Finding and Citing Credible Sources

You’ve been given a writing assignment about a subject you know very little about. To learn more about this topic, what is the first thing you do?

Do you, by chance, Google the topic and click the first few listed links to get started? This is completely normal and often how most of us learn about new topics, but when we are researching and writing about a subject for academic and professional purposes, we will have to start digging a little deeper.

In academic writing, it is important always to discuss your ideas in relation to research and work that has come before you.

When writing an academic paper like a research report, we can’t just make something up! We need to read various sources to learn about the topic. Then, we need to paraphrase, summarize, and synthesize the new information we have learned into our own words to demonstrate that we have developed our understanding of the topic.

Here’s the catch:

1. We need to be very careful about where we are getting our information.
2. We need to credit (or cite) the sources from which our information comes.

The goal of this guide is to help get you started on finding and citing credible sources.

How do I find credible sources?

Quality, credible sources come in many forms. Some of these forms can include:

• Publications from peer-reviewed academic journals
• Articles from reputable news outlets with editorial standards
• Publications or websites from established institutions, such as government agencies, universities, or research organizations
• Expert-reviewed books or materials

Generally, the academic community prefers that students use peer-reviewed sources over other sources whenever possible, but let’s back up: what do we mean by peer-reviewed sources, and why are they preferred?

• An article is peer-reviewed when it goes through an editorial process where several experts in a field review the publication for accuracy and scientific integrity.
  • In general, if you use materials from peer-reviewed publications, they have been vetted by scholars in your field for quality and importance.
• It is generally accepted in the scientific community that if a publication has gone through the peer-review process, it is very unlikely that the research is fabricated, exaggerated, or influenced by ulterior motives.
  • The peer-review process and academic publishing lend credibility to our sources.

Now that we know what a peer-review source is, where do we begin to find credible sources like these?

Start with Google Scholar:

Google Scholar is a search engine that largely searches academic, peer-reviewed, and government sources for publications relevant to your topic. Watch this video on Conducting a Literature Search with Google Scholar.

Other academically oriented search engines that are helpful include:

• Unity Environmental University’s Library Database
• JSTOR
• PubMed
• Science Direct

Improve Your Search Abilities:

More often than not, simply typing in a few words about your topic will find you many awesome resources on these search sites, but sometimes, you need to be a little more specific with your search terms.

• To get better results on these search engines, using keywords, applying filters, and using search operators can really help you narrow down what you find.
  • Search operators are special commands or symbols you use in search engines to narrow down or refine your search results. For example, using quotes (“”) around a phrase searches for the exact wording, while a minus sign (-) excludes certain terms from your results.
    • To learn more about improving your searches, Watch this video.
• If you decide to look for sources outside of these academic search engines, for example, you find a nonprofit’s website or a news article you like, and you want to make sure it is credible, there are steps you can take.
  • Credibility checking uses a variety of criteria to ensure that the source you are citing is reliable, up-to-date, and written by experts who can be trusted.
    • Try using the C.R.A.A.P. Test Checklist to ensure the credibility of your sources.

How do I give credit to and cite my sources?

In general, putting text and ideas from our sources into direct quotes simply is not a sufficient way to give credit to our sources. We need to get into the practice of:

1. Paraphrasing, summarizing, and synthesizing information from our source into our own words and
2. Including citations in our academic writing to avoid plagiarism and properly attribute information to the original content creators.

What is a citation?

In environmental writing, we follow the APA citation style, which involves two parts you will include in your writing:

• In-text citations come at the end of your summary/synthesis sentence where you are referencing information or ideas from a specific resource:

  • EXAMPLE: More than 90 percent of tropical plant species are animal-pollinated, therefore the disruption of pollination represents one of the greatest threats to tropical biodiversity posed by habitat loss (Ollerton et al. 2011).

• Full citations are the entries that you put on your literature cited or references list at the end of your research report, paper, or essay:

  • EXAMPLE: Ollerton, J., Winfree, R., and Tarrant, S. (2011). How many flowering plants are pollinated by animals? Oikos 120: 321–326.

• • Helpful Hint: If you find a source on Google Scholar, you can copy/paste a pre-generated APA citation directly from the search list. Watch this video to find out how to do it!
  • Another Helpful Hint: you don’t need to write your citations from scratch! Websites like BibGuru and Scribbr will generate citations for you from a URL!

• Directly quoted text should be used sparingly in academic writing and only in specific circumstances where they add significant value to the ideas you’re trying to express.

  • EXAMPLE: “The greenhouse effect is a natural process that plays a major part in shaping the earth’s climate” (Mahato, 2015, p.1).

• • Helpful Hint: If you do deem it necessary to use directly quoted text from one of your sources, you will need to include the same in-text citation as above and include the page number where the quoted text came from.