54 9.1 Researching Information
As a college student, it is important that you can find reliable sources for your class work and assignments. It is also essential that you know how to correctly use and handle the sources when you make them part of your own work.
Outside of school, most of us also feel that it is important to be informed about current issues and ideas. Knowing what is going on in the world is, arguably, a citizen’s responsibility. Plus, it feels good to join in a conversation and know the facts, or to be sure we are sharing a meme, social media post, or news article that’s accurate and trustworthy.
Snopes
Snopes is a widely respected, non-partisan site dedicated to investigating rumors, memes, social media statements, and news stories, and then issuing decisions about whether the materials are correct or false.
Exercise: Using Snopes
Go to Snopes’ “What’s New” page—a page that updates daily and includes the latest rumours.
Scroll through the list until you find an interesting hot topic. Click and read, then write a quick paragraph that summarizes what you found. What did you learn? Were you surprised?
If this captured your interest, you may want to explore Snopes a little more. It’s a fun place to poke around and a great place to fact-check information. The next time you are forwarded a bit of information and you want to know if it’s true before you become outraged and send it to all your friends, do a search for it on Snopes.
As humans living in the digital age, people should know how to navigate the Web successfully, find the best materials, and evaluate and use them with confidence. Alas: in an age where a quick Google search nets millions of “hits” in half a second, evaluating the sources of the chosen material can be trickier than it sounds. There’s a lot of great material on the Web, but there’s a lot of garbage, too. Being able to tell which is an important life skill in the digital age.
We also need to understand who “owns” information—whether hard copy (printed) or digital—and how and when to give credit to the owner; this keeps us safe from accidentally committing plagiarism. This will be discussed in the next section, Chapter 9.2 Plagiarism.
Finding Quality Texts
In the world of academia, our gold standard for texts requires them to be created by people with substantial education, advanced degrees, and life expertise, making them experts in their fields. If I’m reading a cookbook, I want it to be by someone who really knows their way around a kitchen—not someone who’s a mediocre cook but decided it would be fun to collect the family favourites into a self-published book.
You’re a college student. Without a doubt, the best place for you to find quality information is the college library—and you can do this by walking into the library or searching it via the Web. Many college libraries have adopted a new set of guidelines for helping students find good materials. It’s called CRAP. Yes, really! CRAP stands for currency, rel