DBU Library Blog

Five Steps to Excellent Research

     Research Step #1

DBU Library Director Scott Jeffries teaches an instruction titled 20-minutes to Continual

Learning 

This engaging research activity shows students and faculty how to find credible academic sources in only 20 minutes.

The next five blog posts will demonstrate how to use the 20 minutes to find useful research tools and develop topics into research questions. Let's get started.

Learning to think critically about information sources and identify

scholarly material is an essential research skill for every university student.

Consider Wikipedia  a tool for building a working knowledge of a research topic, using information for a specific purpose, and learning appropriate documentation procedures. Go to Wikipedia and spend a few minutes just reading about your topic. Often, there is a content list for a Wikipedia article that helps "visually organize" a topic. In addition, the sources in the reference list are often credible and academic. You should not cite the Wikipedia article, but you may discover very useful sources in the references list. Don't forget to use the "Control F" key to search for the most recent references.

In this Wikipedia article about self-driving cars, there are 40 references using 2019 sources. Many of the 303 references for this article are credible and academic.