Tech essay - Searches for sources

  • Due Feb 19, 2021 by 11:59pm
  • Points 2
  • Submitting a file upload

 

Overview of Technology Essay

Imagine you have secured your first full-time professional job after college, in your chosen career community.  At 5pm on Friday afternoon, your supervisor forwards you a recent news article about how some new technology is affecting your field, with the note "Need your reactions for Monday's staff meeting!"  

Over the course of these assignments, you will write a four-page, double-spaced essay, making an argument about how a particular new technology currently being discussed in the news might affect some aspect of your prospective career community.  

Your argument should not only be descriptive (what you think will happen and why), but also normative (whether the consequences will be good or bad).  And you must use scholarly concepts and evidence, from both your course reader and outside sources,  in making your arguments.  

 

Part 2: Searches for sources. Pick one of your three possible news articles from the last assignment to write about, and do some second-order searches for scholarly sources to explore this topic more deeply.

 

Steps to follow

1. Pick one of your news articles from the last assignment.  Choose the news article where the technological change seems most interesting or relevant to your chosen career.  Ideally this will be something you'd like to learn more about yourself -- even something could imagine talking about with an interviewer in a job interview.  You may have also received some feedback from your TA on which of your three news articles from the last assignment seems most promising as the "seed" for your essay topic.  Write down the full citation of this news article at the top of your assignment and write a brief paragraph explaining why you chose this as the seed of your paper.

2. Compose some additional search terms based on this news article. Given this chosen news article, now create a second-order search for scholarly articles related to the topic of the news article, to see whether there is recent research on how the technology and career community mentioned in the news article interact.  

This involves not just repeating your news search terms from before, but also trying to figure out what kinds of additional terms and concepts from the news article itself might be effective search terms to get you into the scholarly literature.  For example, you might scour your news article to see if it contains these kinds of clues:

  • Titles of particular research studies recently published on the new technology
  • Names of individual researchers whose work is relevant to the new technology
  • Technical or official terms for the new technological developments 
  • Companies or organizations which are experimenting with the new technology

Write down at least three new search queries in addition to the one you used in the last assignment.  

3. Use these search queries to scour the scholarly article databases through our UW library page.  Go to the UW Libraries article search page (or just go to the main UW Libraries page and choose "Articles" from the drop down search menu).  This will allow you to search the UW Libraries licensed database of peer-reviewed scholarly journals for relevant research articles.

Your goal is to find at least three likely scholarly sources that might allow you to delve deeper into your news article topic.  Sift through the search results and see if any of the resulting journal articles seem like they would make interesting resources for your paper.  You will probably need to click into several candidate articles and read them to determine this.

4. Pick three possible scholarly articles that you might use as research resources for your paper.  For each scholarly article that you find, write down the following information:

  • the full citation of the scholarly article, again using APA citation format (see this UW Writing Center guide to APA format)
  • the exact search terms you used to find the scholarly article
  • a one-paragraph summary of what the article is about
  • a one-paragraph description about how the scholarly article relates to the news article you have chosen as the seed of your paper 

Again, it is crucial that your articles are listed in APA format for consistency and clarity.  For example, a typical peer-reviewed journal article would be listed this way:

  • Gaudio, J. L., & Snowdon, C. T. (2008). Spatial cues more salient than color cues in
    cotton‐top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) reversal learning. Journal of
    Comparative Psychology, 122, 441‐444. doi: 10.1037/0735‐
    7036.122.4.441

Listing your references correctly now is good practice, and will make it easier to add them to the reference list at the end of your final essay draft if you do end up using them as part of your paper!

5. Turn it in.  Upload to Canvas the document describing your three scholarly articles which support the chosen topic of your paper. 

 

More information on scholarly article searches

Whether writing a research paper for a college class, investigating an organization you may be interested in working for, or composing a summary memo on a new competitive trend for an employer, the ability to quickly and effectively investigate a topic and find reliable, useful, and understandable information on an issue that you’re not already familiar with is a key professional communication skill.

You are probably accustomed to doing simple web information searches using tools like Google and Wikipedia. These are good starting points, but use caution:

  • The first few hits that appear in a Google search are not necessarily the most authoritative or effective resources. Even if a site provides factually accurate information, that information may not be complete, relevant, or understandable.

    Tip: Your Google search results may differ from those of others based on your personal search history, your location, or other contextual factors.

  • The Wikipedia page for a particular topic can be a good starting point for learning about a new subject. But an encyclopedia entry is meant to provide the basic consensus outline on a topic, not the open debates or most recent developments.

Tip: Well-written Wikipedia articles include footnotes and source links at the bottom of the page, which can lead you to scholarly sources.

A second step is to do a library resource search using the book or article database. This can lead you to more authoritative writing that has been peer-reviewed (other experts have had a chance to review the work, suggest improvements, and ultimately approve the work for publication), copy edited (experts in language usage and clarity have helped the author polish the writing), and professionally published (an organization with a reputation to maintain, a professional audience to serve, and a business model to uphold has agreed to put its name reputation behind the piece). Our library owns research materials that you can’t find for free on the open web.

  • The UW library Search Page at https://search.library.wisc.edu lets you search either books or journal/periodical articles by title, author, or subject.

    Tip: These searches can yield hundreds or even thousands of hits. Once you have started a search, check for options to narrow your search by date (eg. constrain to work in the past ten years if looking for the most recent research) or by publication type (eg. constrain to peer-reviewed articles)

  • For a more targeted scholarly article search, use a particular database that our library subscribes to, like Academic Search or JSTOR. Find these and other databases for specific subjects at  https://search.library.wisc.edu/search/database

    Tip: For help see https://www.library.wisc.edu/help/research-tips-tricks/

Finally, the most important tool for finding scholarly articles is to follow the bread crumbs of author names, journal titles, and book titles that connect one useful source to another. For example:

  • Use Google and Wikipedia searches to gather likely search terms and concepts that can help you do more effective searches of library databases.

  • When you use a library search database to find a useful article, note the name of the journal and browse through the last few years of articles from that journal to see if the subject comes up again in a different way.

  • Many library search databases for books and articles now have a Netflix-like feature listing related books and articles for each search result.

  • When you find a useful scholarly book or article, use the library book search and article search to find other pieces written by the same author that might expand on the ideas or restate them in a more understandable way.

  • When you find a useful scholarly book or article, check the footnotes to see what research the authors are building upon, responding to, or criticizing in their own work. Often the footnotes include lists of references to basic background on a subject that can help introduce you to a new research area.

  • Read a professional news source every day and follow up on links, researchers, and ideas from interesting news articles.

 

Bonus: Here are some video tutorials on finding scholarly articles from the UW Libraries.

1613800799 02/19/2021 11:59pm