Research Papers Across the Disciplines

1. Research Papers Across the Disciplines University Writing Center Cal Poly Pomona

2. Research Papers are Easy • If you start early. • If you ask a good research question. • If you work systematically. • If you do a little bit every day. • If you take good notes on your reading.

3. Research Papers are Hard • When you wait until the last minute. • If your question is too broad. • If you work in a haphazard fashion. • If you try to research and write the paper in two days. • If your notes are disorganized and missing vital information.

4. Writing the Paper • If you have good notes about the right information, the paper almost writes itself. • If what you have is is a collection of: • Photocopies with highlighting. • Scrawled notes on scraps of paper. • Web page printouts. • On-line information pasted into Word documents. • It’s going to be tough.

5. Choosing a Topic • Should be important, interesting and worth exploring. • Don’t worry if you are not sure what you think about your topic at first. • Formulate your topic as a question you are trying to answer.

6. Narrowing a Topic • You are not writing a book. • It’s only a short paper, and it needs to be detailed. • You need to narrow your topic. • You narrow by setting limits, such as time and place.

7. Group Identity • Race • Gender • Ethnicity • Sexual Orientation • Class • Age • Disability • Religion

8. Issue • Employment • Housing • Education • Politics • Media • Violence

9. Place • Nation • State • Region • City • Neighborhood • Street

10. Time • History • Century • Decade • Year • Month • Day • Hour

11. Beginning Your Searches • Choose your search terms carefully. • Make sure they are spelled correctly! • Try the Cal Poly “Websites by Subject” page. Research librarians have selected the best of the best, by discipline. • Don’t take the first 10 hits on a general Yahoo! search and stop.

12. General Engineering Sites  Subject Guides & Directories  Aerospace Engineering   Chemical Engineering   Civil Engineering  Electrical & Computer Engineering  Energy & Fuels  Environmental Engineering  Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering  Materials Engineering   Mechanical Engineering   Patents  Standards & Specifications  Technical Reports  Transportation & Highway Engineering  Engineering Databases Websites for Engineering

13. ACM Digital Library--Association for Computing Machinery publications ACS Web--Journals & other publications of the American Chemical Society Agricola--Agriculture, animal science, foods and nutrition AIP Journal Center--Complete contents of many American Institute of Physics journals Applied Science Full Text (WilsonWeb)-- All engineering disciplines and the applied sciences ASCE Publications--Research journals of the American Society of Civil Engineers BasicBIOSIS--Covers 350 core life science journals Biological & Agricultural Index Plus (WilsonWeb)--Agriculture and the life sciences Books24x7--Ebooks from leading information technology & business publishers (Register using your Cal Poly Pomona email address) Clase/Periodica--Index of Latin American journals in the sciences and humanities Compendex/Engineering Village 2--Engineering and applied science journals, conference papers, reports Databases for Engineering

14. Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology--(Kirk-Othmer) Chemical technology and related fields Encyclopedia of Materials: Science & Technology--Materials properties, applications, processing FSTA: Food Science & Technology Abstracts [CD-ROM]--Food science and technology, human nutrition General Science Full Text (WilsonWeb)--Covers popular and scholarly science journals GeoRef--Journals, reports, and other publications in geology and related fields IEEE Xplore (IEEE/IEE Electronic Library)--Journals and conference proceedings from IEEE and IEE, IEEE standards Databases for Engineering

15. MathSciNet--Bibliographic access to the world's mathematical literature MEDLINE (FirstSearch)--Index to worldwide medical and biomedical literature Nutrition Abstracts & Reviews A: Human & Experimental--Research on human nutrition Online Guide to Computing Literature--Bibliographic database from key publishers in computing Safari Tech Books Online--An online, searchable database of technical books Science Citation Index [CD-ROM]--Citation and subject searching of science journals Science Direct--Over 1700 journals; science, technology, medicine, business, social science Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical & Electronics Engineering--Electrical, electronics, computer engineering; related fields Wiley Interscience--300+ scientific, technical, medical, business & professional journals Databases for Engineering

16. Don’t Forget Books and Journals • Books and journals still have the most credible in-depth content. • Bibliographies in the backs of books and journals are a valuable resource for research leads. • When in doubt, ask a librarian.

17. The Old-fashioned Way • The pre-computer way to do research was with notecards. • Notecards allow you to accumulate information over a period of time and then re-sort it. • Many faculty still use notecards, because they have real advantages.

18. Notecards • Each bibliography card has information for one source, and a number that you assign. • Each notecard has one fact, idea, event, description, or quote, plus the number you assigned to the source and the page where the information was found. • The notecard is a nugget of information that can be fit into a larger pattern that you devise.

19. Using Notecards • When you write a note, you decide whether to paraphrase, summarize, or quote. • If you paraphrase or summarize, the note can go into the paper, with documentation, pretty much as written. • If you quote, you have to do the paraphrasing later. This is how plagiarism happens to famous authors.

20. Using Notecards (Cont.) • You can also have “idea cards” on which you write your own insights and ideas. • It is extremely important to record the number of the source, and the page number on each card. • Library research is the consistent, organized, accumulation of information about a particular topic over a period of time. • Don’t assume that you will remember the source, or what is paraphrased and what is quoted.

21. Writing with Notecards • Create subsection cards for the different parts of your paper. Lay them out in front of you. • Deal the stack of notecards out into the subsection piles. • Sort the subsection piles into the order you think you will use the material.

22. Writing with Notecards (Cont.) • Take the pile for the first subsection. Look at the first card. Start writing. • As you use each card, turn it over. • If you don’t use a card, but might later, put it at the back of the stack. • When the stack is finished, you have probably written the first section. • Continue for each subsection pile.

23. Using the Bibliography Cards • When a source turns out not to be useful, remove its card from the active stack. • When the paper is written, alphabetize all the bibliography cards that remain in the stack. • This is your bibliography or “works cited” list.

24. The New-fangled Way • Most people search on-line databases for full-text articles. • When they find something good, they copy and paste it into a Word document. • Sometimes they forget to copy the URL, the author or the date. • They end up with a long Word file, that ends up becoming the paper.

25. The New-fangled Way (Cont.) • Advantage: You don’t have to retype everything. • Disadvantage: The long Word file is hard to re-sort. It is hard to process the information. • Another disadvantage: The danger of plagiarism.

26. Recommendations • Use the “find” command to do keyword searches in your document. • Use cut and paste to sort blocks of information into categories. • When you move a block, make sure you move the source information with it. • Paraphrase information before you use it. Make sure direct quotes are in quotation marks.

27. Cal Poly’s Plagiarism Policy • Plagiarism is intentionally or knowingly presenting words, ideas or work of others as one’s own work. Plagiarism includes copying homework, copying lab reports, copying computer programs using a work or portion of a work written or created by another but not crediting the source, using one’s own work completed in a previous class for credit in another class without permission, paraphrasing another’s work without giving credit, and borrowing or using ideas without giving credit. (Catalog, Cal Poly Pomona, 1999-2001, p. 49).

28. Cal Poly’s Policy (Cont.) • Instances of suspected plagiarism are reported to the office of Judicial Affairs. • Generally, in the first instance, the student is put on probation for one year. • In the second instance the student is suspended for at least two quarters and his or her name is placed in a permanent file for Academic Dishonesty. • The third instance ends the student’s career at Cal Poly Pomona (and all other CSU campuses).

29. Types of Plagiarism • Type I: Simple Fraud. The student turns in a paper written by someone else. • Type II: The Pastiche. The student turns in a paper that is assembled out of other texts, which may or may not be cited.   • Type III: Insufficient Paraphrase. The student cites sources and attempts to paraphrase them, but the text is very dependent on the sources for language and sentence structure. Sometimes called “Patchwriting.”

30. Introduction • What is your thesis or research question? • Why is this topic important now? • How can you make the reader interested? • What background does the reader need to know about?

31. Literature Review • The lit review shows that you know something about your topic. • What are the main issues? • What are the different points of view? • What do experts generally agree about? • What do experts disagree about? • What is new in this field? • Organize the lit review by issue, perspective, history, or in some other way. Don’t just do a note card dump.

32. Discussion Section • In the discussion section, you present the arguments that support your point of view. • Support your arguments with facts, ideas, and authorities from your research. • Think about which experts you agree with and which you don’t. Your lit review should be objective and balanced. In the discussion section you are generally making a case for your position.

33. Conclusion • If you wrote a rough thesis and intro, by this point in the process your views may have changed and you may need to update your introduction. • The conclusion should follow directly from your discussion. You may also want to summarize your main points.

34. Documentation • Follow the style manual indicated by your instructor. Different disciplines use different styles, and sometimes different professors have different preferences. • Ask if you need to use in-text documentation, endnotes or footnotes. • The format for the reference or bibliography page is different from an endnote or footnote. • All systems record the author, title, source, publisher, date, and page number. Record this information for every source you use. • Some older manuals have no information about documenting internet sources. Make sure you use an up-to-date style manual.

35. Documentation Styles • Modern Language Association (MLA) is common in English and Foreign Languages. • American Psychological Association (APA) is common in Psychology and other social sciences. • The Chicago Style Manual is another common style. The Turabian manual is similar to Chicago style.

36. Remember • Start early. • Narrow your topic. • Take good notes, including sources. • Sort your information. • Document your sources according to the appropriate style. • Don’t plagiarize.