Research Shortcuts

SHORTCUT 24. Stick to Dependable Sources

SHORTCUT 24 Stick to Dependable Sources It saves time and raises grades to stick to dependable sources and to keep conscientious track of who they are, no matter how brief or obvious the information is. There are two practical reasons. 1. It makes your paper weightier Consider the following statements from three different papers. Which one makes the greatest impact? • There won't be any drinking water left ten years from now. • A Mother Earth News article states that there won't be any drinking water left ten years from now. • Dr. John Jones, Professor of Limnology at Harvard University, is quoted in Mother Earth News (December , 1982) as saying that there won't be any drinking water left ten years from now. The more dependable your source, the more important it is to refer to it in your paper. A paper filled with careful, complete mention of dependable sources gets an A. 2. It takes you off the hook If you say there won't be any drinking water left ten years from now, without attributing the information to anyone else, you must personally stand behind the statement 's accuracy, like it or not. If, instead, you include the 71 Copyrighted Material 72 RESEARCH SHORTCUTS source of your data, you are reporting it. Aside from sounding more authoritative, it also leaves you practically in the clear if somebody else got her facts wrong. The more dependable the source of the data, the more likely the facts are to be correct. Fortune magazine employs people just to check the facts in its articles before they're printed; many smaller business publications do not. The Wall Street Journal is carefully proofread for errors before publication; The New York Times no longer is. Many scholarly journals ask the authors of their articles to correct errors in the galleys (the words set in printer's type) before publication; most consumer magazines do not. If you're building a case on the quotation, "There won't be any drinking water left ten years from now," you must consider the reliability of the source. Your entire paper could collapse if ten is a typographical error and another student cites a more dependable source for the figure 100. Copyrighted Material ...