Welcome to the Communication 306 research guide. This guide will provide you with information that will help you: develop the topic of your editorial essay, identify the different resource types required by the assignment, locate academic and other credible sources relevant to your topic, and evaluate the source materials. The guide is divided into the following sections:
- Choosing Your Topic: This page provides a video tutorial offering ideas that will help you select and develop a viable research topic, mind mapping tools, and links to tertiary resources where you can search for background information on your general idea.
- Planning Your Research: This page contains several video tutorials explaining the difference between scholarly and non-scholarly sources; what constitutes a peer-reviewed source; and essential library skills including navigating the library's general search tool and its databases, developing search terms, and performing controlled searches using keywords, subject headings, and filters.
- Research Tools: On this page, you will find databases containing materials that will both provide overviews of major topics as well as in-depth research, government and vendor resources that provided statistics and data related to a variety of subject areas, and video tutorials that help you understand and evaluate statistics.
- Evaluating Information Resources: This page contains strategies recommended for the evaluation of both scholarly and non-scholarly materials available through library resources and on the open web.
- Reading and Taking Notes: Here you will find video tutorials with helpful strategies for interrogating scholarly works and effective note-taking.
- APA: On this page, you will find a variety of resources and tools that will help you avoid plagiarism and address questions concerning what elements of a resource are needed in a citation based on the resource type, the proper formatting of a citation, and other APA formatting requirements.
