Dancing on Heaven's Door Research Paper, Page 3

A Record of What You Find

The information you gather about potential sources of information for your research should be stored in an orderly way. You need to write down the ideas, facts, quotations, etc. that are relevant to your topic, so that you can have easy access to them when you are constructing your research paper. Just as importantly, you must record the source of these ideas, facts, quotations, etc., so that you can give your paper a proper reference list.

There are practical and ethical reasons for including a reference list in any academic writing—and, yes, at the university level, academic writing is what you are doing. On the practical side, a “fact” is rarely something that can be taken for granted. Things like population sizes, production levels, and mortality rates may sound straight-forward, but they are really estimates drawn from partial data. The results may vary depending on the methods of calculation used and the biases of the person or group responsible for the research. If you present in your paper a fact that you found in someone else's work, you should tell your reader where you originally found the fact, so that she can go to the source and evaluate its validity for herself. On the ethical side, if you use facts or ideas from another researcher, or indeed that person's original words, the author deserves to get some credit. Not to give such credit is considered a form of intellectual theft known as plagiarism. This is a serious infraction of academic ethics which the university punishes with penalties that may include expulsion. Moreover, your teachers can very easily detect plagiarism by using internet services like Turnitin.com. If you have any questions about how to use research material ethically, take the library's tutorial on plagiarism.

To help you keep a record of useful facts, ideas, etc. along with their sources, I have prepared a Data Collection Sheet. (Note that an icon linked to this sheet is included on the right-hand side of this and all subsequent pages of the Dancing on Heaven's Doorstep research paper.) This is a document containing a preformatted table with labeled slots into which you can insert relevant information, like the author's name, book title, article title, web address, quotations, etc. Download this file; it contains instructions for its use.

Let's begin finding information to put into the Data Collection Sheet; proceed to page 4