Category: Research tools

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Fiction and nonfiction writing Research tools Writing

Joys and Sorrows of Online Research

Frere Hall, in Karachi, Pakistan, which dates from the British Raj. Source: Wikipedia.

I was writing a story for myself, set in South Asia, and was using online searches to research some locales. It was fun: Finding pictures of remote valleys and small towns on maps, reading about them on Wikipedia and other sites I thought I could trust.

I don’t know if websites about Pakistan are more dangerous than other sites–it would be consistent with the increased dangers of other things, like travel. I was trying to find names for my characters and searched for lists of surnames and first names. Learned some things about Pakistani ethnicities, which are not as simple as I had assumed. Of course Pakistan has been a crossroads for millennia, why wouldn’t family names be complex? Understand that I am not bashing Pakistan. I concluded they are as diverse as we are.

Some of the websites were sketchy, wanted me to create an account, and those I got out of quickly.

Anyway, I eventually found the perfect setting in a “tribal area” of Pakistan, which I am not going to name. I was on Wikipedia and there was a short article with one picture. There were external links to two websites. I clicked on the first link and something came up which had nothing to do with the topic, and I got out of there quick. The second one led me to a site warning me that I had damaged their system by entering it and would have to pay them to fix their computer and thus be able to get my files back. In other words, I was a victim of ransomware.

This all happened really fast as I closed the browser almost instantaneously. But now my computer was frozen. I immediately unplugged the backup drive and tried “control-alt-delete” to close the browser. No response. I was able to get into Windows 10 settings and do a “reset.” It actually was the second reset in two days—the first time was related to a hardware malfunction. By now I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

Fortunately I have my computer backed up in two places, one in the cloud and also an external hard drive. Still, having to go through the reset and reinstall process took the whole day, once again, was tedious and a waste of time. The computer is now operating normally and I didn’t lose any files.

I did contact Wikipedia to report the problem. It was hard to figure out where to send the “malicious content report,” but it did eventually get forwarded to a volunteer editor. The link for reporting is info-en@wikimedia.org, in case anyone else should ever need it. A week later the volunteer sent me back a nice note and said he had removed the links.

My take-homes from this experience:

  • The virtual world has opened up to writers. The admonition to “write about what you know,” can be cautiously ignored, to some degree. What I still know about is people, and I was careful to write characters I could breathe substance into.
  • I do have a lot of generalized background knowledge about the story setting, have been to South Asian cities and villages, and was able to imagine myself there in ways that I think are convincing to the reader.
  • I was careful to only describe scenes I felt were convincing.
  • Be really careful about clicking web links! If I was doing this again, I would probably go to the library and use their computers. But that part of the story is finished. I’m now moving on to Chicago and LA, places I know more about.
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Bibliographic management Research tools

Research Methods: Evaluating Scholarly Sources with Google Scholar

The weight of Gods word against traditions

In writing term papers, many students instinctively do a Google search and pick the first few items that come up, which will frequently include a Wikipedia article. This, however, is not the best way to find sources that your professor might accept. For those doing more scholarly research, such as doing a review of literature, the challenges are more substantial

Fortunately, there are a number of good websites, usually maintained by academic libraries, which go over the basics of identifying and evaluating scholarly sources. For instance, the University of Southern California Library’s page on “Organizing Research for Arts and Humanities Papers and Theses: What are Scholarly and Non-Scholarly Sources,” does a good job of going over the basics. It is also useful for delving into the peculiarities of research in the arts and humanities; for example, it notes that in certain instances, “The author may be a multi-disciplinary intellectual of a transnational stature, who does not rely on the commonly acceptable scholarly apparatus.”

This is all well and good, but once you’ve identified a number of sources, how do you judge their relative value? One way is by using a feature of Google Scholar, which limits its searches to scholarly books and articles in English, which provides a handy way of finding out the popularity among scholars of particular sources.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ3FlcMbmRM

The YouTube video above, from Charles Sturt University, in Australia, provides a good overview of how to use Google Scholar, especially in conjunction with a school’s library and with whatever bibliographic management software you’re using—in this instance Endnote. (Zotero isn’t one of the options listed, but the program can easily import citations from Google Scholar. You can also generate citations that you can copy into your paper.)

One feature the video doesn’t really deal with it is how many times an item has been cited by others. All things being equal, the number of citations can be used as a barometer on how much the scholarly community values a source. For instance, the top result for a search I did on “global warming” was for Root, Terry L., et al. “Fingerprints of global warming on wild animals and plants,” by Terry Root, et al., which appeared in Nature in 2003, which shows it was “Cited by 3471” sources. In comparison, James E. Hansen’s “Sir John Houghton: Global Warming: The Complete Briefing” that appeared in the Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry in 1998, was “Cited by 1566.”  (If you click on the “Cited by…” link, you can bring up the sources which cited the item in question.)

While the Root article has been cited twice as many times as the Hansen, the comparison is not really that cut and dried. The former was published in a relatively popular natural science journal, while the latter is a book review from a more specialized publication dealing with atmospheric chemistry. Used with care, though, it’s one more way to identifying useful scholarly material.

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Bibliographic management Research tools

Research Sources: WorldCat

Snow White and the Seven DwarfsWorldCat is not the sexiest research tool out there, focusing as it does on bibliographic information concerning books, DVDs, CDs and articles. But it can also be very useful in a number of small but handy ways.

WorldCat is the public face of the Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), which began life in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center. It eventually replaced the National Union Catalog, a mammoth ongoing publishing project which compiled and printed the 3” x 5” catalog cards prepared by the Library of Congress and others in libraries around the United States.

It remains the place to find out where you can locate a particular item in over 10,000 libraries around the world. For instance, I often use it to see which local library has a particular book. Libraries do the same when they are trying to borrow something for a patron through interlibrary loan. It is also a source for cataloging information that institutions use to create entries in their own library catalogs.

Google Scholar and Google Books have, in a number of ways, superseded WorldCat as a way to identify useful sources of printed information. Still, it does provide a rather handy way to compile bibliographies, though its abilities in this regard are greatly enhanced by using a bibliographic management program like Zotero.Worldcat MLA Citation for Capital

However, if all you need is a bibliographic citation for a term paper, it can do the job quickly with a reasonable degree of accuracy. See, for instance, the MLA citation created a 1967 edition of  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Capital above.

Like other sites which automatically generate citations, you have to realize that they are not always infallible. An example is the following entry, in MLA style, for the 2009 DVD of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:

Hand, David, Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Rickard, Earl Hurd, Maris M. De, Dorothy A. Blank, Webb Smith, Walt Disney, Adriana Caselotti, Roy Atwell, Eddie Collins, Pinto Colvig, Billy Gilbert, Otis Harlan, Verne L. La, Scotty Mattraw, Harry Stockwell, Frank Churchill, Leigh Harline, Paul J. Smith, Wilhelm Grimm, and Jacob Grimm. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2009.

Listing 24 people as the film’s authors is somewhat absurd and unwieldy. As a film’s director is usually considered the film’s author, a better citation would be:

Hand, David. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2009.

Last update: December 26. 2016