PART V. RESEARCH

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When I was assigned to research osmosis for my third-grade class in the 1970s, I walked to the science shelf in our elementary school library and gathered 9 or 10 books that boasted the most colorful pictures. When I wrote a university-level thesis on the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, I visited several research libraries to collect armloads of books and academic journals to support my claim. The pre-web research field was narrow in comparison to the splendor of the internet, but at least we were assured that skilled reference librarians had vetted the materials we found. The credibility of your sources can determine the success of your claim, and in today’s world, the task of determining credibility has grown steadily more daunting. How do you determine whether the information you find was gathered by experts or imagined by preteens? How do you decide whether to move ahead with evidence that sounds reasonable or discard it for fear of losing the trust of your audience?