What is the purpose of using source material in a research paper?

Use source material to provide proof or support for your arguments or ideas, to define or clarify points or examples, or to provide a point of view or argument different from your own and to refute opposing ideas. You may paraphrase, summarize, or quote directly from a source.

What are acceptable sources for a research paper?

Potentially appropriate: books, encyclopedias, and other scholarly works. Another potential source that you might use when writing a research paper is a book, encyclopedia, or an official online source (such as demographic data drawn from a government website).

How do you use sources in a research paper?

Generally speaking, there are three ways to integrate sources into a research paper – summarizing, paraphrasing and quoting. →You will want to summarize and paraphrase most often in your research paper, using direct quotes sparingly.

What are 4 things that need to be true about any source material you want to use in a research paper?

Scholarly Resources Scholarly language – technical, discipline specific vocabulary. Verifiable and reliable evidence – look for citations.

How do you know if a source is appropriate to use for academic research?

Is the information provided correct?…When considering accuracy, ask yourself the following questions:

Has the source been edited or peer-reviewed?
Has the author supplied a list of references for their work? Does the list of references include scholarly sources?
Does the source include spelling or grammatical errors?

What are 3 questions that we should ask when evaluating a source?

Critical Questions

Who is the creator/author/source/publisher of the information? What are the author’s credentials or affiliations?
Is the author’s expertise related to the subject? Are they an authority on the topic through education, experience, or expertise in the field?
Whose voices/viewpoints are not being heard?

How do you know if a source is relevant?

Define What Makes a Source “Relevant”

The source must be credible. It is verifiable.
The source must also be accurate. More than just making sure the information is not false, it must be completely true.
The third criterion is that the source is relevant. The information addresses the thesis statement and/or answers the research question.

What are the four questions you may ask yourself when determining if a source is relevant?

Here is a list of things you should look for in your results list to determine whether a resource is relevant to your research needs.

What is it about?
What is the subject area focus?
Are you looking for recent information?
Is it a book or an article?
Is it scholarly?
What type of article is it?

What does it mean when a source is relevant?

The first category is relevance, which means the importance to the matter at hand. When discussing literature, a source is relevant if the content relates to the topic you are dealing with.

What are the five criteria for evaluating information?

Five Criteria for Evaluating Resources: AAOCC

Authority. Who is the author or creator (who is responsible for the intellectual content) and what are his or her credentials?
Accuracy/Quality. Is the information provided specific?
Objectivity.
Currency.
Coverage.

How do you evaluate the validity of information sources?

Determine the reliability and validity of articles by following a process very similar to evaluating books:

Look at the author’s credentials. For scholarly articles, this is usually pretty simple.
Review the article’s contents.
Examine the evidence.
Determine bias.

How do you trust a source?

Tips for Checking the Source

Start with Sites You Know.
Check the Date.
Check Credentials.
Check the TLD and Domain.
Digging Deeper.
Check Your Local Library.
Don’t Trust Your First Source.
Check the URL.

What are the 4 types of validity?

There are four main types of validity:

Construct validity: Does the test measure the concept that it’s intended to measure?
Content validity: Is the test fully representative of what it aims to measure?
Face validity: Does the content of the test appear to be suitable to its aims?

What is the most important type of validity?

While there are several ways to estimate validity, for many certification and licensure exam programs the most important type of validity to establish is content validity.

What makes good internal validity?

Internal validity is the extent to which a study establishes a trustworthy cause-and-effect relationship between a treatment and an outcome. In short, you can only be confident that your study is internally valid if you can rule out alternative explanations for your findings.

How can internal and external validity be improved?

Increasing Internal and External Validity In group research, the primary methods used to achieve internal and external validity are randomization, the use of a research design and statistical analysis that are appropriate to the types of data collected, and the question(s) the investigator(s) is trying to answer.

What factors affect internal validity?

Here are some factors which affect internal validity:

Subject variability.
Size of subject population.
Time given for the data collection or experimental treatment.
History.
Attrition.
Maturation.
Instrument/task sensitivity.

What is the relationship between internal and external validity?

Internal validity refers to the degree of confidence that the causal relationship being tested is trustworthy and not influenced by other factors or variables. External validity refers to the extent to which results from a study can be applied (generalized) to other situations, groups or events.

What affects internal validity?

Internal validity is concerned with the rigor (and thus the degree of control) of the study design. Eight threats to internal validity have been defined: history, maturation, testing, instrumentation, regression, selection, experimental mortality, and an interaction of threats.

Is sample size a threat to internal validity?

The use of sample size calculation directly influences research findings. Very small samples undermine the internal and external validity of a study. As a result, both researchers and clinicians are misguided, which may lead to failure in treatment decisions.

What is meant by internal validity?

Internal validity is defined as the extent to which the observed results represent the truth in the population we are studying and, thus, are not due to methodological errors.

What increases external validity?

Some researchers believe that a good way to increase external validity is by conducting field experiments. In a field experiment, people’s behavior is studied outside the laboratory, in its natural setting. Through replication, researchers can study a given research question with maximal internal and external validity.

What is external validity example?

For example, extraneous variables may be competing with the independent variable to explain the study outcome. Some specific examples of threats to external validity: In some experiments, pretests may influence the outcome. A pretest might clue the subjects in about the ways they are expected to answer or behave.

What affects external validity?

The external validity of a study is the extent to which you can generalize your findings to different groups of people, situations, and measures. There are seven threats to external validity: selection bias, history, experimenter effect, Hawthorne effect, testing effect, aptitude-treatment and situation effect.

What are the elements of external validity?

In sum, external validity covers at least four aspects of experimental design: whether the participants resemble the actors who are ordinarily confronted with these stimuli, whether the context within which actors operate resembles the context of interest, whether the stimulus used in the study resembles the stimulus …