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While sometimes there are requirements about what types of sources to include, it is otherwise a judgment call whether you include "scholarly" sources, "popular" sources, or a combination thereof. You should consider what information you need to make your case and what information your readers need to understand. Different sources have various strengths and limitations because of how they were created and what their features and conventions are.
Further, the differences among these types of sources is often less clear than at first glance -- there's an element of judgment and interpretation, and it is important to evaluate and verify the information of your research no matter what kind of source it is. See our "Understanding & Recognizing Peer Review" guide for more about identifying source types. The "Engaging" section of this guide describes the unique features of academic writing.
We recommend beginning an investigation of the library's resources (which include all types of sources in many different formats, including digital materials that are accessible anywhere) with either the library's "Articles + Library Catalog" search (on our home page) or an individual database, which can be found by either searching or browsing our Databases A-Z page.
The library has also developed a few guides and tutorials about the powerful (though initially confusing) search tools available for finding materials -- you can access these in the links below.
Below is a list of education-related databases available to the UConn community. These may be particularly helpful for sections of ENGL 1007 with the guiding inquiry, "What does an education do?" Other databases may be more valuable to courses with different inquiries: consult the library's Databases A-Z Guide for more.
Google Scholar is a specialized tool for searching across scholarly articles and other publications. While it has some limitations, many feel comfortable with its familiar interface, and it can be configured with the library's databases to allow for access of otherwise-paywalled articles. Below you will find our detailed guide about how to use it.
Google likely needs little introduction. Indeed, googling has become synonymous with using any search engine (of which there are many besides Google!). It remains a powerful way to find research of all types, though it also has some limitations and problems. Something helpful to keep in mind for using Google in academic contexts is that it includes advanced searching features that we often don't require for everyday purposes. The guides below provide some further tips to find what you're looking for in a Google search.
Everybody has likely heard a prohibition against using Wikipedia in academic writing at some point. While it is sometimes not effective to cite Wikipedia (or other encyclopedias) as a source directly, it is an excellent means of orienting yourself in an unfamiliar topic and finding further resources. The UConn Library has developed a guide showing how the citational apparatus of high quality Wikipedia pages can point you to excellent material for understanding your topic and developing your own writing.
Citation chaining (also called citation tracking or tracing) is the idea of using the citations in any given source as a resource for finding additional research. The simplest way to do this is by finding those other texts cited by a source you already have that seem most relevant to your research question. This is referred to as "backward chaining." You can mine an end-of-text references list, but such earlier scholarship is often discussed with context and commentary within texts themselves. Many texts include such discussions in introductory or "literature review" sections.
Databases have also made it much easier to complete "forward chaining" -- that is, seeing what subsequently published texts have cited the one you're looking at. Google Scholar and some other databases have this feature easily accessible, though not all provide it.
In addition to discovery of new relevant research, citation chaining can be a tool for evaluation and assessment. If a particular text, researcher, or journal are cited frequently by many others, that might be an indication of its influence or importance within a scholarly conversation!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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