4 Step 4 | Evaluating, Gauging and Organizing Sources
Evaluation
The sources you use should add something new to your project. Having a variety of sources and authors helps support your argument. By evaluating your sources as you gather them, you can save time and avoid having to redo your search. It can be frustrating when you need to start over in the middle of a project because your sources do not back up your argument with enough depth.
Operating within a web-based culture requires an evaluation method that can account for the digital environment that is riddled with biased misinformation. The SIFT Method (The Four Moves) does just that.
Tips for Evaluating Scholarly Sources
Evaluating scholarly information takes more than just verifying that it has been peer-reviewed. You also need to determine if your source is accurate, reliable, and relevant.
Within the article, there are four major areas that can help you determine if the body of work is going to be helpful for your paper.
Abstract – This summary gives you a general idea of what the authors were trying to accomplish, as well as a brief description of their experiment, observations, or analysis.
Methods – Explains how the author(s) conducted their research, including how they gathered their data (e.g., surveys, interviews, experiments, or observations) and why they chose that method.
Results – Sometimes called discussion, provides more specific details about what the authors found. This includes descriptions of overall results and their corresponding data.
Conclusion – Usually includes information about major findings and why the author thinks they are important. By reading the conclusion, you can verify that the impression you got from the abstract is correct and check that the article is relevant for your research question.
Strategically skipping around and skimming specific sections can help you understand the big takeaways from the research.
Word Banking: Key Word Tracking
As we gathered popular and scholarly materials for the sample paper, we kept track of all the terms being used to describe our area. During the background research we learned that ChatGPT is an Open AI platform and is described as a chatbot. Open AI is different from machine learning. These revelations allowed us to use these specific keywords within the library databases to generate accurate searches using Boolean operators and nesting. The terms discovered within the articles allowed us to clarify our searching on the web when we hit walls and needed to fill knowledge gaps as we were organizing our resources and synthesizing information.
Gauging & Organizing Resources
By now you have successfully found all the sources you need for your paper. Next, you will have to read the articles more thoroughly to see how they each support your working thesis. Reading articles can be a challenging task, but it is necessary to ensure each source is touching base on different aspects of your topic. While reading you should identify themes showing up in the scholarship, popular sources, and even background information. This will help you focus on the major themes within your research and will serve as the beginning of an outline for your paper.
There are several ways to organize your research that will make the writing process easier, and if you can identify themes early on, it will prove to be advantageous. Consider organizing your research by source types and key ideas. For our topic such as the one defined in step one like generative AI, we considered categories such as “types of students,” “types of AI,” and “AI types mentioned and their uses.” Each category will work to highlight key talking points. For instance, the way neuroscience students use AI may be different than the way a history student uses it. This helped develop a key argument about the different components in which someone may consider using AI in a classroom. We discovered through diving into the articles that each group of students had a different way of using AI.
This is also an opportunity to find any gaps in your argument and sources. Perhaps, there is an angle that you have not explored. Now is the opportunity to ask more questions to ensure that your paper is diverse and well rounded. Creating a thematic chart will help you organize your paper in a way that flows well and highlights weak areas.
Here are some tips that will help you achieve this goal.
- You have to have a significant body of research to thematize in the first place. Hopefully, you have started compiling materials from the library, the Internet, interviews, and so forth. If you have not done these things yet, you probably are not ready for the categorization and evaluation essay exercise.
- Each piece of research has to fit into a theme. No matter how you decide to categorize your research, be sure that all of it can be put into at least one theme. These categories will enable you to reflect on similarities and differences in your resources.
- As much as possible, each theme should have at least two pieces of research. Avoid having themes with one resource. If there is only one resource per category, it doesn’t allow you to make comparisons or generalizations about how things might be similar. Opting for more than one resource per category discourages one item categories that only reveals the difference between each resource.
- Themes should be as distinct and different from each other as possible. You may include categories such as academic sources, popular sources, etc., however, focus more on the themes showing up in the resources and identify at least three things showing up. For example, in the paper we wrote we identified the professionals concerned with AI, types of students using AI, and uses for AI. See the example below.
- Last but not least, themes should inspire deeper talking points. Work to identify themes that will allow you to expand on the research that you are presenting and will allow you to express your own personal thoughts about the research. When recognizing professionals concerned with AI, a librarian’s concern will be different from a software engineer’s concerns. They may share similarities and differences in how they approach artificial intelligence. They both may find it useful for productivity in curating lists while librarians may be concerned with the ethics in the classroom.
Checklist
- Have you found all or half the sources required for your assignment?
- Have you determined if they are relevant? Biased? Credible?
- Now, organize them into an information chart according themes that you noticed from skimming through them.
Information Adapted from :
Library 1600: Introduction to College-Level Research | Current contributors include: Abbey K. Elder, Rano Marupova, Kris Stacy-Bates, Cara B. CC BY-SA 4.0
Stone, and Erin Thomas & The Process of Research Writing | Steven D. Krause | Spring 2007 | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
SIFT text and graphics adapted from “SIFT (The Four Moves)” by Mike Caulfield, licensed under CC BY 4.0
