13.3: 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—that is, for your audience’s needs (your purpose is to inform or persuade them, so their needs should guide you). When collecting sources online by entering key terms into a search engine, examining the 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 or library database search results to determine which fulfill your (and your audience’s) purposes. Time constraints force you to skim.

Successful skim-reading depends on the effective organization of the sources you are sorting through, as well as your own time-management strategies. For articles, you would focus on the abstract or synopsis—a paragraph that summarizes the entire piece and helps determine if it contains (some of) what you are looking for. For webpages, you would read the very top and then skip down to see if the section headings indicate topics of interest; you can also do a word search (ctrl + f) if you are scanning for specific concepts. At the level of each paragraph, you rely on the first sentences representing the topic of the paragraph—and 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 and illustrations also help. (If your sources are effectively organized in this fashion, 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.

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 and a proper summary under each entry; as a set of 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 on paper—or on your word processor screen—counts as your first step in the actual writing of your document, giving you a foundation to build on.)

The most relevant and useful sources are those that would best meet the needs of the audience for which you are preparing your document. To this end, you must choose sources with the right amount of detail. At the lower end of the range, you may find plenty of general sources that offer acceptable 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 have used, if those introductory sources  are credible and have properly documented their research. At the high end of the range, sources such as peer-reviewed journal articles might offer a level of detail that far exceeds what you need, along with content you might find difficult to understand. You may want to include such evidence in your reports because it is the most credible, but make sure you paraphrase clearly and that the evidence selected clearly supports your points (not 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. Remember to keep an open mind and learn from the experience. 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 consider changing your argument to avoid embarrassing yourself in the end with a fantasy-driven document. If you are preparing 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 that investors tend to avoid such opportunities—see, for instance, the case of the failed Plasco plant in Ottawa (Chianello & Pearson, 2015)—will undermine your credibility.

Finally, be careful with your collection of 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 those fragments 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 so you can properly cite them if you use them later. If you don’t put quotation marks around copied text, you run the risk of committing plagiarism by rolling unmarked quotations into your final document; even if you cite them, implying that you have paraphrased text from a source when in fact you are reproducing the source text verbatim still counts as a breach of academic integrity. We will return to the problem of plagiarism in the next section, when we continue examining the process of building a document around research, but at this point 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.