library link section that will show up in the Preferences. And you just want to go ahead and click on that box and go ahead and search for Butte. I've typed View College of Works too, but Butte seems to get it done. At that point, a couple of different options will show up. Go ahead and select both of those options, click the checkboxes, then scroll down to the bottom and save the preferences that you've just set up. Now at this point, Google Scholar is linked up to View College resources. And you can go ahead and search by keyword or by the title of an article that you're looking for. So I'm just going to go ahead and put MySpace and Facebook into here. And I'm just looking for an article. And there it is, it's the first one. So go ahead now and click that Get Full Text and Bute CC link. And this will take you to this link 360 service, which will then find the resource on the Bute College website. So you now have access to the full text of the article. If you're using the Zotero Reference Management Tool, now is a great time to go ahead and import in that library. And if you've gotten Zotero installed, just click on the little icon in the address bar. It'll automatically save the reference and the PDF file to your Zotero library. And as you can see, there it is, it shows up, and you have access to all that material from that point on. Super easy, super handy. If you haven't watched my other lecture on research tools, check it out. So Zotero is an amazing program for keeping track of your research. All right, let's continue on. So I'm gonna go ahead now and take you through the funnel method process step by step. So as I've mentioned, the first step is to find that general research, whether you're doing a search on Google, you're looking for an article on Wikipedia, or you find a research report on CQ Research. You wanna go ahead and find that article and give it a quick read through and gain some understanding on what that topic is. The next thing you wanna do is search through those sources and try to find out, find some of those good academic sources that you were looking for in the first place. So find those sources and go ahead and scroll, click on the bracket at links, scroll down to the bottom. And what you wanna do is go ahead and copy the title of that source. You copy the whole thing, but I find just copying the title gets the job done and gets you what you need. Next step is to navigate on over to Google Scholar and paste the title into the search bar. On this, you go ahead and assumes that you've already set up your library links and click search. If you search for the title, chances are it's gonna be the first thing to pop up. As you can see, the example that I did popped up right there. That point over on the right, go ahead and click on that, get full text at butecc, that'll take you to the link 360 service. And before you know it, boom, the full text Epsco host or other database will go ahead and show up and you'll have access to that. So you can either download the PDF there or if you're using Zotero, great time to go ahead and click on that icon and import that into your library. So pretty easy process, basic idea behind that funnel method is to start broad narrow it down and find those good sources that are in between. Once you started to find some research, you may wanna find related research and you can use that same process to look for journal articles that are cited in other journal articles. So again, by just reading through those journal articles, finding the source, copying and pasting that source back into Google Scholar and just continuing this process as you narrow and focus your research. All right, now I'm gonna go ahead and spend a little bit of time talking about the Butte College Library and specifically some of the digital tools that are available to you as a Butte College student. All right, so just before I top into the digital side of it, the Butte College Library is an amazing place, has access to a ton of stuff, probably a place you should check out and visit at some point. That being said, if you're doing a lot of work from home or your distance education, there are a lot of great digital resources that are also available to you as a student that I'd like to explore now. So the library website is an amazing resource and really acts as your portal to all of the resources that are available to you as a Butte student. You can access it off campus. It's a great site to visit. I'm gonna take you through some specific tools that I find really helpful. However, I encourage you to visit the library website and check out the whole variety of resources that are available on there. There's also other videos that you can watch in the library website that take you through different tools and resources that are available on there. So make sure to check that out. All right, let's talk about some of the specific tools that are available. First thing, gotta give a mention to the library catalog. Butte College has accessed over 66,000 print books as well as 25,000 eBooks that you can access online. Click on the catalog, you can search it there. If in your research, a book comes up and maybe you found it on a Wikipedia site, great place to check, see if the library has it and if it does, you can either go and pick it up at the main campus or they'll even send it on over to Chico Center if that's easier for your commute. All right, the next thing I wanna talk about is databases. Now I showed you the process of accessing databases through Google Scholar. However, if you want to just browse the databases that are available to you, you can do that too by just going ahead and clicking on databases and looking at them. There's a wide variety and you can either look at them alphabetically, you can look at them by subject. Couple of my favorites in doing research are the Academic Search Premier database and just going into EPSCO Host by itself and selecting a whole different variety of databases and doing kind of the EPSCO Host combined search. Super handy, but if you got something that's specific to your topic, perhaps if you're doing something on social and political science or philosophy, there's databases for subject areas that you can click into and search specifically for that. The next tool is called Interlibrary Loan and I think Interlibrary Loan might be one of the most valuable tools that is available out there and probably one of the least known. So what Interlibrary Loan is, is a service that is available to you as a BUDE student where our library connects with libraries all throughout the country and even throughout the world to gain resources that maybe they don't have direct access to. So what you can do is if you're doing your research and you go to try to find a journal article or a book and the library doesn't have it, you can request that resource through Interlibrary Loan and usually for free, the library will go ahead and request that resource from another library and have it sent to you. Super, super handy. So for instance, if you're looking for a book, there's a link on the Interlibrary Loan site for books. You just go ahead and fill out this form, try to fill it out completely and what will happen is the library will go and request it, they'll find a library that has that book, that library will mail it to our library. It usually takes anywhere from three to 10 days. They'll send you a message letting you know it's there. You get it for a couple of weeks. You get to check it out, use that resource and then they'll go ahead and send it back to its home library once it's done. And there's options on there. You can have it either be sent to the main campus or the Chico Campus Library. Super handy, you can pretty much get any book that you want. And for the most part, it's all free. There was only I think one time during my thesis process where there was something that I really, really needed. There was a thesis from another university and I think I had to pay five bucks for it. But for the most part, pretty much anything that you can want, you can access for free through Interlibrary Loan. The other thing that you can gain is access to journal articles. While Butte College Library does have a lot of journal articles, there are some that it doesn't have. So, the way journal articles works is there's a separate form. Fill out all the information if you can and go ahead and submit it and they'll again send out the request. However, with journal articles, what usually happens is instead of having them mailed, they're delivered electronically. The other universities or colleges will just go ahead and scan them in, email them on over and you'll be able to get them digitally and set it by mail. So, it usually takes place faster than it does to get a book. In my experience, somewhere two to three days is on average occasionally. If it's something really obscure, it takes longer. But pretty handy and then you've got a digital copy that you can go ahead and keep. All right. Well, that is the research techniques that you can use in a nutshell. I hope that some of this information has been useful for you. You can go ahead and access my website ranguy.org if you wanna look at more tutorials and information about this process. Thank you and happy researching.