3.3: Collecting Sources by Reading with a Purpose

Part of the process of identifying credible sources involves reading critically to find the best information available for your purposes, which are closely tied to accommodating your audience’s needs. When collecting sources online by entering key terms into a library or open-internet search engine, examining the resulting list of titles, and clicking on those that seem relevant, you begin the process of narrowing down your topic by what research materials are available. Of course, you don’t have time to read all the thousands or even millions of webpages and articles that turn up in Google-search results or even in a more exclusive list of sources found using your college library’s advanced-search filters to determine which fulfill your (and your audience’s) purposes. You skim.

Successful skim-reading depends on the effective organization of the sources you’re sorting through and your own time-management strategies. Once you look beyond the title of an article that looks relevant to your purposes, you would next focus on the abstract or synopsis, which is a paragraph that expands on the title just above it by summarizing the entire piece and helps determine if it suits your purposes. For webpages, you would read the top screen and then scroll down to see if the section headings indicate topics of interest; you can also do a word search (Ctrl + F) to scan for specific words related to your research topic. At the level of each paragraph, you rely on the first sentences representing the topic of the paragraph (see §4.4.1 for more on paragraph organization), so you can skim the topic sentences and perhaps the concluding sentences to capture the main points and get a sense of how the content flows (Freedman, 2012). Bolded key words (such as what you see throughout this webpage and textbook) and illustrations also help. If your sources are effectively organized in this manner, you can express your gratitude by paying it forward to your own readers. Organize your own writing so that you place main points strategically in topic sentences and highlight topics as subheadings. Your readers will be grateful if you help them to skim effectively.

(Yonis, 2023)

If you’re working with sources that lack helpful organization, you can use AI for help with summarizing them to speed up your source-selection process. Whether you use a dedicated AI tool such as that demonstrated in Amina Yonis’s “How to Read a Paper Quickly & Effectively with AI” video above or an all-purpose AI such as ChatGPT, just prompt the AI to do what an abstract does—i.e., summarize the gist of the article at whatever reading level and length (number of words) you tell it to. Additionally, you could ask it to evaluate whether the source is appropriate for your research topic. After that, however, it’s important that you carefully consider the AI summary and recommendation to determine if the advice is sound given what you know about the research project at hand. In other words, use AI as a research assistant that improves your decision-making rather than get it deprive you of all thinking and learning.

When you find online sources relevant to your topic, best practice for preparing to document and use them properly is to collect them in an informal annotated bibliography. A formal annotated bibliography lists full bibliographical entries (see §3.5) and a proper summary under each entry (see §3.4.3). As a set of working notes, on the other hand, an informal annotated bibliography need only include the source titles, web addresses (URLs that allow you to get back to the sources and collect more information about them later if you end up using them), and some summary points about the sources under each URL. When you begin your research investigation, however, you may want to collect only titles and URLs until you’ve narrowed down a list of sources you think you’ll use, then go back and confirm their relevance by writing some notes under each. Getting some note-form points down in a working file counts as your first step in the actual writing of your document, giving you a foundation to build on, as we shall see in Chapter 4.

Because the most relevant and useful sources must meet the needs of the audience you are preparing your document for, choose sources with the right amount of detail. You may find plenty of general sources that offer decent introductions (e.g., from Wikipedia) but fall short of providing appropriate detail; in such cases, you might be able to find more detailed coverage in the sources that they’ve used if they properly document their research with citations and references. On the other end of the spectrum, sources such as peer-reviewed journal articles might offer a level of detail that far exceeds what you need along with content that goes over your head. If so, you may want to include these as mere citations merely to point readers in the direction of credible evidence for a minor point that supports a major point. In such cases, recalling the CRAAP Test criterion of relevance (§3.2.2), you should at least ensure that they indeed prove your point rather than prove something distantly related but not relevant enough to your topic.

During this process, you will encounter plenty of information in sources that may both confirm and contradict what you already know about your topic. It’s important that you do what you’re supposed to do as a student: keep an open mind and learn! Refrain from simply discarding contradictory information that will over-complicate your argument. If it turns out that a reputable source undermines your argument entirely, then this is the perfect time to change your argument so that you don’t end up embarrassing yourself in the end with a fantasy-driven document or go any further defending an insupportable idea. If you’re doing a research report into the viability of a waste-to-energy gasification facility, for instance, and you really want to say that it solves both your city’s municipal garbage disposal and energy production needs, you don’t want to find yourself too far down that road before addressing why no such facility has ever achieved profitable positive energy production. Ignoring such a record and the reasons why investors tend to avoid such opportunities, such as the failed Plasco waste-management plant in Ottawa (Chianello & Pearson, 2015), will undermine your credibility.

As a final word of warning, be careful with how you collect source content so that you don’t accidentally plagiarize by the time you use the sources you’ve collected in your final document. If you copy and paste text from sources into your notes as a basis for quotations or paraphrases, ensure that you put quotation marks around that source text and cite the page numbers (if the source has them) or paragraph numbers (if it doesn’t have page numbers) in parentheses immediately following the closing quotation marks. That way, you can properly cite them if you go on to use them later. If you don’t take a couple of seconds to put quotation marks around copied text, however, you run the risk of committing plagiarism by confusing your words with your source’s and rolling unmarked quotations into your final document. Even if you cite your sources properly, implying that you’ve paraphrased (i.e., put source text in your own words) when you’ve actually quoted without quotation marks still counts as a breach of academic integrity. We will return to the problem of plagiarism and how to quote, paraphrase, and summarize properly in the next section (§3.4) when we continue examining the process of building a document around research. At this point, however, it’s worth reviewing your collection of research material to ensure that it meets the needs of the audience and works towards fulfilling the purpose you determined at the outset of the writing process and your research task or assignment.