How to Use Sources in Research Writing

hi everyone this is david and welcome to today's live chat in which we're going to discuss how to use sources you know this academic writing usually involves the use of sources and whether you're on the bachelor's master's or doctoral level there are certain common usages rules standards that can be applied across all three levels and so what i hope to do today is to cover some of those standards some of those general rules of thumb that can be applied hopefully to your situation okay so let's go ahead and get started thank you may thank you very much and we're going to be talking about how to use sources in all three of those standards research papers theses and dissertations one of the first things i wanted to cover today is the verb use of verb tenses in research projects as you've no doubt found out by now your research projects often consist of very distinct parts abstracts introductions literature reviews methodology results conclusions findings and so forth it just so happens that there is a general kind of tense that is associated with each of those parts before we get into those let me first give you a couple of caveats one when it comes to figuring out what tints you should use be sure to review the any guidelines for using verb tenses according to the style guide you're using apa mla ama c tripoli and so forth now that's one caveat a second caveat has to do with for whom you're writing oftentimes journals magazines even your own department will have specific guidelines on which verb tense to use so please consider what i'm about to tell you simply general guidelines general rules of thumb and we will be noting exceptions to that those general rules as we go along let's begin at the top of most research studies which is the abstract i reviewed a number of abstracts from a variety of different fields in preparation for this presentation i found almost without exception that abstracts are written in the present tense this research examines this paper presents the study concludes now there are some exceptions to that some of them are quite logical for example you will find that whenever you are describing methods whether it be in the abstract or in the research study itself you will use the past tense whenever describing methods and results so methods and results always use the past tense whether in the abstract or in the body of your document one other notable exception is studies written following the ama american medical association guidelines in which case the abstract uses the past tense now if there are any questions along the way please uh let me know looks like we have some more people joining us nicola hello nicola greetings to you as well and of course brandon hello brandon i think i missed you last week but it's great to see you in konichiwa to you as well brandon okay from the abstract we move next to the introduction if you remember the introduction is that part of your project where you provide context for your topic where you describe the problem that your topic addresses where you also announce what the particular aims or purposes of your research study are so you do use the present simple present whenever setting up your topic for example research suggests that impaired social skills are so you're providing background more background few interview interventions currently exist there is a paucity of services that is all background material that is presented in the present tense now there are some logical exceptions to this whenever you leave the present and refer to previous research especially by your team or your authorship that shift from present to the past is indeed contained in the past so you're writing into introduction and you say this research team in an earlier study discovered so you are contrasting the earlier discovery in the past tense with your current findings in the present tense concluding statements if you present any of those concluding statements or outcome statements in your introduction they will be in the past tense because remember methods and results in a research study are always in the past tense and also one other exception whenever you discuss or present or state the aim of your study the purpose of your study that will also be in the past tense because the study has already been concluded as we move on you'll see fewer exceptions for example in the lit review that is very much straightforward essentially always in the past tense pearson discovered the authors investigated confirmed compared all of those kinds of verbs will be in the past tense now the one exception is whenever you shift from reporting on this past research to giving an opinion or analysis of the research so you're shifting from a documentation of what was done in the past to your current analysis of it so you would stay say something like my study refutes the earlier work done by that refutation is taking place in the present tense in this study literature review pretty straightforward except for that one exception same for the methods and results i did not find any exceptions to the use of the past tense in the past as using the passive voice in my study in preparation for this presentation in your methods and in your results you will maintain the simple past the glucose molecule was added you're describing your experiment at this stage the gluco glucose molecule was added now when it comes to your analysis of the data you want to put the emphasis on the data not on you the researcher so that is why you shift to the present paths of voice the data were analyzed and you completely leave out by whom it was analyzed because you are the author of the study and you are describing your methods so there is no need to mention your name you want to keep it in the third person keep the emphasis on the content not on the person there is one notable exception to using the past tense and the methods in the results section and that is whenever you shift to an explanation of a figure table chart diagram or other graphic so you would say things like table four shows data for the first trial are displayed in graph graph number or graph labeled so those are the only two the only exception really when it comes to table figures illustrations diagrams otherwise meth as a result keep it in the past including the passive voice discussion section that is depending upon whether simple past or simple present what you are discussing if you are summarizing your findings you use the past tense because the experiment took place in the past if you're interpreting or discussing your current findings then that is something that is happening in the present so you say this study confirms however if you were if you were summarizing your findings it would be the study yielded so the difference between summarizing and interpreting the the results for the discussion section conclusions also pretty straightforward they're pretty much always in the simple present whenever you are applying findings whenever you are stating implications when you're if you're suggesting further research it is the simple present this study confirms that a current limitation of this study is further research is urgently needed now the only time that you deviate dvf the only time you deviate from that is whenever you present some kind of projection about the universal ongoing verifiable truth or claim that you're making results from this study have led to a common perception led to a common standard for use in and that is the one time that you do that so there we have our verb tenses let me pause and see if we have any kind of uh need to boot somebody i understand why people think it's funny to come in and say weird things best boo is it better let me put this up bismuth is it better that we use passive voice or we say idea passive voice bizmo without the shadow of a doubt unless you have a style guide which encourages you to use the present tense you will be using the passive voice unless you have a a professor a um a superintendent a someone who is the chair of your degree committee unless you have somebody in that kind of authority telling you not to use the passive voice you would hide references to yourself into researchers by using the passive voice mr g is a little late your your tardiness was recorded mr g and uh you points will be taken off mr g what makes a paper a good argument for use in citing in a paper excellent question mr g you would look at that paper for three criteria credibility timeliness and relevance first you establish credibility by seeing where it was published and by looking at its scope score which is provided to you by various services whenever you research an article and you want to avoid articles with low scope scores and go with articles with higher scope scores you also want to see whether or not that author has published other studies in peer-reviewed journals and you also want to see about the credibility of as i said that particular peer review journal that's credibility timeliness some schools some departments limit you to 2 10 years in the past uh that's a kind of general rule of thumb that can be violated depending upon your topic there are certain evergreen principles there are certain standards if you will that were introduced by seminal articles published in the past and certainly it's fine to reference those and certainly it's also fine to reference textbooks that were published more than 10 years ago as long as their current editions of that textbook um let's see so we got credibility timeliness and relevance what makes a particular study especially credible or important or usable is whether or not it is directly relevant to what you are discussing so those are the three criteria mr g credibility timeliness and relevance okay any other questions before we move on to the second part here okay well i will continue sharing and we will go into signal phrases your one of the things you will do most frequently one of the challenges you will most often face is how to stitch together elements of all the different research articles that you have found and so it is the function of a signal phrase to introduce information from a source regardless of whether that source was quoted or summarized you want to always for the first time especially use a signal phrase to introduce that source in that signal phrase you can also give certain information about that source publication date position of the authors that kind of thing let's take a look at one common signal phrase here you see a signal phrase acting as a kind of transition between two parts we begin with a statement this is the student author's own statement something that he or she has discovered one explanation for the coyotes successful invasion is their advanced communication skills now you've got to back up what you meant by communication skills and so to do that you're going to quote an animal behaviorist so notice how the signal phrase worked in philip lerner's credentials or philip lerner's discipline in order to make the quotation more relevant then that signal phrase is set off by a comma and then comes what the signal phrase introduces which in this case is a quotation but signal phrases are also introduced by in signal phrases also introduce paraphrases so here you have a paraphrase of that quote notice everything is exactly the same except one has quote marks because it is a direct quotation one had does not have quote marks because it is a paraphrase or a summary one other point to be made about signal phrases at this point is that signal phrases once you get into these uses of sources once they've already been introduced you can then begin to vary the position of your signal phrase a signal phrase can come at the beginning in the middle and at the end and so having that kind of variety is sometimes important for you to better fit into the discipline for what you're writing now another purpose of signal phrases is to allow you to avoid what is called ghost quotations or you may have heard dropped quotations ghost quotations or drop quotations are quotations which lack a signal phrase here we have a compassionate communicative leader can create a positive work atmosphere that you the student author's thoughts and words then you want to back that up with a quote unfortunately you forgot to introduce that quote a distant manager can make the workplace seem gloomy oh really well who said that that's where we get the idea of dropped quotation the person is missing like a ghost and they've disappeared so that definitely needs to be introduced so here we have the signal phrase however baker ed al found and then we have the quotation notice that the signal phrase also was used to supply a transition or a bridge between the two and that's another function of signal phrases sometimes they are important to provide what are called thought bridges so sometimes you really have to work to create a logical relevant connection between sources so here we have the impact of diverse in a workplace can be addressed with variety techniques for example barker and gower there's one technique and then notice that transition however this approach may not be suitable for all companies and here's that thought bridge when linguistic differences are an issue for example translators play us a crucial role and that thought bridge that then leads us into the short little signal phrase teo de rescue addresses that's an actual name by the way i'm assuming is is greek so sometimes a signal phrase must be accompanied by a thought bridge these these are thought bridges are especially important in literature and reviews okay we have another question here brandon asked since all projects in with confirms that and my correction assuming the research prizes are opinionated theory supported by i don't think researchers would use the word opinion the research studies follow the scientific method and the scientific method really does not provide room for opinions the scientific method provides room for conclusions based upon evidence and these conclusions are never stated in a final way you would say something like data from this study supports the conclusion so in other words it's not saying this this absolutely makes this conclusion true or confirms it is much more tentative than that brendan besbu can we write the concluding sentence of two paragraphs at the end of the second paragraph good question i that's a very good question i had to think about exactly what you're going on so basically you're dividing your discussion up into two paragraphs and the conclusion of that particular discussion comes at the end of the second paragraph that is a common situation investment so thank you for that question yes you can make your conclusion at the end of the second paragraph of that specific discussion however the two paragraphs must still be linked together you still must have a transition between the paragraphs so that the reader sees that they are connected in light of the discussion that you're conducting okay i think that is our questions for the moment and i thank you for those questions okay so we we've covered thought bridge we also now want to cover this whole idea of reporting verbs these verbs like you see here according to claimed found provides acknowledged those come in in a category called reporting verbs and reporting verbs can be divided up into three categories for you to think about as you try to use reporting verbs more precisely and those three categories are tentative reporting verbs where you are stating something that it suggests or speculates and so you will use words like suggest speculates implies postulates etc and i'm going to give you a whole list of these tentative reporting verbs in just a moment then there are the neutral reporting verbs that's where you providing just a documentarian kind of a view of things when i when a source reports explain you use the neutral reporting burns especially when you are describing someone's methods or when you are reporting your own methods of course when you were doing that they would be in the past tense a strong reporting verb now we're talking about something like brandon was referencing when you're making a claim when you're put forwarding put putting forth a positive argument in support of uh in support of a claim so you would say things like the study asserts this study serves to refute challenge the study challenges previous research those kinds of things now here is a list of all the reporting verbs that i could find put into those three categories of strong neutral and tentative and you can download this pdf using this link right here i probably need to share my screen if i'm going to do this okay so let's see what happens when i click on this and there you see the pdf downloading are you guys seeing that i uploaded it on my google drive if you have any problems whatsoever uh finding it just email me or post a comment to this video and i'll be sure to get one to you but i tried to fit everything on one page so that you could kind of have it at your side so that whenever you're writing your research reports especially in the literature review it can act as a kind of theosaurus of reporting verbs for you and i think it might make your writing a little more speedy fluent easy oh okay you're welcome mr g you're welcome bees boo okay well that concludes my presentation took a little bit longer than i anticipated my apologies for that so you guys now feel free we are in the question q a portion so please feel free to ask your questions okay i know we've got a little bit of a lag here so i will give you just a moment to put in your questions let's see who we have here today may satish kumar hello satish nicola or nikolai i'm sorry if i pronounce your name incorrectly please correct me brandon best boo rama and best food thank you for all the views on on my videos i i'm glad they have been of help to you on us i get to i get the buddha noise again okay mr g and ask the question now could you please give us a practical example of citing a paper or book of which title is in a language other than english arabic for example if you're if the rest of your paper is in english mr g you would go ahead and translate that title into the english alphabet i'm pretty sure that that is correct i can look that up real fast for you but if memory serves that is the standard procedure if you're writing in english all of your script must be in english now tams hello tams welcome to the chat presentation how to write a literature review i have three tams so if you go to my channel or if you even just go to go i'll go to uh google or youtube and you type in literature review um i have a a video called how to write a literature review in 30 minutes or less and it's got almost 2 million views so i'm pretty sure it will come up quickly for you now mr g okay i'm going to look that up on ap epa yeah here is the rule i'll paste it into the chat window mr g there it is mr gene titles and names written in non-latin scripts must be transliterated okay next question please that was a good one had to go way back in the old memory banks for that one excuse me okay waiting for the next question mind if i get a sip while i'm waiting wow so do we get to finish early today usually we go for longer than an hour so i am i am shocked by this my shocked face oh here's a question when we mention the author's name in the paragraph we have to use both first and last name and do we name them good question baseball in mla modern language association the first time that you mention an author you must use the first and last name after that first mention it is last name only the other style guides excuse me apa last name only aama last name only chicago it's kind of up to you i might need to look that up i think you're using mla aren't you best beau looking up i'm almost there okay are you talking about vesma are you talking about an in-text citation or or a parenthetical citation or are you talking about a narrative citation where the author's name is a part of your sentence okay uh never mind um they're both the same only last names whether it is a parenthetical citation within parentheses or whether it's a narrative citation where the author's names are a functional part of your sentence it is last names only are you if you're if you're writing a scientific paper bespoke what style guide are you using apa ama ieee cse what stock guide are you using because these things really do come down to the specific rules published by that particular style guide okay how about the numbered style and here you must be talking about chicago or harvard in the number style and numbered style you give first name and last name in a footnote and in the bibliography yeah yeah if it's a footnote and or bibliography you use first and last names if you're using chicago but i i really need to know what style guide you have been assigned and what style guide you are to follow aki ikea welcome chat to the chat ikea i don't think i've had the pleasure on of working with you before and aki asked the question hi dr what's your video how to write a literary review in 30 minutes that's very helpful my ask how to research and sort out the information well from articles before start writing yes aki we actually did a live stream on that i think two weeks ago and the title of the live stream i believe was how to read a journal article in 10 minutes or less and so ikea if you would go to my channel and study that live stream it gives you a very specific methodology very specific steps and it breaks down each step in each part of a research article it breaks it down as to what to look for and how to read it other than that ikea i would say here's what i do i and i'm currently taking courses online too by the way i when reading a research article will open up a word or text document and i will copy and paste key phrases and when i'm finished reading that article i will then hit return a lot of time so that i don't see what i copied and pasted and then after i re-read what i copied and pasted i will then without looking at anything else write my summary of it after i'm finished writing my summary i'll go back and check to get any specific details that i need and to make sure that what i've said is correct on target whatever may do you have a presentation video on searching articles for lit review no i don't may but that's a pretty good idea isn't it mae can you tell me what your topic is and any problems that you've had this might be one of those times that the answers might be really specific to a particular topic usually when students are having problems finding sources for the lit review their research problem is either too narrow or too broad so if you could provide me that statement of your research problem i would appreciate it research question whatever best boo for review papers is it better to add figures and tables and how do we make them there they are tricky well you only want to use figures and tables when they are called for and figures and tables are generally only used in the results section and how do you make them there are various tools out there to create tables and figures so it depends whether you want to make a figure whether you want to make a table those kinds of things i would for example excel once you put in data in excel you can have it make a a table for you powerpoint will also allow you to input data it will make a table for you figures are usually uh you usually get your figures from someplace else and so you import them as jpegs and place them into your text and then cite them that might be an interesting topic for another presentation bespoke is there anybody else on the chat who would like to see a video on how to use uh images tables figures diagrams charts that kind of thing is it good to build a whole paragraph on one reference peripheral to use a mix of verbs to show the right gosh that really depends bespo are you you must be talking about your literature review here if you're talking about your literature review then it's best for you to make it kind of 60 40 70 30. 70 summary of the source and 30 you're commenting on it and you're attaching it or creating a thought bridge for it to another source if you're thinking about something else let me know if you're thinking if you're talking about using sources to support your argument then that's a different answer all together in which case i need to give you uh or refer you to some different videos on my site that shows you how to use what's called the the sandwich effect whenever you're writing a body paragraph that is in your in your um the body of your paper proper um because you you guys desmond is writing about literature whenever you're in that section of your paper it's best to follow the sandwich method the sandwich method is you state what you think to be true and real in your own words defining any terms that need to be defined explaining what you need to be explained explained then after that the next layer of the sandwich is any source material that supports what you just said and then after that the last layer is your commentary that then ties together the source information with your overall point so it's you source information you top slice of bread the meat the bottom slice of the bread and i do have videos on my channel that described that if you email me best boo i will pick out one or two in particular for you you're welcome uh you're welcome aku misty thank you trying to get prepped for starting msn nursing admin in march struggle with paraphrasing okay here's the most common problem i find in students who are attempting to paraphrase they don't understand that it's okay and necessary to repeat key words it is impossible to do a paraphrase without repeating keywords a paraphrase doesn't mean putting it in your own words if you've been given that advice it's absolutely wrong forget it a paraphrase means i'm giving you my version i am translating it into my way of saying it and in doing so i will need to repeat certain keywords for example let's take and make up a quote although the media assumes that breast cancer is the number one killer of women in america it is actually colon cancer that takes more lives there's my quote my paraphrase of that would be surprisingly breast cancer does not kill more women than any other form of cancer colon cancer is the primary cause of cancer deaths among women now do you see the key words i repeated there you have to repeat women you have to repeat breast cancer you have to repeat colon cancer you have to repeat death so that's the primary fault i find among students who are attempting to paraphrase okay you're welcome makuu ahmad khan hey some people don't put sources in their articles they still not plagiarize well that means it's their own original work ahmed if there are no sources that means they are writing about their own conclusions their own insights their own study their own methods their own results their own whatever yeah so there's a big distinction between sections of articles that are based upon prior research you'll see sources and in the introduction especially in the lit review but you won't see any sources in the methodology section and in the results section and in the conclusion section so that's pretty common of all authors yes okay i got that one i hope okay nesmo is it possible to cite a paper based upon its abstract alone at your own peril citing works based upon their abstract alone means that you very well may be missing out on some really important information that you need for your particular paper if that abstract is presenting the kind of information you want then yeah yeah by all means yeah sure no one's going to know whether or not you read only the abstract i mean figures and tables that summarizes information from a collection of papers yeah i think the same rules would apply to that bismuth yeah the same rules would apply to all figures and tables in terms of where they belong how they're configured that kind of thing okay mitzi you're welcome best boo uh ahmad that really depends upon the style i am not familiar with any styles that do not first use citation formats that are not hyperlinked in other words author date author date page that kind of thing now you certainly do see a lot of articles where those citations have embedded hyperlinks in them and that's just fine that's very helpful as a matter of fact some publications require you to embed hyperlinks in your citations oh mace topic type to a diabetic prevention or reverse using stem cells okay let me answer let me answer this next question may and i'll show you some quick kind of search techniques for that mr g my next question maybe are off topic but i def by the way there's nothing off topic during this portion of the live stream my next question may be awesome but i definitely need a simplified explanation of the difference between epistemological and ontological research paradigms please help doctor oh boy i might i would i would have to go back much further than i am today to uh had to answer that mr g why don't you ask that question in the comments to this video after it's posted and that would give me a little bit of time to do a little bit of re refreshing of my memory on on these things i don't even want to say anything because i'm scared i'm going to get it i'm going to get it wrong and by the way that's not off topic at all okay may type 2 die okay so basically you're going to use you're wondering about resources that use stem cells to treat diabetes right okay i'm going to share my screen i'm sharing my entire screen okay so you guys should now be seeing my entire screen i'm going to open up a browser window are you now seeing that browser window and i'm simply going but first thing i'm gonna do is go to google scholar you know what i'm gonna do just a general search first but we go skim cells treatment diabetes and by the way that came up as a search screen so here we have scholarly articles for stem cells treatment diabetes so there's quite a few as a matter of fact there's 1 million 990 000 so it looks like a good one we review progress toward the goal of utilizing stem cells as a source of engineered pancreatic cells for diabetes so there you have over a million of them i might go back to the kind of general articles this here is a kind of general article to give you a kind of background and here is the section on stem cells so this might give you some leads as to see if it has any sources no sources so that just gives some kind of general information here's another research string okay this is a classic example of how you have to watch the sources okay look at the claim here although stem cell therapy cannot cure it receiving stem cell therapy for diabetes type 2 from true cell sim therapy has the potential and guess who published that article true cell so in other words it has no credibility whatsoever no credibility whatsoever yeah you really when you're doing these kind of general searches so you see they're they're also a firm that is selling stem cell treatments so you you just have to go right over those now here's something from the harvard stem cell institute now that might be something you can use me let's see what sources they have it's a good background though and since we're at even have a video okay so there's a great source now if you're in a library that are you researching in a library made because if you're researching in a library trying to think of a library that an academic library i have access to how are we doing all the time oh i got four minutes okay let me go to an academic library where i have access [Music] i teach at the university of maryland global campus i will log into a class and i will go to academic support library so here i'm going to start with the one search full text only scholarly journals only and here's my search okay so i have 5 5808 returns there's a good one diabetes treatment a rapid over review of the current and future scope of stem cell research i bet you can get a lot of great sources in that so if i download this article if i take a look at this article here is the full text there's the abstract and if i go to the by the way let's notice the parts abstract introduction what's going to come next background kind of like the literature review i think oh this whole thing is a review isn't it okay so there was no experiment research done they're simply reviewing here's a table best boo [Music] just very simple just depends upon what style guide you're using so here are the conclusions now here are the references so this would definitely expand your literature review may somebody's got 3 6 9 12 so he's got at least 40 here there's there are 40 to 50 sources on that on stem cells so i hope that helps a little bit may [Music] and i guess we need to end the broadcast okay i think a couple of you're going to follow up on on my channel with some questions especially about the different epistemological uh and the other one oncological thank you oncological and i think there was one other question i forget what it was but i will look for it in the comments to this video as soon as i hit end broadcast this video will be posted and you can post comments to it as usual thank everyone for coming by i hope you found this valuable thank you for the input this gives me a lot of great ideas for next week's live chat talk to you later

Channel: David Taylor

Views: 10,455

Keywords: research paper, academic writing, how to write a research paper, grad school, academic writing course, how to write a research paper graduate level, how to write a research paper for beginners, how to write a research paper for undergraduate, essay writing, academic writing skills, academic writing examples, academic writing essay

Id: 8_AtfzGq6W0

Length: 58min 23sec (3503 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 03 2022