Academic Research & Citation

What this covers

• Narrowing a topic into a research question with a clear scope, and building a working thesis that the sources can actually support
• Database searching: keyword versus subject headings, Boolean operators, truncation, filtering by peer review and date, and mining a source's bibliography for further leads
• Evaluating sources — distinguishing peer-reviewed articles, trade publications, popular journalism, and advocacy sites, and deciding what each is good evidence for
• Reading a scholarly article efficiently: abstract, methods, and conclusion first, then locating the specific claim you need
• Integrating sources: signal phrases, block quotes, paraphrase that changes structure rather than swapping synonyms, and summary of an entire argument
• Formatting in-text citations and works cited/references entries in MLA 9, APA 7, or Chicago notes-bibliography, including tricky cases like edited collections, databases, and web pages with no author
• Writing annotated bibliography entries that summarize, evaluate, and state relevance to your project

Where learners get stuck

Believing that a paraphrase is safe from plagiarism as long as it is cited and no more than a few words match the original

Students are taught 'cite your sources' as a single rule, so they assume the citation does all the work. In fact a paraphrase that keeps the original sentence structure and just substitutes synonyms is still considered patchwriting by most college handbooks, even with a citation attached. The fix is drafting the paraphrase from notes with the source closed.

Treating any article found through the library website as automatically peer-reviewed and authoritative

Library databases index book reviews, editorials, newspaper articles, and trade magazines alongside scholarly journals, and the interface makes them all look alike. Students see the institutional login and assume vetting. Learning to check for an abstract, a methods or literature review section, a reference list, and the journal's own description is the practical test.

Stacking quotations end to end and assuming the quotations constitute the argument

High school research assignments often reward evidence quantity, and citation feels like proof of work. At college level the reader expects the student's own claim to frame each quotation and an explanation of what the quotation shows. This produces papers that are correctly cited but read as a collage.

What a session looks like

A session usually starts with what you are actually working on — a prompt, a half-finished draft, a list of sources you are not sure about. If you are early, we talk the topic down to a question narrow enough to answer in the assigned page count and plan search terms. If you have sources, you describe one and we test whether it is scholarly, what claim it can support, and where it belongs. Later sessions work line by line: you read a sentence of your draft aloud, we check whether the source is quoted, paraphrased, or summarized, whether the signal phrase attributes it clearly, and whether the in-text citation matches the works cited entry. Citation formatting is practiced by building entries from the raw information rather than by copying a generator's output.

Helpful to know first

• Ability to write a paragraph with a clear claim and supporting evidence
• A current or recent research assignment, or a topic you have been asked to research
• Access to your school's library databases (or awareness that you have them) is useful but not required
• Knowing which citation style your instructor requires, or being able to check the syllabus

Questions

Which citation style should I be using?

It is set by the instructor or department, not by the topic. MLA is common in English and humanities courses, APA in psychology, education, and nursing, Chicago in history. Check the syllabus or assignment sheet first; sessions can work in any of the three, and we can compare them if you take courses in different fields.

Can Evelyn help me find sources for my paper?

Sessions focus on teaching you the search process — choosing keywords, using database filters, following citation trails, judging what turns up. Specific database access depends on your institution's subscriptions, so you run the searches and we work through the results together, including why a search returned nothing useful.

How is this different from just using a citation generator?

Generators produce entries from whatever metadata they scrape, which is frequently wrong for chapters, translations, database articles, and undated web pages. The aim here is that you can read a generated entry and spot what is missing, and build one by hand when the generator fails.

My professor flagged my paper for plagiarism but I cited everything. What happened?

This is usually patchwriting — a paraphrase that follows the source's sentence structure too closely — or quotation marks missing from wording taken directly. Sessions can go through the flagged passages with you, identify which category each falls into, and practice the note-taking method that prevents it recurring.