1. & the Research Paper A presentation compiled by Barbara Mulrine, MLIS

2.  The Modern Language Association of America was founded in 1883 by a small group of scholars who studied and taught languages and literature. It’s now one of the largest humanist societies in the world.  In order to make the dissemination of information between scholars uniform and comprehensive, they developed this citation style, which is widely used today in colleges and secondary schools and among scholars in those disciplines.

3. ●The research paper is a form of communication among scholars. ● It involves research, using both primary and secondary sources. ● It has a thesis, and it bolsters its arguments via primary and secondary sources. For instance, if you’re doing a literary paper, the primary source would be the text itself. In historical research, primary sources can be both direct and indirect and are a bit more complicated. A secondary source would come from a journal article from a scholarly journal (either in print or on a database). ● It cites sources; i.e., it gives the reader all the references he/she would need to find the original source. ● It has both in-text citations, which give author & page numbers, and a Works Cited page. Readers will use the author’s name noted in an in-text citation to find the complete bibliographic reference in the Works Cited page.

4. 1.Be sure you know what your assignment is. If you have a choice of topics, get your teacher’s approval first before starting your research. 2.Consider what your thesis is. What questions come to mind that you will need to answer to prove your thesis? The answers to those questions will back up your thesis. Create a mind map. 3.Consider where you might find the answers: books, Internet, database, magazine, reference works. Decide what sources you’ll need and where to locate them. If you’re not sure, ask a librarian. 4.Note taking is extremely important. Note where you got a quotation, fact, or figure and note all the information you’ll need to cite it in-text and in a Works Cited page. You can take notes by hand, use a laptop, or make copies. 5.Ready to write. Evaluate your notes. See what you need and what you don’t. Prioritize in logical order. If you write a good introduction, this Will be easy to do, and the paper will write itself. 6. Turn in the paper and evaluate the process to see if it worked for you.

5. ◊ Think of every paper you write as a science experiment. Every step of it should be reproducible. Readers should be able to go back to your sources and find where you got the information. ◊ Why would a reader want to do that? There are several reasons. They might want to read more on a topic you bring up in your paper. They may want to see if you are using the source properly to prove your point. Writers can take things out of context and bend them to their own thesis, misusing the original work entirely. Writers may plagiarize intentionally or unintentionally. If you can’t paraphrase something in your own words, then put it in quotations marks and cite where you got it. That will keep you from being accused of plagiarism. ◊ Throughout human history, we have advanced by standing on the shoulders of giants, taking their work a step further or using it to go in a whole new direction. We should give them credit!

6. Plagiarism To plagiarize is to “steal and pass off the words or ideas of another as one’s own: use another’s production without crediting the source; to commit literary theft: present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source” (Merriam-Webster 946). Plagiarism has a legal aspect to it. Works that are under copyright are protected from plagiarists. Using chunks of works without permission from the copyright holder, can result in law suits and financial penalties for the plagiarist. It is strictly prohibited in colleges and universities. A student could be dismissed, and it would certainly hurt the career of a professor. It’s cheating and is a charge that can follow you into jobs. Bosses don’t like someone who cheats because they may put their company in legal jeopardy. There have been several cases in the last 20 years, where journalists have fallen into plagiarism and have lost their jobs and their careers because of sloppy journalism or intentional theft.

7. To paraphrase some part of a text is to restate it in your own words while conveying the same meaning. It’s tricky business and something of an art. If you use three or more key words in your paraphrase, you are probably plagiarizing the work. Don’t grab a dictionary and substitute every word, as one student admitted he did. That’s still plagiarism. There’s an old drinking song that goes: “Show me the way to go home. I’m tired and I want to go to bed. I had a drink about an hour ago, and it went right my head.” Restating it as: “Indicate the way to my habitual abode, I’m fatigued and I want to retire. I had a nip about sixty minutes ago, and it went right to my cerebellum.” The words are in the same order, with the same construction, only the key words have been changed. That’s plagiarism. You might say that you had too much to drink and need someone to help you get home.

8. Primary & Secondary Sources

9. The underwater photographer is pursuing primary research, and he will learn about the shark in his natural environment—like whether he likes to be filmed in the privacy of his own home or not. Although the film is once removed from the original shark, it is a product of the original research and would be a primary source. There are different types of research. What this guy is doing is primary research because he’s studying his subject first hand. You might be doing primary research by studying a literary or historical text, a film, a play, doing a survey or social research, or conducting a lab experiment. Even when you’re conducting primary research, you will probably use secondary sources to bolster your thesis or claims in a research paper. Secondary research is a study of the work that other people have done on the subject, which you would cite from secondary sources, such as scholarly journal articles, magazine articles, and books about historical events, literary works, scientific debates, or political issues.

10. Research is like building a house.

11. Not everything in print or on the Internet is a reliable or useful source of information. When trying to evaluate a source, there are several things to consider: Authority: Does the article appear in a “peer reviewed” journal? Scholarly journals have every published article go through a process in which the editor decides whether an article looks promising or not and sends it on to a panel of experts and specialists to let him/her know whether they think it’s worth publishing. It has undergone rigorous academic scrutiny before it’s published. Checking the authority of Internet sources is more difficult. Few are authoritative. Online articles are often self-published. Look for any statement about the editors or author responsible for the site. It could be on the 1 st page or in the “about us” section. Do the editors or does the author have Ph.D. after their name? Is the site sponsored by a reputable organization, such as the American Cancer Society? Does it have an advisory board? Look for an editorial policy. Look at contributors’ credentials.

12. Accuracy and Verifiability. Check to see if a work or site’s sources are available so they can be verified. There should be a Works Cited or a bibliography in the back of the work that cites their sources. Look at the titles to see the breadth of the sources to gauge the author’s knowledge of the subject and to see if some bias is involved. If you find that the sources are mainly popular sources, or if the sources are ideologically slanted, you have to conclude that isn’t an a reliable source. Currency. The date of a publication matters. It could be out-of-date. A quick look at the copyright date will give you a clue. Some of the articles you can get on the databases are older than I would suspect. No so very long ago, the oldest articles that were commonly found on your best known databases didn’t go back much before 1987. Recently, I found a lit article that went back to 1964. In the field of literature, you don’t have the sort of currency issues you have in science and history. Judging currency on the Internet is more of a problem.

13. Everyone has their own method of taking notes. Some take notes on index cards, sheets of paper, or notebooks. Some use laptops. Don’t think you can print off a bunch of pages from various websites and think your research and note taking is done. You will need sources from books, databases, and other sources. When get information from the Internet use the “Rule of 3”: Verify the information with two other sources to be sure it’s correct. When taking notes, you not only have to note the relevant passage (quote or paraphrase), but this sort of information as well: ●Author’s full name—if more than one author, note the names; ●Title of the source: book or DB, article title, journal title; ●Record the page number, if there is one; ●The name of the publisher, and the place published; ●Copyright date of the book or source document.

14. MLA Style Is Easy

15. The aesthetic and ideological orientation of jazz underwent considerable scrutiny in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Anderson 7). This is a paraphrase of some information found in a secondary source that someone might have used in a research paper. Notice the in-text citation comes at the end of the sentence and gives us the author’s name (Anderson) and the page it is found on (7) in a source that can be found on the Work Cited page. If you author’s name is mentioned in the sentence, only the page number needs to be noted in-text. For example: According to Anderson, the aesthetic and ideological orientation of jazz underwent considerable scrutiny in the late 1950s and early 1960s (7). At the end of the paper, there will be a “Works Cited” page. A Works Cited entry for this in-text citation would be: Anderson, Iain. This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007. Print. The Arts and Intellectual Life in Mod. Amer.

16. The Works Cited Page

17. A book by a single author: Author’s last name, first name. Title of book. Place of Publication: Publisher, year of publication. Medium of publication. Franke, Damon. Modernist Heresies, 1883-1924. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2008. Print. Most of this information can be found on the title page of the book: Author’s name, title of the book, place of publication and name of publisher The year of publication can be found on the back side of the title page under the copyright date near the top of the page. Two or more authors: Booth, Wayne C., Gregory C. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The Craft of Research, 2 nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print. Only the first author’s name is reversed, and an “and” precedes the final author.

18. A periodical is any publication that comes out at regular, fixed intervals. Common periodicals are newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. Information you’ll need for a periodical: 1.Author(s) name(s), corporate author’s name 2.Title of the article (in quotation marks) 3.Name of the periodical (in italics) 4.Volume number & issue number 5.Date of publication (year for scholarly journal; for other publications, the day, month, and year, as available) 6.Inclusive page numbers of the article 7.Medium of publication: Print 8.Supplementary information Barthelme, Frederick. “Architecture.” Kansas Quarterly 13.3-4 (1981): 77-80. Print. Jeromack, Paul. “This Once, a David of the Art World Does Goliath a Favor.” New York Times 13 July 2002, New England ed.: A 13+. Print.

19. ●Dictionaries, almanacs, and encyclopedias are examples of reference works. ●Encyclopedias come in two basic varieties: special and general. ●A special encyclopedia has articles about various people and subjects that have something to do with the subject of the encyclopedia, like our Dance and Theater encyclopedias, or the Encyclopedia of Black America or the Encyclopedia of Hispanic America. It can be a multivolume work or a single volume. ●A general encyclopedia covers a whole range of subjects. ●Some articles in encyclopedias are signed, some are not. If they’re signed articles, you’ll find the author’s name at the end of the article and what his or her affiliation is. ●Many of them are revised often. The edition &the year are important.

20. Unsigned Articles: “Japan.” The Encyclopedia Americana. 2004 ed. Print. Most of the Americana’s articles are signed. If it had been a signed article. It would look like this: Last name, First name. “Japan.” The Encyclopedia Americana. 2004 ed. Print.

21. Some scholarly journals only exist in electronic form, and some exist In both print and digital. If you find a journal article that was collected on an online database, you will have to specify that on the Works Cited. Potter, Lois. “Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama.” Studies in English Literature 52.2 (2012): 471-512. Academic Online. Web. 25 August 2012.

22. There are a host of different citations to fit almost any sort of source you might encounter. There are citations for other formats (films, audio), for speeches, for forwards to books, translations, and websites. Textbooks are often revised as are many other reference works, so they cover revised editions not to mention books without pagination, online journals that aren’t paginated. You name it. At one time, MLA recommended adding the complete url at the end of a citation for a website. The 7 th edition of the MLA Handbook, the most recent edition (5.6.1), suggests you provide a url only if the “reader probably cannot locate the source without it or when your instructor requires it. If you give one, put the url after the date of access.” Eaves, Morris,Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. The William Blake Archive. Lib. of Cong., 28 Sept, 2007. Web. Nov. 2007..

23. Barthelme, Frederick. “Architecture.” Kansas Quarterly 13.3-4 (1981): 77-80. Print. Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. The William Blake Archive. Lib. of Cong., 28 Sept. 2007. Web. Nov. 2007.. Franke, Damon. Modernist Heresies, 1883-1924. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2008. Print. “Japan.” The Encyclopedia Americana. 2004 ed. Print. Potter, Lois. “Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama.” Studies in English Literature 52.2 (2012): 471-512. Academic Online. Web. 25 August 2012.

24. Good luck and happy researching!