Oreva had nearly two dozen tabs up, showing various websites, videos, and journal articles on her research topic. At first, she was excited by all the information she was findings on the Mali Empire, a Western African Kingdom that flourished from about 1200 to 1600 ADE, that she wanted to present her informative speech on for class. However, as the night deepened, and it dawned on her that she might be pulling an all-nighter at the library, she became more and more despondent. Now, she just listlessly clicked from tab to tab, unable to concentrate on any source for long because there was just so much to read on the topic. A hand on her should startled her out of her reverie:

“Hey, are you okay,” said a woman with glasses and brown hair, standing behind her and looking over her shoulder. “Wow, it looks like you have quite a lot of work ahead!”

“Tsh-yeah,” Oreva grumped. “I’m going to be here all night at this rate.”

“Do you know how you’re going to organize all of those sources? Do you have some system?”

“If you mean, ‘Do I have enough coffee to stay awake all night reading’ then yes,” Orevea joked.

“Nah, I mean an actual system,” the woman laughed. “Do you mind if I gave you some tips?”

“Sure, but why are you being so helpful? To I look that clueless?” Oreva asked.

“Oh goodness, no,” the person reassured. “I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. My name’s Rebecca and I’m a research librarian. I’m here to help!”

---

Have you faced the same trouble as Oreva when looking for credible information? On the surface, it seems like it has never been easier to find material on any topic, whether on politics, fashion, science, relationships, or culture. To get this information, most people turn to search engines. Google search is the most used search engine on the internet, constituting nearly 92% of search engine market and processing nearly 9 billion requests per day (Mohsin, 2023). Although Google is an amazingly efficient search engine, as we talked about in Chapter Eight, it is a webcrawler program—meaning it picks up anything on the web that it detects is similar to your search keywords as well as other considerations such as advertisements and traffic. As such, search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo do not, and cannot, evaluate whether the information your search gets is necessarily factual, reliable, or credible, only what is related or paid for.

Another way that many people get their information from is their preferred social media platform. As Walker and Matsa (2021) found, Facebook still has the largest share of U.S. Americans who get their news from that platform (31%). However, for adults between 18-29, the preferred platforms are Snapchat (63%), TikTok (52%), Reddit (44%), and Instagram (44%) (Walker & Matsa, 2021). Collectively, approximately 79% of U.S. Americans reported getting news through social media websites. Much like the Google search engine, these searches may lead you to what is viral, popular, or trending, but not necessarily what is factual. Social media platforms also inhabit a grey area in media laws—on one hand they are not content producers of the news and have little legal obligation to ensure what is shown on their platform is credible information. On the other hand, they have enormous influence on how people interact with the news because it is the primary way people do engage with media content. Some social media companies have tried to—with varying degrees of success and effort—to combat misinformation, but since their revenue is advertisement generated, they have a monetary incentive to push information that promotes engagement (no matter the reason) not facts.

Unfortunately, there are many bad actors who take advantage of this weakness in search engines or social media platforms. For example, China’s “Great Fire Wall” serves to keep out content produced outside of their country while its 50 Cent Army (or wǔmáodǎng) amplifies pro-China propaganda abroad. Russia’s Internet Research Agency is a well-known troll-farm, spreading disinformation and propaganda in an effort to increase tensions, unrest, and dysfunction within enemy countries (including the United States) (Craig Silverman, 2023) while cracking down on Western internet traffic as it pursues its unjust war against Ukraine (Bandurski, 2022). Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, has cut down on Twitter’s infrastructure to identify, track, and remove untrue, malicious, and unsubstantiated content (Drapkin, 2023) while Facebook has banned university professors studying the spread of disinformation on its platform (Bond, 2021). Entire platforms, such as The Parlor, Truth Social, 4Chan, and 8Kun pride themselves on having little or no content moderation, allowing users to spread everything from targeted hate campaigns to weird or malicious conspiracy theories such as QAnon.

Social media influencers use their vast networks to sell their products, generate advertisement revenue, and run morally and legally dubious operations, such as Stephen Crowder, Gwyneth Paltrow, or Andrew Tate. All of these problems, and more, are even more frightening in the context of research that has found that the top false news traveled through social networks faster and reach approximately 100 times more people than true news (Vosoughi et al., 2018). Your responsibility, as a content consumer and producer, is to make sure that you can identify, avoid, and create information that is rigorously made and vetted. In a democratic society, people make decisions, and their decisions can only be as good as the information they have to inform them. Spreading or consuming bad information (whether intentionally or not) makes it impossible to come to the best decisions for laws or policies for our communities.

The challenge of today is not finding information—it’s finding good information. Unfortunately, most people do not develop their information literacy skills and, instead, rely on mental shortcuts to make their decisions. For example, McGeough and Rudick (2018) found that students in public speaking classes made appeals to authority (e.g., “I found it in the library so it must be credible”), appeals to form/style (e.g., “The article was professionally formatted and in a print newspaper so I thought it was reliable”), appeals to popularity (e.g., “A lot of people use this source so it must be good”), and appeals to their own beliefs (e.g., “I am pro-guns and 2^nd Amendment, so I searched for information on ‘problems with gun control’”) when making their presentations. There are many reasons people rely on these shortcuts—lack of formal education, time constraints, stress, or unwillingness to develop ideas that are contrary to their important social groups (e.g., their religion or family). These shortcuts can influence how you vet, read, and use information for your presentations. Many times, students make decisions to choose their information sources because they have limited time (e.g., waiting until the night before an assignment is due) and cognitive bandwidth (e.g., they are stressed due to other class’s demands on time and attention). However, now is the time to develop these skills. If you do not know how to identify or create factual content, then you are more likely to make information choices based on convenience instead of rigor.

In this section, we offer one way that you can start to develop a stronger set of information literacy skills. We wish to be clear—this is not the only way to vet information, nor should this be the end of your journey on being a better information consumer or producer. You will need to routinely practice, revise, and update your skills. Doing so is especially important because internet trolls, online scammers, predatory corporations, and malicious governments are constantly updating their strategies for spreading misinformation and disinformation. Here, we’ll use the information literacy program SIFT to offer some guidance on vetting your sources (Caufield, 2017), informed by the best practices of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

The SIFT method has been found to an excellent way for students to begin learning information literacy skills because it encourages lateral reading (Brodsky et al., 2021). SIFT includes four moves: stop, investigate the source, find trusted coverage, and trace back to the original.

Stop

Before you even begin searching the Internet for information, STOP. What is your research purpose (e.g., to persuade, inform, or motivate)? What are you trying to do with the information you are looking at? Are you being open to competing or opposing viewpoints or have you searched using keywords that will automatically limit what kind of information you are going to get? Often, novice searchers have a vague idea of what they are looking for and then land on the first source that seems to connect to their topic. If you search this way, you are likely to land on information that has a particular viewpoint and then find yourself over focusing on it and excluding other information. Worst case scenario, you may find yourself in an echo chamber regardless of the credibility of information. Next, once you have found a source or a series of sources, STOP. Do you already think this source is credible, and if so, why? Relying on it because it is the first result of a search or because it agrees with your beliefs are poor reasons for relying on it. If you don’t know if it is credible or not, what criteria will you use to ascertain whether the source is worthwhile? Here, you should look at the reputation of the outlet (e.g., the news media corporation, academic journal, social media content producer, or individual expert or witness). Do they have a history of truth telling? Or, maybe they only have a history of reporting information that already affirms your beliefs or discounts/ignores competing views. If you don’t know if the source has a history of disseminating credible information, then you need to execute the next moves to ascertain its reliability.

Investigate the Source

If you have encountered a source that you never have before and/or if you don’t know if it is reputable or not, then you need to do some research on the outlet and/or author. What is their expertise and agenda? For example, many non-profit policy organizations such as the Heartland Institute, Heritage Institute, Cato Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, and the Family Research Council receive millions of dollars in donations from tobacco, oil, and gas industries or conservative religious groups. As result, a great deal of their policy downplays the harms of smoking cigarettes, hydraulic fracturing (i.e., fracking), climate change, and/or attacks LGBTQ rights and families. Many people might believe these are reputable sources because they are .org sites instead of .com sites, but .org simply means that it is an organization—there is no obligation on the part of that organization to give better information due to its .org status. This is not to say you should never visit these sources. There might be a need to know what a problem is or why it hasn’t been solved yet, and going to sources that promulgate bad information is a way to trace how untrue, harmful, or hateful content can negatively affect decision-making about a variety of issues. However, sources that are biased because of politics, faith, money, advertisement, or personal relationships must be approached with caution. By figuring out not just what a source says, but why it says it and who benefits from its advocacy, you can be a better content producer and consumer for your community.

Find Trusted Coverage

Next, is their advocacy in line with other outlets and, if not, why? That is, you should go to websites that offer information on the same topic to see if there is broad consensus or disagreement about the topic. For example, maybe the source you are using is older than a more recent source, indicating that knowledge in this field has changed. Or, the author has a fringe or minority view within a field that has broad consensus about an issue. To be clear, we are not saying that information that is generally agreed upon is always correct. However, when there is broad agreement on a topic then it requires a greater burden of proof for those who advocate against the established position. For example, NASA reports that approximately 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is occurring, is affected by human pollution, and will negatively affect people around the world. But, don’t just take NASA’s word for it—The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations, World Health Organization, and hundreds of other governmental, corporate, non-profit, and academic sources agree on these propositions. To disagree with this, a person would need to demonstrate climate change is not occurring, that if it is occurring humans aren’t the cause for it, and/or that climate change will not harm people— an extremely high burden of proof given the number of sources that agree these things will occur or are occurring. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and refuting generally agreed on propositions is considered an extraordinary claim. All-too-often, people promote misinformation or disinformation by claiming to have insider knowledge that “they” (i.e., Big Government, Big Pharma, the Illuminati, the Lizard People, etc.) don’t want you to have. This type of discourse is especially useful on U.S. Americans because, culturally, most of our media and history is shaped by the idea that brave truth-tellers, patriots, or morally clear-eyed individuals are often a lone voice against a throng of the evil and ignorant. However, it is important to remember that real-life decisions should be based on facts and facts are something that can and should be agreed to and recognized by the majority of experts on a given topic (no, your uncle posting bad memes information from FreedomEagle.net/patriotsforcoal is not an expert!). Those who cannot meet this burden of evidence only use this cultural idea to hide the fact that they simply cannot meet the evidential burden of their position and do not want you to draw on other sources that might disagree with their analysis.

Trace the Original

Finding the original source of information is more and more important as it becomes easier to share content and information across the Internet and social media. For example, in response to a medical study, news outlets reported: “Silent, not deadly; how farts cure diseases” (Burnett, 2018), “Sniffing your partners’ farts could help ward off disease” (Sun, 2017), and “Scientists say sniffing farts could prevent cancer” (UPI, 2014). However, tracing their claims to the original study reveals a much different picture. The study (Le Trionnaire, 2014) showed how hydrogen sulfide, compound associated with (among other things) the disgusting smell of rotten eggs or human flatulence, may be delivered to the mitochondria of cells to as a way to fight disease and cancer. The study did not say farts cured disease or cancer or even that the compound hydrogen sulfide did; rather, the report made the more limited claim that the compound may be used as a tool in fighting disease and cancer and its efficacy is promising. Pictures, video clips, tweets, reactions, and even (as we see in this example) full medical studies can be condensed into clickbait titles that are meant to provoke anger, frustration, laughter, or sadness—because in the world of social media algorithms all of those emotions translate into engagement which means more advertisement dollars. You must be able to trace information to its original source and then evaluate whether the information that you have read is accurately reported and credible. Otherwise, you may find yourself sniffing farts for no reason!

It is important to remember that no one, single study, article, podcast, or YouTube video proves or disproves anything. Rather, it is only in reading laterally multiple sources or studies published over years that a clearer picture of credible information emerges. Using SIFT, you can begin to develop the skills that allow you to see information claims as part of a wider network of efforts moving from ignorance to knowledge. For example, the non-profit group Center for Scientific Integrity that tracks retracted academic articles (i.e., articles that have been published but later removed because of research misconduct or fabrication) shows how some scholars have abused their responsibilities as researchers. In one case, Yoshitaka Fuji, a Japanese researcher in anesthesiology and ophthalmology, was forced to retract 183 published papers (Stromberg, 2015)!

On one hand, it is chilling to know how long Fuji was able to elude detection. On the other hand, catching errors (whether intentionally made or not) is exactly why scholars engage in lateral reading. Researchers may review the findings of a study against other studies to see if their findings agree with past work or conduct the same tests to see if they get approximately the same result. If they don’t, then it raises questions about the surety of the previous study’s claims, inviting scrutiny and changing knowledge claims as more evidence supports or doesn’t the original study—which is ultimately how Fuji’s research was found to be fraudulent.

All of this is to say, there is no magic bullet, no one good type of source that will ensure that you have good information. It is a constant practice and one that encourages you to not take mental shortcuts. Working to make sure you are informed, demanding that your sources provide factual information, and informing others with high quality information are the only ways that all of us live in a healthy information ecosystem. As the old saying warns, “Garbage in, garbage out,” or, when you consume bad information, you’ll likely produce bad decisions or conclusions. So, don’t settle for garbage!

You’ve found a variety of sources, used SIFT to test them, and feel confident that they offer a clear picture of the side or sides of an issue. Great! But, as you begin trying to read the journal articles, you find them to be incredibly dense and difficult to get through. Don’t worry—this is a common problem experienced by novice researchers. We find that one of the challenges of reading research articles is that novice researchers try to read the entire article from start to finish to ascertain if it is worth using or vetting. We wish to be clear—not all journal articles follow the format guidelines we explain here. Some articles are opinion pieces, reviews of books, arguments with fellow researchers, or creative pieces that aren’t easily captured in the type of organization we outline here. Therefore, we implore you to go beyond the advice we give here and develop a wide set of tools for reading a variety of research articles.

However, we do believe this approach to reading articles a great place to start and can provide the foundation for being a good researcher. Therefore, we encourage you to follow this order of reading your articles as you begin researching so you can reduce your time searching for articles, increase your comprehension, and utilize the most valuable knowledge in the manuscript. As you develop as a researcher in your area of study, you will most likely need to develop new skills until you reach mastery in your subject.

Title/Abstract

The title of a research article will contain the major concepts, ideas, theories, method of analysis, or insights from the study. For example, the study “Highlighting the intersectional experiences of students of color: A mixed methods examination of instructor (mis)behavior” by Vallade et al. (2023) describes the research participants (i.e., students of color), major concepts (i.e., intersectional experiences and instructor (mis)behaviors), and research methodology (i.e., mix-methods or a combination of quantitative and qualitative research). You should also read the study’s abstract, which appears on the first page of the article. The abstract is usually a 100–300-word outline of the study’s purpose, relevant literature, research method/design, major findings, and implications. By reading the title/abstract, you can get a good idea on whether the article connects to the topic you are studying or not. If not, go onto the next article and read its title and abstract. If so, then you need to proceed to the next step.

Introduction

The introduction of the article is usually not notated or labeled as such. Rather, it is simply the first part of the article, which proceeds from the very start to the first major section heading of the article. The introduction of the article should detail the research purpose, which usually contains two elements. The first is the ‘practical’ issue or the actual challenge, issue, or topic the article responds to. This information lets the reader know what problems they will be able to solve or mitigate by finding out what the researchers found. The second, is the ‘theoretical’ issue, which details the academic questions or gaps that the study tries to address. This content shows the reader how the researchers are building on past scholarship in this area and justifying the need for the present study.

Literature Review

The final section you should read is the literature review. Sometimes the literature review is named ‘Literature Review,’ but often it is not explicitly named. Instead, it is understood that the first major section heading after the introduction is the beginning of the literature review. The purpose of the literature review is to provide a summarization of all the past research that has been conducted in the past about the topic. The literature review should also show how the current research is meaningfully building on that information and should end with the hypotheses or research questions that the study will address. Remember, you should rarely, if ever, cite work from the literature review. Rather, when you find any important information you find in this section, you should find the literature being cited in the reference section and go read that particular study or source.

Method

The method section will describe who (e.g., the participants and their demographic information) or what (e.g., the documents, speeches, or content) they got data from. It will also detail what procedures were used to gather data (e.g., surveys or interviews) or texts (e.g., documents, speeches, or content). For example, in a statistical report, it will show what survey instruments were used and how reliable they have been in past studies as a way to justifying their use in the present study. Finally, the section will detail how the researchers analyzed the data in order to come up with new insights. This could be the author or author team’s explication of their statistical procedures used to test a hypothesis. The method section is important to examine because even if the results and discussion are important, if the method section shows a poorly designed research project, then those insights showed be read with extreme caution.

Results/Discussion

Now you are going to skip everything between the introduction and the section labeled ‘Results’ or ‘Findings’ and ‘Discussion’ or ‘Implications’ in the article. Novice researchers often think that the whole research article is something that can be cited from. However, information in the introduction, literature review, or method sections is often a summary of past research or information on the topic. In other words, it a secondary source, since you are relying on the author of the present article to understand and convey the information from past studies to you. The information in the results section should be the statistical tests, interview excerpts, or other information that is produced through the application of the research method. The discussion section should summarize what the findings or results of the research article were as well as detail (or, discuss) the implications of the study for the production of knowledge on the topic. Much like the introduction, the discussion will most likely explain the ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’ implications of the study. In other words, it will describe how the knowledge produced through the research should inform peoples’ actions as they try to address the problems the research responds to (practical) as well as make a case for how it extends or challenges the existing research in that area for future researchers to build on in their own work (theoretical). The information in the article that is new, or is a primary source, is the information in the results and discussion. Therefore, if you find something in the literature review that is helpful, important, or worth noting, you should go to the reference list, find the source, and read the original source so you can cite it in your own work. If you don’t, and you cite information from the literature review in your own work, this is a form of academic dishonesty because you never actually read the original source.

We admit, sometimes research writing is needlessly difficult to read. We remember the first time we read an article that stated, “Due to the established lacunae in the field…” and were intimidated by the word “lacunae.” What does it mean? How important is it? It sounds so daunting! Lacunae, however, just means “gaps” or “holes.” The author, in establishing that there are missing answers to questions that were important to their field of study, used a word that immediately caused consternation and confusion from their audience. This word choice is an example bad writing because it needlessly confuses their audience, which should always be avoided! However, sometimes, technical jargon is necessary. The difference between a vein or artery, mitochondrion or ribosomes, verb or adjective, or discourse and rhetoric are important distinctions within their respective fields of study.

Often, we find that novice researchers, when encountering a new or unfamiliar word, just pass over the word in their reading and don’t use dictionaries to look it up because they: A) aren’t motivated to; or B) they feel like doing so is an admission of ignorance. However, if you wish to be able to consume and vet knowledge from a source, you will need to be able to understand what is written and that burden, ultimately, falls on you (the reader) to do the work to figure it out. Passing over a word, whether due to laziness or anxiety, robs you of a chance to grow your knowledge on a subject and eliminates the possibility that you can use or refute the information in a meaningful way.

After you have found a wide range of sources on the topic, winnowed them down to the ones that are the most reliable and credible, and mined them for information regarding your topic, it is time to put them in your speech or writing. We find that citing information can be some of the most anxiety producing work that students do. Often, they report getting incomplete, conflicting, or erroneous information about citing sources. As a result, many students put little effort into their citation practices because they think, “I’m going to get it wrong anyway, so why try?”

Conversely, some students rely solely on computer apps, such as EasyBib, BibTex, or Bib It Now to do their citations for them. Relying on apps doesn’t build your information literacy skills. Doing so means you never bothered to learn how to do it correctly since there was an app that you thought would do it for you and, therefore, you won’t be able to tell if the program is producing a correct citation or not. As we’ll see later, these programs often incorrectly cite work. In short, you need to learn how to properly cite materials and practice those skills.

We cannot stress enough that properly citing your sources is an incredibly important practice in your work. Not only does it ensure that you are sharing information with others in a responsible way by letting them know where you got your information from, it also increases your credibility with your audience because they recognize your effort to keep them fully informed. Citation guides provide standardized system for reporting your sources so that your listeners or readers know exactly how and where to find your sources. There are a variety of ways to cite your information for your audience, but in this chapter, we’ll focus on the two most common styles: the American Psychological Association (APA) style guide and the Modern Language Society (MLA) handbook.

Verbal Citation

When giving a presentation, you need to verbally cite your sources so your audience can ascertain the quality of your sources. Failing to do so can make your audience to doubt or disagree with the content of your speech even if your information is correct. To avoid this, you need to verbally cite your sources in a way that supports your work while not being overly cumbersome to your speech and interrupting your flow. We suggest you use three pieces of information every time you cite something verbally: Name of Source, Credibility Statement of Source, Year of Publication. Here are a few examples of what you might say:

Dr. McGeough, who is a leading researcher in ancient Greek rhetorical philosophy, argued in a 2023 research article that…

In 2022, the World Health Organization, an internationally renowned inter-governmental body that studies health and medicine, reported…

In a research study spanning from 2015 to 2020, the internationally recognized data scientists at the Pew Research Center tracked voting habits of various groups and found…

Do you see the Name of Source, Credibility Statement of Source, Year of Publication in each of the examples? Although you can report the information in a variety of ways, each contains the information. Typically, you don’t have to give more information than this because doing so makes your speech awkward and filled with a lot of extraneous information. If your audience wants more specific information about your sources, they can ask for your written citations. You should have a “References” (APA) or “Works Cited” (MLA) paper or (if using a slideshow app such as PowerPoint or Google Slides) on the final slide. In those case, make sure to write out the reference information based on our advice below.

In-Text Citation

There are two primary ways that you can cite information in text, or in the body of your writing. The first is called summary or synopsis. Luckily, we cite and report information the same whether it is a summary or synopsis. Let’s take the following passage that we might find in an academic journal article (sometimes called a periodical): “After surveying 200 participants, the study found that people like dogs more than cats, hamburgers more than hotdogs, and cake more than pie.” Now, we’ll create a summary in both APA and MLA:

McGeough and Golsan (2023) discovered that people like dogs more than cats.

(APA)

Researchers have discovered that people like dogs more than cats (McGeough & Golsan, 2023).

(APA)

McGeough and Golsan discovered that people like dogs more than cats (1).

(MLA)

Researchers have discovered that people like dogs more than cats (McGeough and Golsan 1).

(MLA)

The sentences can be written either way, but both contain information that is specific to their citation style. Notice how in APA, the in-text citation shows the authors’ last names, the year of publication, and uses the ampersand symbol (“&”) whereas the authors last names, the page number the information was found on, and the word “and” was needed in MLA (we made up the year of publication and page number for the sake of the example). Also, notice how the summary focuses on one finding, even though the research found peoples’ preferences on three different things. If we had reported on all three findings, in our own words, then it would have been a synopsis. We can also write a direct quote if we cite it properly. For example:

Past research has found that “people like dogs more than cats, hamburgers more than hotdogs, and cake more than pie” (McGeough & Golsan, 2023, p. 1).

(APA)

Past research has found that “people like dogs more than cats, hamburgers more than hotdogs, and cake more than pie” (McGeough and Golsan 1).

(MLA)

Note, that in APA, we have now added the page number to help a reader find the information that we are quoting whereas citation in MLA doesn’t change. In both cases, though, we use quotation marks to indicate that we are directly quoting material from a source. You must copy information from the source word-for-word if you are using a direct quotation.

Written References

Your references (APA) or works cited (MLA) pages are where you collect all of the information for your sources into one place. Doing this makes it easier for your reader to find the information you use in your writing. Let’s use the article, “Academic advising as teaching: Undergraduate student perceptions of advisor confirmation” and see how to cite it properly in your papers. First, let’s compare out how the citation appears on the article’s first page, Bib It Now, and proper APA:

Scott Titsworth, Joseph P. Mazer, Alan K. Goodboy, San Bolkan & Scott A. Myers (2015) Two Meta-analyses Exploring the Relationship between Teacher Clarity and Student Learning, Communication Education, 64:4, 385-418, DOI: 10.1080/03634523.2015.1041998

(Article’s first page)

Titsworth, S., Mazer, J. P., Goodboy, A. K., Bolkan, S., & Myers, S. A. (2015). Two Meta-analyses Exploring the Relationship between Teacher Clarity and Student Learning. Communication Education. Retrieved from https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/doi/full/10.1080/03634523.2015.1041998

(Bib It Now)

Titsworth, S., Mazer, J. P., Goodboy, A. K., Bolkan, S., & Myers, S. A. (2015). Two meta-analyses exploring the relationship between teacher clarity and student learning. Communication Education, 64(4), 385-418. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2015.1041998

(APA)

Can you see the differences? The third citation is the correct way to cite it in APA. The differences you see are why it is so important to know how to cite information properly. If you just relied on the journal article or app, then your citation would be incorrect and you wouldn’t be informing your audience of your information in the standardized way. Let’s try it with MLA now:

Scott Titsworth, Joseph P. Mazer, Alan K. Goodboy, San Bolkan & Scott A. Myers (2015) Two Meta-analyses Exploring the Relationship between Teacher Clarity and Student Learning, Communication Education, 64:4, 385-418, DOI: 10.1080/03634523.2015.1041998

(Article’s first page)

Titsworth, Scott, et al. “Two Meta-analyses Exploring the Relationship between Teacher Clarity and Student Learning.” Communication Education, 9 June 2015, www-tandfonline-com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/doi/full/10.1080/03634523.2015.1041998.

(Bib It Now)

Titsworth, Scott, et al. “Two Meta-analyses Exploring the Relationship between Teacher Clarity and Student Learning.” Communication Education, vol. 9, no. 4, 2015, pp. 385-418, https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2015.1041998.

(MLA)

Again, can you spot the differences? The final example is the correct way to cite an article in MLA.

The examples we just gave are for journal articles, but there is a unique way to cite almost anything: tweets, textbooks, websites with authors, websites without authors, YouTube videos, and a whole lot more. There are thousands of books, blogs, online writing centers, and YouTube/TikTok videos on citation. We suggest you visit a reputable website that offers sample papers so you can compare your work to what is the correct, standard way of citing and formatting your paper. We recommend (and often use ourselves!) the Online Writing Lab (or OWL) website from Purdue University, which offers sample papers in APA and MLA.

As you look at the sample paper and your own, sing the children’s song from Sesame Street: “One of these things is not like the others/One of these things just doesn’t belong/Can you tell which thing is not like the others/By the time I finish my song?” That is, if your paper looks different than the sample paper’s formatting, in-text citation, or reference/works cited page, yours is most likely the one that is incorrect—fix it! When students turn in papers that do not adhere to proper formatting, then there are two primary explanations: either the student didn’t take the time/energy to do the work properly or the student cannot follow Sesame Street rules and make corrections to their paper based on comparing their work to a sample paper. Frankly, neither is a good look, which is why your professors (and audience) will get frustrated if you don’t take the time to properly reference your sources.

When you are trying to inform, persuade, or motivate your audience, you need to be able to communicate why you have come to the conclusions you have based on the evidence you have gathered. If you cannot explain why you believe something or if you believe something for poor reasons (e.g., “my family believes this,” “my friends all say this,” or “everyone knows this”), then you have not lived up to your responsibility to be a good, careful researcher. Being able to vet your evidence is the first step to not only demanding that you are an informed person, but that others around you live up to their responsibility to communicate in ways that are factually supported about important topics or problems you and your community may face.