7.1: Using and Organizing Information Details

The Scholarly Conversation

As a student you’re participating in a scholarly conversation anytime you write a paper, complete a research project, or make a speech describing, arguing, or synthesizing information on a topic you’ve studied. In this conversation, you are listening to lots of different voices such as your professors, the authors of your textbooks, journalists reporting on an issue, and researchers who have performed studies or analyzed that issue.

Through your academic assignments, you’re adding your voice to the discussion. Depending on the purpose of the assignment you may be:

• synthesizing and drawing connections between what others have said on an issue
• explaining your personal experiences related to the topic, and/or
• expressing your own opinions or conclusions about what the research shows.

For this scholarly conversation to be successful, you have to approach your academic assignments with honesty,use information sources effectively, and give proper credit to the other voices in the conversation through attribution and citation.

These terms - attribution and citation - are going to come up a lot over the next two weeks. Before moving on, here are some quick definitions of the terms:

• Attribution (noun): Crediting ideas, words, or works to a particular author, artist, or person.
• Cite (verb): To give information from a source as support or evidence in a research paper or project.
• Citation (noun): A note describing the original source of ideas, words, or works included in a research paper or project.

Manage Pillar

Being a part of the scholarly conversations means you know how to effectively use and organize information. This is where the Manage pillar comes in. It focuses on the need to use and organize information professionally and ethically. This means:

Individuals understand:

• Their responsibility to be honest in all aspects of information handling and dissemination (e.g. copyright, plagiarism, and intellectual property issues).
• The need to adopt appropriate data-handling methods.
• The role they play in helping others in information seeking and management.
• The need to keep systematic records.
• The importance of storing and sharing information and data ethically.
• The role of professionals, such as data managers and librarians, who can advise, assist, and support with all aspects of information management.

They are able to

• Use reference management software, if appropriate, to manage information.
• Cite printed and electronic sources using suitable referencing styles.
• Create appropriately formatted bibliographies.
• Demonstrate awareness of issues relating to the rights of others including ethics, data protection, copyright, plagiarism, and any other intellectual property issues.
• Meet standards of conduct for academic integrity.
• Use appropriate data management software and techniques to manage data.

Scenario

In order to manage information and take part in a scholarly conversation, we often rely on the works of others. We are using information to help build our knowledge, form educated opinions, and create our own contributions.

So how should we handle this product of creativity (a.k.a information)? Let’s think about a simple example: apple picking in the fall. It is a popular thing to do, especially in our Sierra foothills. Have you ever been to Apple Hill? People come to orchards, get bags or baskets, gather apples, and then line up to weigh them and pay. The farmers’ hard work is being rewarded.

Now imagine a different situation. You worked hard to research and write a very good article that is being published in the college newsletter. You've discovered that your roommate has copied a couple of paragraphs and inserted them into one of her assignments because the topics were related. Was this fair? How were you rewarded for your hard work? Bottom line - she should not have used your intellectual capital without attribution to you. What she did was an act of plagiarism.

Once your ideas become tangible - meaning they're written down on paper, on a computer, on your phone, they become your intellectual personal property and you hold the copyright. This means that no one has the right to reproduce all or any part of it (i.e. copy it) without your permission. If your roommate decides to use some information from your article in her own paper, she should provide a citation. If she is using direct quotes from your article, again, she would need to put double quotes around your words and provide information about the author (you, in this instance) to avoid plagiarism. 

There is a lot to learn about using information legally and ethically, copyright and plagiarism are just two aspects of intellectual property. This knowledge will empower you in your academic work and help you be successful.

Plagiarism Defined

Plagiarism is using someone else’s words or ideas in your academic work without giving credit to the original author. In college, the way we most often give credit is in the form of a citation. Plagiarism can include:

• Summarizing the ideas, statements of fact, or conclusions made by another without citing the source.
• Word-for-word copying (CTRL + V) of work written by someone else without quotation marks and/or a citation.
• Close or extended paraphrasing of another person’s work without acknowledging the source. In other words, you’ve taken someone else’s ideas and changed a few words here and there, but haven’t acknowledged where you got the idea from.
• Using an image, video, or music without permission and/or proper attribution.

In the classroom (and in the world of publishing), documenting your information sources is the only way others can tell how thorough and careful you’ve been in researching your topic. If you don’t tell readers where your information came from, they may think (and many do) that you either made up the information or “stole” it . Failing to cite your sources is plagiarism.

Unintentional Plagiarism

Plagiarism can be intentional, meaning you knowingly copied the words of another person in your paper. Or it can be unintentional, meaning you weren’t trying to pass off someone else’s ideas as your own, but you didn’t properly cite your sources. Unintentional plagiarism often happens when students don’t know citation rules, fail to keep track of their research, or are rushing and/or disorganized when completing an assignment. 

Scenario

Jackie was working on her 10-page research paper at the last minute. It was 3:30 am and her paper was due in class at 9:00 am. She finished the last sentence at 5:15 am, did a spellcheck and voila! Done! Groggy yet awake she went to class, turned in the paper and waited for her grade. She received an email from her professor that read, “There are some major issues with your research paper that I need to discuss with you. Please see me.” Uh oh.

When she nervously went to see him, the professor told Jackie that she hadn’t cited any of her sources, and because she included a lot of direct quotes in her paper, she was guilty of plagiarism. She received an F on her paper and may be referred to the school administration for academic dishonesty.

Academic Honesty

In your college courses, it’s expected that you (and only you) will do the assigned work. By completing the assignments, papers, quizzes, and exams, you are showing that you have mastered the content of the course - meaning you have learned the information and gained the skills covered in that class. (Your grade shows how well you’ve done that.)

When you are dishonest in your academic work, either by cheating or plagiarizing another person’s work, the learning process breaks down.

Plagiarism Detection

You should be aware that our Learning Management System (Canvas) includes a plagiarism detection tool called Vericite. If your instructor is using this tool, your papers and assignments could be compared to a large database of material to search for signs of matching text. If you have not quoted, paraphrased, or cited sources properly, you could be accused of academic dishonesty. 

Consequences of Academic Dishonesty

There are big consequences for academic dishonesty. If you plagiarize or cheat at a Los Rios college, you could face one or more of these consequences:

• Receiving a failing grade on the assignment
• Receiving a lower overall grade in the class
• Failing the class altogether
• Being referred to the College’s Disciplinary Officer and/or
• Being placed on disciplinary probation, suspension or even expulsion from the College.

Even if you are not caught cheating or plagiarizing, you are still damaging your opportunity to learn from the coursework.

Real World Scenario

Students often feel that they are being singled out in regard to plagiarism and academic dishonesty. But that is far from the case. There are numerous examples of scholars and other professionals who have been caught plagiarizing.

Take a look at these headlines...

Another example, with a dramatic outcome, is that of Eugene Tobin. He was the president of Hamilton College in New York State, when it was discovered that he had included plagiarized material in speeches he had given over the course of almost a decade. He resigned from his position as the head of this prestigious institution, admitting his guilt (Isserman, 2003). Other college presidents and administrators have also been caught violating academic trust. If you try a search using the terms plagiarism and college president, you may be dismayed at the number of results.

If you plagiarize in your career, you could face job penalties like firing or suspension, your reputation could be damaged, and you could even face lawsuits.

Clearly, plagiarism and cheating are things you want to avoid.

Plagiarism can be avoided when you learn to give proper credit through attribution and citation and when you learn to use information sources effectively by staying organized throughout the research and writing process. More on that is coming up next.

Why We Cite

One of the best ways to avoid plagiarism and to follow the rules of academic writing is to cite your sources. Students often think about plagiarism and wanting to avoid it when they talk about the reasons to cite a source. It is more than that though. This very short video from North Caroline State University Library explains exactly what a citation is and why we use them.

In your research projects, it’s important to seek out a variety of sources like books, articles, websites, films, etc. These sources will help you define and describe your topic, identify new developments, current events, or emerging research, and see what conclusions or opinions other people have come up with related to your topic.

When you write your paper and present the information you found in your research, you need to say where this information came from. This is called attribution or acknowledging your sources, and it’s usually done through a citation. Again, a citation is a brief note that describes the original source of the ideas.

Citing your sources serves a few purposes:

• It shows your preparation for your research assignment and illustrates the conversation surrounding your topic.
• When you use credible sources, it helps strengthen your argument.
• It allows your reader to learn more by referring them back to the original source.
• It helps you avoid plagiarism by giving credit to the thinkers and authors whose works you are drawing from.

A citation is required anytime you:

• Summarize someone’s ideas on a topic.
• Use a direct quote or copy and paste from a source.
• Paraphrase information you read in a source - meaning you’ve taken someone else’s idea and put it into your own words.
• State a fact that is not considered common knowledge.

Summarizing

Summarizing is when you describe or explain the central ideas or most important information found in a source. You might read a whole 5-page article about an issue, but in your research paper you just describe the main points of that article in one sentence. Summarizing is taking a lot of information and explaining it in as few words as possible. But because you are explaining what you learned from a source, you need to include a citation at the end of the summarizing sentence.

How to Summarize: An Overview

A summary is a brief explanation of a longer text. Some summaries, such as the ones that accompany annotated bibliographies, are very short, just a sentence or two. Others are much longer, though summaries are always much shorter than the text being summarized in the first place.

Summaries of different lengths are useful in research writing because you often need to provide your readers with an explanation of the text you are discussing. This is especially true when you are going to quote or paraphrase from a source.

Of course, the first step in writing a good summary is to do a thorough reading of the text you are going to summarize in the first place. Beyond that important start, there are a few basic guidelines you should follow when you write summary material:

• Stay “neutral” in your summarizing. Summaries provide “just the facts” and are not the place where you offer your opinions about the text you are summarizing. Save your opinions and evaluation of the evidence you are summarizing for other parts of your writing.
• Don’t put quotes inside your summary. Summaries will be more useful to you and your colleagues if you write them in your own words.
• Don’t “cut and paste” from database abstracts. Many of the periodical indexes that are available as part of the library’s database system include abstracts of articles. Do no “cut” this abstract material and then “paste” it into your own annotated bibliography. For one thing, this is plagiarism. Second, “cutting and pasting” from the abstract defeats one of the purposes of writing summaries and creating an annotated bibliography in the first place, which is to help you understand and explain your research.

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Summarizing Information Graphic Description

The information graphic shows a definition of summarizing:

Summarizing is taking the main themes or ideas from your source and explaining or describing them in just a few sentences. An entire chapter of a book or a 5-page article might be summarized in just one or two sentences.

The book, Geek Girl Rising, by Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens is the featured example. In a paper, a summary in APA style would be written as follows:

In their book, Geek Girl Rising, Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens, highlight success stories of women working in technology and provide inspiration for girls wanting to break into this male-dominated industry (2017).

Quoting

Writer's quote (and paraphrase) from research in order to support their points and to persuade their readers. A quote from a piece of evidence in support of a point answers the reader's question, says who?"

This is especially true in academic writing since scholarly readers are most persuaded by effective research and evidence.  For example, readers of an article about a new cancer medication published in a medical journal will be most interested in the scholar’s research and statistics that demonstrate the effectiveness of the treatment.  Conversely, they will not be as persuaded by emotional stories from individual patients about how a new cancer medication improved the quality of their lives.  While this appeal to emotion can be effective and is common in popular sources, these individual anecdotes do not carry the same sort of “scholarly” or scientific value as well-reasoned research and evidence.

Of course, your instructor is not expecting you to be an expert on the topic of your research paper.  While you might conduct some primary research, it’s a good bet that you’ll be relying on secondary sources such as books, articles, and Web sites to inform and persuade your readers.  You’ll present this research to your readers in the form of quotes and paraphrases.

A direct quote includes the exact word-for-word sentences or phrases that you found in a source. When you copy and paste text into your paper, you are directly quoting that source. A direct quote must have quotation marks around it and it must include a citation to show the reader where those words came from.

While quotes and paraphrases are different and should be used in different ways in your research writing (as the examples in this section suggest), they do have a number of things in common.  Both quotes and paraphrases should:

• be “introduced” to the reader, particularly the first time you mention a source;     
• include an explanation of the evidence which explains to the reader why you think the evidence is important, especially if it is not apparent from the context of the quote or paraphrase; and
• include a proper citation of the source.

When to Quote 

the question of when to quote and when to paraphrase depends a great deal on the specific context of the writing and the effect you are trying to achieve.  Learning the best times to quote and paraphrase takes practice and experience.

In general, it is best to use a quote when:

• The exact words of your source are important for the point you are trying to make.  This is especially true if you are quoting technical language, terms, or very specific word choices.
• You want to highlight your agreement with the author’s words.  If you agree with the point the author of the evidence makes and you like their exact words, use them as a quote. 
• You want to highlight your disagreement with the author’s words.  In other words, you may sometimes want to use a direct quote to indicate exactly what it is you disagree about.  This might be particularly true when you are considering the antithetical positions in your research writing projects.

Tips for Quoting

• Introduce your quotes to your reader, especially on first reference.
• Explain the significance of the quote to your reader.
• Cite your quote properly according to the rules of style you are following in your essay.
• Quote when the exact words are important, when you want to highlight your agreement or your disagreement.

Quoting in APA Style - An Example

Consider this BAD example in APA style, of what NOT to do when quoting evidence:

“If the U.S. scallop fishery were a business, its management would surely be fired, because its revenues could readily be increased by at least 50 percent while its costs were being reduced by an equal percentage.” (Repetto, 2001, p. 84).

Again, this is a potentially valuable piece of evidence, but it simply isn’t clear what point the research writer is trying to make with it.  Further, it doesn’t follow the preferred method of citation with APA style.

Here is a revision that is a GOOD or at least BETTER example:

Repetto (2001) concludes that in the case of the scallop industry, those running the industry should be held responsible for not considering methods that would curtail the problems of over-fishing.   “If the U.S. scallop fishery were a business, its management would surely be fired, because its revenues could readily be increased by at least 50 percent while its costs were being reduced by an equal percentage” (p. 84).

Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is when you use your own words to explain something that you learned from a source. Paraphrasing can be a useful way to clearly explain the meaning of information you uncovered through your research. It’s a good way to describe what you’ve learned and also help the reader understand the significance of the information. Paraphrasing is a common writing technique, but it’s also where many students unintentionally plagiarize.

Students unintentionally plagiarize because they:

• Take a sentence from a source and rearrange the words. 
• Use the thesaurus tool to change a few words in a sentence.

To do a good job of paraphrasing, you have to make sure you are using only your words, not the author’s. First, read the original source and think about it. Make a few notes of what you think it means. After that, try explaining the author’s ideas in your own words. It’s helpful if you wait a little while between reading the source and trying to paraphrase it so that the author’s words aren’t quite so fresh in your mind. If there’s a word or phrase that you keep repeating when you try to paraphrase, then you probably should just quote it (with quotation marks and a citation).

When to Paraphrase

In general, it is best to paraphrase when:

• There is no good reason to use a quote to refer to your evidence.  If the author’s exact words are not especially important to the point you are trying to make, you are usually better off paraphrasing the evidence.
• You are trying to explain a particular piece of evidence in order to explain or interpret it in more detail.  This might be particularly true in writing projects like critiques.
• You need to balance a direct quote in your writing.  You need to be careful about directly quoting your research too much because it can sometimes make for awkward and difficult to read prose.  So, one of the reasons to use a paraphrase instead of a quote is to create balance within your writing.

Tips for Paraphrasing

• Introduce paraphrases to your reader, especially on first reference.
• Explain the significance of the paraphrased material to your reader.
• Cite your paraphrased ideas properly according to the rules of style you are following in your essay.
• Paraphrase when the exact words aren’t important, when you want to explain the point of your evidence, or when you need to balance the direct quotes in your writing.

Paraphrasing in APA Style - An Example

Paraphrasing in APA style is slightly different from MLA style as well.  Consider first this BAD example of what NOT to do in paraphrasing from a source in APA style:

Computer criminals have lots of ways to get away with credit card fraud (Cameron, 2002).

The main problem with this paraphrase is there isn’t enough here to adequately explain to the reader what the point of the evidence really is.  Remember:  your readers have no way of automatically knowing why you as a research writer think that a particular piece of evidence is useful in supporting your point.  This is why it is key that you introduce and explain your evidence.

Here is a revision that is GOOD or at least BETTER:

Cameron (2002) points out that computer criminals intent on committing credit card fraud are able to take advantage of the fact that there aren’t enough officials working to enforce computer crimes.  Criminals are also able to use the technology to their advantage by communicating via email and chat rooms with other criminals.

Again, this revision is better because the additional information introduces and explains the point of the evidence.  In this particular example, the author’s name is also incorporated into the explanation of the evidence as well.  In APA, it is preferable to weave in the author’s name into your essay, usually at the beginning of a sentence.  However, it would also have been acceptable to end an improved paraphrase with just the author’s last name and the date of publication in parentheses.

Common Knowledge

Common Knowledge is a term for facts that are generally well-known, not controversial, and easy to look up. When you state something that is common knowledge in your paper, you don’t have to include a citation because you are assuming that the reader already knows this information. Common knowledge can vary somewhat depending on who the audience for your research project is. If you aren’t sure whether something you are stating in your paper is common knowledge, always play it safe and include a citation.  

Machine readable text description of preceding graphic.

How to Cite

Now that we know when we have to cite our sources, let’s talk about how we cite our sources.

Citation styles are sets of rules to follow for citing sources and formatting research papers.

Professionals in different disciplines or subject areas have put together these styles to help writers in their field write well, convey important information, and organize their research.

MLA (Modern Language Association)	APA (American Psychological Association)	Chicago

You don’t need to memorize all the rules of each citation style, you really just need to know where to go to get guidance and help. We'll be focusing more on this next week.

Regardless of which style you are using for your research assignment, there are generally two parts to a citation in academic writing. The first part tells the reader when you have included information from a source in your paper. This could be done through an in-text/parenthetical citation (MLA, APA) or through a footnote/endnote (Chicago, etc.).

In this first part of the citation, you are signalling to the reader that you’ve just provided information or ideas that you gained from someone else. You show this by including information about who’s responsible for the information. This could include things like the author’s last name, title, date of publication and/or page number.

The second part of a citation is generally a full description of the source organized in a list at the end of your paper. This list may be called a Works Cited List (MLA style), a References list (APA style) or a Bibliography (Chicago style). Include a citation for each source that you’ve referenced in your paper. This full citation will allow the reader to find the source if they want to read it.

We'll be using APA Style in this class. It is used by many disciplines, including Early Childhood Education, Psychology, Sociology, Communication Studies, and Library Science.

Ethical Issues and Intellectual Property

Knowing how to properly cite sources shows that you understand the practice of professional and ethical use of information. Ethical treatment of information assumes that you are treating an author’s rights appropriately and avoiding an act of academic dishonesty such as plagiarism.

As a creator of information yourself, you should understand the importance of respecting other authors’ rights and following the general rules of academic integrity, including being cognizant of copyright, and other issues associated with intellectual property.

Anatomy of An Academic Journal Article

In order to use and cite information effectively, you must understand what it is you're reading. Before we get into the assignments this week, I want to take a minute to explore more deeply the content of academic journal articles.

We've talked about these sources in earlier weeks of the course. These are the sources your instructors will often call "scholarly articles" or "scholarly sources." College instructors love it when you use academic journal articles because many of them see this as the most "valuable" type of academic information. We'll be exploring the value of information in coming weeks, but what I mean by that gets to the heart of most instructors' passions.

They are academics and scholars. They have chosen a field that allows them to teach other people about their discipline expertise every day. Because of this, they think very highly of academic writing and research and it will benefit you greatly as a student if you understand how to read and use these types of sources. I am going to break down one of the most common types of academic journal article, which is to present empirical research - or research that the authors have designed and collected and then presented in the form of an academic paper.

Common Sections of an Empirical Research Academic Journal Article

Title

All journal articles are going to have a title. Sometimes titles are quite descriptive and you can immediately understand what the article is about. Other times, you might need to read the abstract to get a true picture of what's included in the article.

Abstract

An abstract is the very first thing the reader will see under the article's title. It is a one-paragraph summary and can be very useful for researchers. You should know immediately after reading the abstract whether the article is relevant to your research or if it's something you should pass up. In the databases, you can click on the little magnifying glass to the right of an article's title to read the abstract without having to open up the entire article. As you're searching for sources, don't spend a lot of time reading beyond the abstract - you'll do that later as you begin organizing your thoughts and how you will use each source in your research assignment.

Introduction

This part of the paper will introduce the reader to the author(s)' research question. Just like in science class, researchers will pose a question, decide how they're going to go about answering that question (usually a survey or treatment of subjects), administer their study, and then analyze the results. The introduction will lay all of this out for you so you know exactly what information the researchers were trying to find.

Literature Review

The literature review may be its own section or might be part of the introduction. This is the section in which the authors take time to summarize other research that has been done that relates to their research question. This section can be very powerful to you as a researcher because you will often find other sources that are mentioned that could also be powerful evidence for your topic. Sometimes, researchers will write an entire paper that is a review of the literature. The embedded research guide below includes an example of a single paper that is a literature review.

Methods

This is the section in which the author(s) describe their research subjects and how they went about researching and coming to conclusions. They will sometimes describe specific research methods and ways of analysis. At this level in your college career, those sections aren't necessarily the most useful. It might be useful to describe the types and number of research subjects, and perhaps even include specific questions that were asked, but getting into the minute details of the research method probably isn't necessary for the level of academic writing you will be faced with in community college. If you continue onto graduate and/or post graduate school, these sections will become more useful.

Results

This is the section in which authors describe what they found. This can be one of the most useful sections for you as a novice researcher. This is where you might grab quotes or evidence that could be used to make points in your own writing.

Discussion

The discussion section allows the authors to lay out how their findings impact the body of research in that area. They might show how their research is in line with other similar studies or they might show how their findings dispute other published research. Authors will often point out limitations to their research and make suggestions of other studies that could be conducted to help flesh out questions that remain.

Conclusion

This is the section in which the authors summarize their entire paper. They will often restate their research question, give a summary of their findings, and again point out where further research can be done. This section can be very useful to novice researchers. You might even want to start here.

On that note, I think the most useful sections to novice researchers are the Introduction, Results/Discussion, and Conclusion. You'll be able to practice this in this week's assignments and later in the course.

The embedded information below is from the Distance Education Research Guide has more information on types of academic journal articles, differences between scholarly and popular sources, and defines primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. You might want to bookmark this page as a reference for other research assignments you might encounter.

This chapter was compiled, reworked, and/or written by Andi Adkins Pogue and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Original sources used to create content (also licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 unless otherwise noted):

Krause, S.D. (2016). Quoting, paraphrasing, and avoiding plagiarism. J. Kepka (Ed.) In Oregon writes open writing text. https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/oregonwrites/chapter/quoting-paraphrasing-and-avoiding-plagiarism

Los Rios Libraries. (2020). Avoiding plagiarism and citing sources. Los Rios libraries information literacy tutorials. https://lor.instructure.com/resources/44fe428e10b347bea9892a63482f55fd?shared 

Manage: Organizing information effectively and ethically. (2016). In G. Bobish & T. Jacobson (Eds.), The information literacy user's guide. Milne Publishing. https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/the-information-literacy-users-guide-an-open-online-textbook/chapter/manage-organizing-information-effectively-and-ethically/

North Carolina State University Libraries. (2014). Citation: A (very) brief introduction. https://youtu.be/IMhMuVvXCVw. NOTE: This source is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC-SA US

References

Isserman, Maurice. (2003). Plagiarism: A lie of the mind. Chronicle of Higher Education 49(34), p. B12.