What *really* matters when citing sources? November 5, 2009
Posted by Emily in : Citing Sources, Duke researchers, Librarians, Original research , 1 comment so farYou may know that two major style manuals — APA and MLA — have released new editions in the last six or so months. And if you’re aware of that fact, you undoubtedly know that both editions contain inconsistencies in their examples and enough errors to require APA to post an 8-page list of corrections and then replace its first run copies with a second printing.
The new rules have driven confused and frustrated researchers to sources such as APA’s blog, which provides examples and attempts to explain the more complicated rules (check out the DOI/URL flowchart — yes, this rule requires a flowchart), or Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL), which hosts APA and MLA resources that received 3.5 million and 2.5 million hits, respectively, during September and October alone, according to the coordinator of OWL.
It is evident from these stats alone that librarians and faculty have spent countless hours supporting the researchers and students who have spent even more time formatting manuscripts to meet the unbending rules of CSE, APA, MLA and enumerable others.
As Barbara Fister posits in her ACRLog post, is this time well spent? Is research somehow made more valid when its footnotes are perfectly formatted, its works cited page spaced just so? Have we spent so much time agonizing over comma placement and tracking down database names that we’ve lost sight of the whole point of citing sources in the first place? Do our budding scholars realize that citing sources is not merely an academic hazing ritual of sorts, causing them hours of extra labor after their papers are written?
It would seem that the newest editions of APA and MLA are only muddying the waters, making it harder for researchers — especially novice ones — to achieve the true goal of citing sources: to give credit to the scholars their research builds upon and to make it as easy as possible for their readers to learn more about that work.
And if we can agree on that primary goal, how do we get back to emphasizing it rather than the arcane rules?
Facebook for Faculty (Part Two) June 30, 2009
Posted by Nathaniel in : Cool tools, Duke researchers, Original research , add a comment
Name ambiguity is a recurring issue that impacts research accuracy and quality, career advancement and tenure, global collaboration among researchers, and identification and attribution of funding for institutions and individual authors alike.
ResearcherID.com by Thomson Reuters (the creators of ISI’s Journal Citation Reports) allows researchers to:
- Generate a unique identifier to ensure that your work is correctly attributed to you
- Provide a way for your institution to properly measure your performance
- Manage your publication list and professional profile online, in one place
- List previous institutions in your profile to helps others find you as you move through your career
Publish or Perish May 22, 2009
Posted by Michael in : Cool tools, Original research, Research Help , add a commentThere are a number of ways to analyze the impact of publications of a particular researcher (including yourself). A longtime favorite has been ISI’s (Social) Science Citation Index, which has come to the web as Web of Science. The web has introduced a number of other tools for assessing the impact of a specific researcher or publication. Some of these are GoogleScholar (don’t forget to set your preferences!), Scopus, SciFinder Scholar, and MathSciNet among many others.
Joining this group is Publish or Perish, with a slightly different take on this process. Publish or Perish uses data from Google Scholar, but it automatically does analysis on the citation patterns for specific authors. After searching for an author (works best with first initial and quotes, such as “DG Schaeffer”) you can select the papers you want to analyze and you get metrics such as total citations, cites per year, h-index, g-index, etc. Any analysis done can be exported to EndNote, BibTeX or a CSV file.
The software is available for Windows and Linux and is a quick, light, free download from the Publish or Perish website. It’s more of a do-one-thing-well software and isn’t full of features, but this makes it easy to use. It was created by an Australian professor and she includes some thoughts on her site about GoogleScholar as a citation tool as well as an explanation of the metrics used in the software.
Want $1000? April 22, 2009
Posted by Emily in : Duke researchers, Original research , 2comments
Then enter your research paper or project into competition for the Libraries’ Durden Prize or Middlesworth Award.
Undergraduates who make exceptional use of library collections (yep, articles that you get online through the Libraries website count!) are eligible for the Durden Prize.
Undergraduates OR graduate students who incorporate materials from the Rare Books, Manuscript and Special Collections Library into their research are invited to submit papers for consideration for the Middlesworth Award.
All winners will be recognized at a reception at Parents and Family Weekend 2009 and will receive $1000.
Submissions for both awards are due to the library by 5:00 p.m. on Friday, May 15.
Note: Both awards require a faculty member’s signature, and the Durden Prize requires a short essay on your research process, so you may not want to wait till May 15 to decide to apply!
Want $1000? April 4, 2008
Posted by Emily in : Duke researchers, Original research , 1 comment so far
Then enter your research paper or project into competition for the Libraries’ Durden Prize or Middlesworth Award.
Undergraduates who make exceptional use of library collections (databases count and e-journals count!) are eligible for the Durden Prize.
Undergraduates OR graduate students who incorporate materials from the Rare Books, Manuscript and Special Collections Library are invited to submit papers for consideration for the Middlesworth Award.
All winners will be recognized at a reception at Parents and Family Weekend 2008 and will receive $1000.
Submissions for both awards are due to the library by 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 15.
Note: Both awards require a faculty member’s signature, and the Durden Prize requires a short essay on your research process, so you may not want to wait till May 15 to decide to apply!
