how to make sources of data in research

Sources of Data For Research: Types & Examples

Introduction

In the age of information, data has become the driving force behind decision-making and innovation. Whether in business, science, healthcare, or government, data serves as the foundation for insights and progress.

As a researcher, you need to understand the various sources of data as they are essential for conducting comprehensive and impactful studies. In this blog post, we will explore the primary data sources, their definitions, and examples to help you gather and analyze data effectively.

Primary Data Sources

Primary data sources refer to original data collected firsthand by researchers specifically for their research purposes. These sources provide fresh and relevant information tailored to the study’s objectives. Examples of primary data sources include surveys and questionnaires, direct observations, experiments, interviews, and focus groups. As a researcher, you must be familiar with primary data sources, which are original data collected firsthand specifically for your research purposes.

These sources hold significant value as they offer fresh and relevant information tailored to your study. Also, researchers use primary data to obtain accurate and specific insights into their research questions to confirm that the data is directly relevant to their study and meets their specific needs. Collecting primary data allows you as a researcher to control the data collection process, and monitor the data quality and reliability for their analyses and conclusions.

Examples of Primary Data Sources

Surveys and questionnaires: Surveys and questionnaires are widely used data collection methods that allow you to gather information directly from respondents. Whether distributed online, through mail, or in person, surveys enable you to reach a large audience and collect quantitative data efficiently. However, it is crucial to design clear and unbiased questions to ensure the accuracy and reliability of responses.
Observations: Direct observations involve systematically watching and recording events or behaviors as they occur. This method provides you with real-time data, offering unique insights into participants’ natural behavior and responses. It is particularly valuable in fields such as psychology, anthropology, and ecology, where understanding human or animal behavior is critical.
Experiments: Experiments involve when you deliberately manipulate variables to study cause-and-effect relationships. When you control variables, your experiments provide rigorous and conclusive data, often used in scientific research. They are well-suited for hypothesis testing and determining causal relationships.
Interviews and focus groups : Qualitative data collected through interviews and focus groups give you an in-depth exploration of participants’ opinions, beliefs, and experiences. These methods help you to understand complex issues and gain rich insights that quantitative data alone may not capture or provide for your study.

Read More: What is Primary Data? + [Examples & Collection Methods]

Secondary Data Sources

As a researcher, you should also be familiar with secondary data sources. Secondary data sources involve data collected by someone else for purposes other than your specific research. Therefore, secondary data complements primary data and can provide valuable context and insights to your research.

Examples of Secondary Data Sources

Published literature: Published literature refers to academic papers, books, and reports published by researchers and scholars in various fields. These literatures serve as a rich source of secondary data. These sources contain valuable findings and analyses from previous studies, offering a foundation for new research and the ability to build upon existing knowledge. Reviewing published literature is essential for you to understand the current state of research in your area of study and identify gaps for further investigation.
Government sources: Government agencies collect and maintain vast amounts of data on a wide range of topics. These datasets are often made available for public use and can be a valuable resource for researchers. For example, census data provides demographic information, economic indicators offer insights into the economy, and health records contribute to public health research. Government sources offer standardized and reliable data that can be used for various research purposes.
Online databases: The internet has opened up access to a wealth of data through online databases, data repositories, and open data initiatives. These platforms host datasets on diverse subjects. This makes them easily accessible to you and other researchers worldwide. Online databases are particularly beneficial for conducting cross-disciplinary research or exploring topics beyond your immediate field of expertise.
Market research reports: Market research companies conduct surveys and gather data to analyze market trends, consumer behavior, and industry insights. These reports provide valuable data for businesses and researchers seeking information on market dynamics and consumer preferences. Market research reports offer you a comprehensive view of industries and can inform you of how to make strategic decisions.

Read More: What is Secondary Data? + [Examples, Sources & Analysis]

Tertiary Data Sources

In addition to primary and secondary data, you should be aware of tertiary data sources, which play a critical role in aggregating and organizing existing data from various origins. Tertiary data sources focus on collecting, curating, and preserving data for easy access and analysis.

Examples of Tertiary Data Sources

Data aggregators: Data aggregators are companies or organizations that specialize in collecting and compiling data from multiple sources into centralized databases. These sources can include government agencies, research institutions, businesses, and other data providers. These aggregators offer a convenient way for you, a researcher, to access a vast amount of data on specific topics or industries. As they consolidate data from diverse sources, they provide you and other researchers with a comprehensive view of trends, patterns, and insights.
Data brokers: The best way to describe data brokers is that they are entities that buy and sell data, often without the direct consent or knowledge of the individuals whose data is being traded. While data brokers can offer access to large datasets, their practices raise privacy and ethical concerns. As a researcher, you should be cautious when using data obtained through data brokers to ensure compliance with ethical guidelines and data protection laws.
Data archives: Data archives serve as repositories for historical data and research findings. These archives are essential for preserving valuable information for future reference and analysis. They often contain datasets, reports, academic papers, and other research materials. Data archives ensure that data remains accessible for replication studies, verification of previous research, and the development of longitudinal analyses.

Emerging Data Sources

As you delve into the world of data collection, it’s important to know the emerging sources that have gained prominence in recent years. These newer data sources provide valuable insights and opportunities for research across various domains. Below are some of these emerging data sources:

Internet of Things (IoT): The Internet of Things (IoT) has changed data collection in the 21st century through the everyday connection of devices and objects to the Internet. Smart devices like sensors, wearables, and home appliances generate vast amounts of data in real-time. For example, IoT devices in healthcare can monitor patients’ health metrics, while in agriculture, they can optimize irrigation and crop management. As a researcher, you can leverage IoT data to analyze patterns, predict trends, and make data-driven decisions.
Social media and web data: Social media platforms and websites host a wealth of information generated by users worldwide. When you analyze social media posts and online reviews, and scrap the web, they provide you with valuable insights into public opinions, consumer behavior, and trends. You can study sentiment analysis, track customer preferences, and identify emerging topics using social media data. Web scraping allows for the extraction of data from websites, enabling researchers to gather large datasets for analysis.
Sensor data: Sensor data is becoming increasingly relevant in various fields, including environmental monitoring, urban planning, and healthcare. Sensors are capable of measuring and collecting data on environmental parameters, traffic patterns, air quality, and more. This data helps you understand environmental changes, optimize urban infrastructure, and improve public health initiatives. Sensor networks offer a continuous stream of data, that provides you with real-time and accurate information.

In conclusion, we have explored the diverse sources of data for research, such as primary data sources, secondary data sources, and tertiary data sources, which all play a crucial role in getting the accurate information needed for research. It is important that you understand the strengths and limitations of each data source.

As you embark on your research journey, explore and utilize these diverse data sources. And if you leverage a combination of primary, secondary, and tertiary data, you can make informed decisions, drive progress in your respective fields, and uncover novel insights that may not be achievable without trying out different sources.

Connect to Formplus, Get Started Now - It's Free!

data sources
primary data sources
research studies
secondary data source
tertiary data source

Naive vs Non Naive Participants In Research: Meaning & Implications

Introduction In research studies, naive and non-naive participant information alludes to the degree of commonality and understanding...

Projective Techniques In Surveys: Definition, Types & Pros & Cons

Introduction When you’re conducting a survey, you need to find out what people think about things. But how do you get an accurate and...

Subgroup Analysis: What It Is + How to Conduct It

Introduction Clinical trials are an integral part of the drug development process. They aim to assess the safety and efficacy of a new...

Desk Research: Definition, Types, Application, Pros & Cons

If you are looking for a way to conduct a research study while optimizing your resources, desk research is a great option. Desk research...

Formplus - For Seamless Data Collection

Collect data the right way with a versatile data collection tool. try formplus and transform your work productivity today..

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

2-Types of Sources

9. Data as Sources

Using data as sources can help with all of your research project’s information needs:

Learn more background information.
Answer your research question. (The evidence that data provide can help you decide on the best answer for your question.)
Convince your audience that your answer is correct. (Data often give you evidence that your answer is correct.)
Describe the situation surrounding your research question.
Report what others have said about your research question.

Activity: Example of Data

Check out this very detailed data about frozen lasagna. Did you ever think this much data was available? Are there elements new to you? How might you use such data?

Movie: Reinterpreting Little Red Riding Hood

What is data.

The word means many things to many people. (Consider “data” as it relates to your phone contract, for instance!) For our purposes, a definition we like is “units of information observed, collected, or created in the course of research.” Erway, Ricky. 2013. Starting the Conversation: University-wide Research Data Management Policy. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research. http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/library/2013/2013-08.pdf

Data observed, collected, or created for research purposes can be numbers , text , images , audio clips , and video clips . But in this section on using data as sources, we’re going to concentrate on numerical data.

Sometimes data are actually necessary to answer research questions, particularly in the social sciences, life, and physical sciences. For instance, data would be necessary to support or rule out these hypotheses:

More women than men voted in the last presidential election in a majority of states.
A certain drug shows promising results in the treatment of pancreatic cancer.
Listening to certain genres of music lowers blood pressure.
People of certain religious denominations are more likely to find a specific television program objectionable.
The average weight of house cats in the United States has increased over the past 30 years.
The average square footage of supermarkets in the United States has increased in the past 20 years.
More tomatoes were consumed per person in the United Kingdom in 2022 than in 1962.
Exploding volcanoes can help cool the planet by spewing sulfur dioxide, which combines with water vapor to make reflective aerosols.

So using numeric data in those portions of your final product that require evidence can often strengthen your argument that your answer to your research question is correct or the most reasonable answer. At other times, even if data are not actually necessary, numeric data can be particularly persuasive and sharpen the points you want to make in other portions of your final product devoted to, say, describing the situation surrounding your research question. (See Chapter 9, Making an Argument )

For example, for a research paper about the research question “Why are there many more people who qualify for food from U.S. foodbanks than the number of people who actually use foodbanks?,” you could find data on the website of Feeding America , the nation’s largest network of foodbanks.

Similarly, for a project with the research question “How do some birds in Australia use “smart” hunting techniques to flush out prey, including starting fires?,” you might find a journal article with data about how many people have observed these techniques and estimates of how frequently the techniques are used and by how many bird species.

Obtaining Data

There are two ways of obtaining data:

Obtain data that already have been collected and analyzed. That’s what this section will cover.
Collect data yourself. This can include activities such as making observations about your environment, conducting surveys or interviews, directly recording measurements in a lab or in the field, or even receiving electronic data recorded by computers/machines that gather the data. You will explore these activities in courses you take.

Finding Data in Articles, Books, Web Pages, and More

Numeric search data can be found all over the place. A lot of it can be found as part of other sources such as books, journals, newspapers, magazine articles, and web pages. In these cases, the data do not stand alone as a distinct element but instead are part of the larger work.

When searching for data in books and articles and on web pages, terms such as statistics or data may or may not be useful search terms. That’s because many writers don’t use those terms in their scholarly writing. They tend to use the words findings or results when talking about the data that could be useful to you. In addition, statistics is a separate discipline, and using that term will turn up lots of journals in that area, which won’t be helpful to you. So use the search terms data and statistics with caution, especially when searching library catalogs. (See information on the Library Catalog . More information on searching is in Chapter 4 Precision Searching .)

Even without using those search terms, many scholarly sources you turn up are likely to contain data. Once you find potential sources, skim them for tables, graphs, or charts. These items are displays or illustrations of data gathered by researchers. However, sometimes data and interpretations are solely in the body of the narrative text and may be included in sections called “Results” or “Findings.” (That shouldn’t keep you from displaying the data in charts, graphs, or tables as you like in your own work, though.)

If the data you find in a book, article, or web page are particularly helpful and you want more, you could contact the author to request additional numeric research data. Researchers will often discuss their data and its analysis – and sometimes provide some of it (or occasionally, all). Some may link to a larger numeric research data set. However, if a researcher shares his or her data with you, it may be in what’s called a “raw” form. This means that you might have to do additional analysis to make it useful in answering your question.

Depending on your research question, you may need to gather data from multiple sources to get everything you need to answer your research question and make your argument for it. (See Chapter 9, Making an Argument .)

For instance, in our example related to foodbanks above, we suggested where you could find statistics about the number of people who get food from American food banks. But with that research question (“Why are there many more people who qualify for food from U.S. foodbanks than the number of people who actually use foodbanks?”), you would also need to find out from another source how many people qualify for foodbanks based on their income and compare that number with how many people actually use foodbanks.

Finding Data, Data Depositories, and Directories

Sometimes the numeric research data you need may not be in the articles, books, and websites that you’ve found. But that doesn’t mean that they haven’t been collected and packaged in a usable format. Governments and research institutions often publish data they have collected in discipline-specific data depositories that make data available online. Here are some examples:

United States Census Bureau
Budget of the United States Government
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics
National Center for Education Statistics
Daily Weather Maps NOAA)
GeoData.gov
The World Factbook (CIA)
OSU Knowledge Bank

The United Nations and just about every country provide information as numeric data available online. Free and accessible data like this is called open data. The U.S. federal government, all states, and many local governments provide “open” data. You can find them (among other places) at site: .gov.

Other data are available through vendors who publish the data collected by researchers. Here are some examples:

Hoover’s Online (OSU Only)
International Monetary Fund Statistical Databases
World Health Organization Statistical Information System
Envirofacts
Census of Agriculture (OSU only)
OECD Education at a Glance
Corruption Perceptions Index

Don’t know of a depository that could contain data in your discipline? Check out a data directory such as re3data.org where data can be registered.

Evaluating Data as Sources

Evaluating data for relevance and credibility is just as important as evaluating any other source. See Chapter 6, Evaluating Sources for help with that.

Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research Copyright © 2015 by Teaching & Learning, Ohio State University Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research

(48 reviews)

Cheryl Lowry, Ohio State University

Publisher: Ohio State University Libraries

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by Elbert Davis, Assistant Professor, Marshall University on 10/24/21

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

The author does an incredible job in explaining the research process, from choosing a research question to how to search for sources (and citing those sources), and more. There are relevant self-check quizzes throughout the book to check for understanding, along with other supplemental resources. As the book was published through The Ohio State University, some of the sources are only available to OSU students, but the author makes it clear when this is the case.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The author did an excellent job with the accuracy of the book, Two specific examples that stood out: taking care to mention that Wikipedia is a great as a starting point, but not as an endpoint for research. Lowry also clearly explained that educational use did not automatically mean fair use, which seems to be an issue with students and faculty alike.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

The book should remain relevant in years to come, as academic research seems to follow the same basic pattern. The only issue would be if The Ohio State University changes the links used in the book, although I expect these to be easy to update. The book would still be able to be used without the supplemental links though.

Clarity rating: 5

The book seems to be targeting an introductory audience. Lowry does a great job of breaking down the jargon of academic research into plain English for the beginning researcher.

Consistency rating: 5

I thought the author used approprate terminology for a student learning about academic research.

Modularity rating: 5

The book is designed into specific chapters for the different aspects of choosing a source. While there are specific sections devoted to The Ohio State University library, I would not expect to have any trouble assigning the other chapters in my courses.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The author started at the beginning, with how to design a research question before going into choosing a source, which gave good background knowledge.

Interface rating: 5

The contents of the book were clean and crisp. No distortions were noted. Navigation from the table of contents was easy.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

No grammatical errors were noted.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

Nothing offensive was in the book.

I have a difficult time in getting beginning graduate student to understand the different types of sources and fair use. I think using most chapters of this book would help a great deal in that comprehension.

Reviewed by Kelly LeFave, Instructor, Portland Community College on 6/15/21

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

This student friendly overview of academic research, including a strong focus on information literacy, covers many of the salient points that college level writing and writing for research classes curricula contain, making it a strong choice as a comprehensive and useful overview. Chapters include enough depth of coverage to make the leap from information to practice for students; self-directed activities are provided to check knowledge, work through concept applications, and offer more specifics. The book provides an easy-to-navigate Table of Contents, but an Index and Glossary do not seem to be available.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

Some errors appear that a thorough proofread would catch. Some resources may need to be updated since information practices and modes change so quickly; some references and links direct students to OSU information that would not apply to all readers.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

The book’s topic – academic research – necessarily demands constant updating given our fast-changing digital landscape and the shifting paradigms we are witnessing for locating and evaluating information in our times. Resources can become obsolete fairly quickly in this environment. The book’s content is largely up-to-date, though a thorough review of linked resources, perhaps annually, would be beneficial. For instance, a video on RSS mentioned a Google feature that looks to be no longer available, though finding alternatives proves simple when searched online. The book’s organization makes updating or replacing linked resources easy, so keeping the content relevant would be straightforward with regular review.

Content is presented in a style engaging for students, using the “you” pronoun address to walk readers through a thinking process that applies and links ideas to practice; this effective approach is used for many of the book’s concepts. The writing strikes a good stylistic balance between engaging the student reader and informing/challenging that same reader by modeling research brainstorming or methods. The style seems appropriate for college level readers and college level curricula. The topic of academic research does include some technical terms at times, but the book’s approach is to define and explain such terms a part of its content.

Stylistically and organizationally, the content is consistent and easy-to-follow. A user begins to anticipate knowledge check activities or “try it out” activities at particular points in each section. The knowledge check quizzes, which are simplified multiple choice questions, seem at odds with the highly contextualized concept explanations in much of the book’s prose; perhaps a different approach to knowledge check quizzing, which as an element can be helpful, would work better.

Modularity rating: 4

Headings and subheadings follow a logical organization and are easy to navigate in the book. Some sections do refer to—and link to—other book sections, but most would work as stand-alone modules. An instructor or course designer could pick and choose sections and adapt them for their own purposes. As a whole, the book remains self-referential to the context of a specific university, which limits the easy adaptation of the book, and perhaps even sections, for faculty and course designers at other educational institutions.

The book’s organization is easy to navigate and coheres with the overall focus on presenting academic research and information literacy in a way that invites students toward a practical and fuller understanding. Topic order makes sense and is organized via headings and subheadings well.

Overall, no significant navigation issues or interface distractions.

A few errors that look like typos remain in the book. Otherwise, grammatical errors are not an issue for readability.

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

A more nuanced and inclusive awareness of cultural relevance and diversity is worth considering for the book. The choice of some example topics, such as school shootings, might be distracting or traumatic for some student populations, while adding more examples that showcase interests or topics related to non-dominant cultural ideas would widen the sense of inclusivity throughout the book. Choices might be contingent on the demographics of the Ohio State University population, but more awareness of this aspect of the book might also make it more appealing as a resource for others to adapt

Reviewed by Nell McCabe, Associate Professor, Berkshire Community College on 6/15/21

This text is very-student friendly and covers all aspects of writing a student research paper, including steps that students frequently overlook such as the value of preliminary research and the different ways to incorporate different kinds of... read more

This text provides a well-balanced, research-driven approach to guiding students through the process of writing an academic research paper. Spelling mistakes, flaw grammar and usage, and factual errors are few and far between (as in I didn't find any during the course of this review).

Kinds of sources and the means of evaluating them are broad enough to be long-lasting, but the examples and other supporting details are timely and relevant.

This text uses student-friendly language and avoids jargon and other symptoms of academia run amok, while still maintaining high standards and expectations for students. Connections between the different stages of conducting research and developing an argument are well laid out and clear.

Terms associated with locating, evaluating, and incorporating a range of different kinds of sources are clear and consistent throughout the text.

The chapters do stand alone and I could image someone using bits and pieces or leaving out bits and pieces, but since the text is primarily focused on supporting the needs of a college research throughout the research process, it is hard to image much need for separating it into discrete modules. You could certainly rearrange the order of the chapters too if that worked better for your approach to teaching student research.

The flow of one chapter into the next is well-integrated and smooth. The order of the chapters

I had no issues with the interface; everything worked as expected.

Cultural Relevance rating: 3

The book does not go out of its way to make obviously inclusive examples. Increasing the cultural perspectives represented in the examples would enhance the overall value of this text.

Reviewed by Darci Adolf, Director of Library & Media Services, Oregon Coast Community College on 6/11/21

I found "Choosing and Using Sources" to be quite comprehensive and included the major areas that I cover in my LIB 101 Research skills class. In my class I like to cover each area of Eisenberg's Big6 Research model: Task definition, information seeking strategies, location and access, use of information, synthesis, and evaluation. I was pleased to find the subject of synthesis covered under the writing chapter-- many research textbooks leave this out. I did not find anything that talked about Evaluation of the process and product. Also, I would've liked to have seen social justice and equity issues in information publishing and access addressed as a chapter or portion of a chapter. The textbook has a great Table of Contents, but no index.

This textbook seems to contain accurate and error-free content. I spot-checked most of the chapters and didn't find anything I didn't believe to be true, and links weren't broken. Because this book is mostly factual in nature, there aren't areas where an author's opinion was used over facts, and opinions seem to be be appropriate and unbiased. For example, the author remarks on the use of blogs in research: "Blogs – Frequently updated websites that do not necessarily require extensive technical skills and can be published by virtually anyone for no cost to themselves other than the time they devote to content creation." This is a wide-held belief among librarians.

The content appeared to be up-to-date throughout the book. The area that might change the quickest is the types of sources, Chapter 2 in the book. They did a good job including an overview of all of the major source types and should stay relevant for a good period of time. Because they've listed these source types in a single chapter, updates to the text should be fairly straight forward and easy to do without disturbing much of the rest of the book.

Clarity rating: 4

The text was clear to me, a seasoned librarian. But I think there were terms used throughout the textbook that might not be familiar to a student first starting out in library research. So I would add some clarification around some of the language if I were using this textbook for a lower-level class. For example: There are several types of specialized databases listed including: Bibliographic, Full-text, Multimedia, etc. Many first year students wouldn't know those terms, or others such as "circulation, World-cat, discharge, InterLibrary Loan" and so forth.

The text was consistent throughout in terms of terminology and the overall frame. As I mentioned previously, some of the terms might need to be defined for the first-year student, either in-text or in a separate glossary. The framework is well-done, with clear chapters and sections--it was definitely written by those who teach research at the college level.

The textbook has 13 chapters that are again sub-divided into six or more sub-topics. This makes it very easy for an instructor to pick and choose which topics to cover. The thirteen broader subjects makes it easy to use the entire textbook for a term-- or just choose the pieces you want to use. For example, I would use the "Ethical Use and Citing Sources" chapter if I were doing a one-shot in a classroom, but might choose to use most of the chapters for an online class.

The structure was easy to follow. If I were setting it up myself, I'd probably combine the chapters on Ethical Use of Sources (Ethical Use and Citing Sources, Why Cite Sources, and Challenges in Citing Sources) with the chapter on "How to Cite Sources," but it's easier to have them separate and combine them for a class than to have a big block of text that would make it difficult to work through.

The textbook online version was done in Wordpress, and was easy to view and navigate. There were several other choices for students, including a PDF that could be viewed off line. There were charts, graphs, and links throughout that added to the content, but not so much as to be distracting. Any visuals were simple and enough white space was left as to not overwhelm, with colors that were contrasting visually.

I spot-checked throughout the text in each chapter and did not find any grammatical errors.

The textbook seemed to be inclusive of all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds.

Ohio State University has included a lot of links to their own pages, handouts, and resources that would need to be changed or omitted by a new user. For example, they have a handout from the OSU Writing Center, and they link to the OSU World Cat platform. These would need to be changed by the adopter.

Reviewed by Kaia Henrickson, Assistant Professor of Library & Information Science, Information Literacy Librarian, University of Alaska, Southeast on 11/4/20, updated 12/16/20

This text does a good job highlighting the steps in the research process, from formulating a strong research question, to finding and evaluating sources, to incorporating ideas from research into writing, and finally, to citing and using sources properly. Each chapter can stand on its own as useful content for a research-based course, or the entire text could be used to walk students through the entire research and writing process. Based on tutorials created for Ohio State University Libraries, some sections, like Chapter 5 on search tools as well as some of the activities, are fairly specific to OSU. Still, much of the text and many of the activities are applicable to all student researchers. This would be a great base text for someone who wanted to remix and add in information from their own university library and student service supports to replace the OSU-focused sections.

The material is accurate overall.

Text content, as well as videos and activities, are fairly current. Sections are small, so making updates should be fairly easy.

While the text is generally clear, there are sections that are a bit cumbersome or wordy. The Evaluating Sources section, especially, seems overly complicated.

References and links to other helpful sections within the text are appropriate and useful. Key concepts and ideas are repeated and built upon as the text progresses.

Each chapter is divided into manageable sections, and there are few sections which require a lot of scrolling. Those that are longer are broken up by subheadings. Embedded video content, visuals, and boxes are used to break up the text for easier reading and more visual appeal.

The text clearly progresses through the steps in the research and writing process from start to finish, but it can also be accessed by section if a particular subtopic is all that is needed. Each chapter stands on its own, as well as being integrated into the whole.

Interface rating: 3

The web version of the text has no paragraph indents or lines of space between paragraphs, which makes it a bit difficult to read, especially when there are longer blocks of text. There are many videos included that only have automatically-created closed captions (and a few with no closed captions available at all). A few of the graphics are blurry, but most visual and audiovisual content is clear and easy to read. With some of the linked activities, it is unclear what to do when you have selected an incorrect answer, and there is not much feedback for students who answer questions incorrectly.

Grammatical Errors rating: 4

There are a few typos and other minor issues here and there in the text. Some of the linked activities have more significant errors.

The text is not culturally insensitive, but it also doesn't present much in the way of diversity in examples or ideas. In addition, there is a noticeable amount content that is focused on Ohio State University resources and students, and this may not be relevant for readers from other universities.

Reviewed by Marybeth Beller, Associate Professor, Marshall University on 3/13/20

The book provides a thorough review of the research process; that said, a professor will have to add discipline-specific information and requirements, such as expected citation practices and research methods. read more

I found no errors in the text.

I will use this book for my undergraduate research course as it gives a very good introduction to research, from narrowing the topic to turning questions into hypotheses.

The book is very clear and provides graphs, links and videos for the reader to have additional information as needed.

Each chapter is organized similarly to the others and is written in the same easy-to-follow, technical-free language. It removes any inhibitions a reader might have.

Each chapter section has its own heading and link. The entire book could be assigned or sections of the book could be just as easily assigned. A drop-down table of contents menu allows the reader to move freely between topics.

This guide is beautifully organized for the beginning researcher but can easily be followed through the table of contents for students needed refreshers on particular elements of research.

I found no interface issues at all in navigating the book.

There were no grammatical errors in the text.

I believe the book would be welcomed by a diverse group of people. There is no insensitive language or use of poor examples in the book.

I really enjoyed the organization of the book and that the author takes the time to include links to additional information as well as videos for students who want to spend more time with a particular concept.

Reviewed by Racheal Rothrock, Assistant Professor, Miami University on 2/28/20

The text is comprehensive in its covering of topics related to choosing and using sources, though it does not go into great depth for each topic. Rather this text provides a broad overview around the topic of sources. This text seems to be written... read more

This information is presented in an unbiased way that informs on the topic rather than presenting a strong bias or slant toward a particular type of source (though, there is cultural bias—see review comments in “cultural” section). The text does provide details on what approaches might be more helpful in certain situations. This provides a balance of usefulness for students trying to determine which sources to use, while also not assigning value to some sources over others or create a hierarchy.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 3

The text demonstrates a current understanding around the topic of sources, taking into account the shift away from paper and toward digital sources. While overall this text should be useful for several years, there are some areas that may require updating (e.g. links, OSU policies or statements, specifics about various citation styles, software options available, copyright laws, etc.). Throughout the text, the authors do depend on examples that are specific to OSU (e.g. a section on “WorldCat@OSU”), and this might provide less useful for non-OSU students.

The text is written with simple language and explanations are given for more technical terminology (e.g. peer-reviewed, quantitative, qualitative, etc.).

Little specialized terminology is used throughout the text, however, the language and terminology used is consistent throughout. The format, structure, and approach the authors use, is also consistent throughout the text and forms a cohesive narrative.

The text is broken up by main topics and then within each topic, subtopics are provided to support the main topic. The length of each subtopic is fairly brief and examples are provided throughout with graphical separation for clarity. While the topics and subtopics support each other, each subtopic could be assigned individually and would maintain usefulness.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

Overall, the organization is logical and clear. There are a few topics that might be shifted in their order, but this is not a critical need. For instance, moving the information about copyright closer to the section on ethical use of sources might make sense, but does not overly disrupt the general flow of the text.

There are no significant issues. A fixed bar at the bottom of the screen allows for navigation to pages directly preceding and proceeding the current page and a clickable contents button at the top right side of the page allows further navigation between sections. Overall, visuals do not appear to be distorted, however, many of the visuals are quite large, taking up the majority of the screen, and could be reduced in size without losing effectiveness. Additionally, on pages 9 and 11, a graphic is presented that contains text that is too small to read. While it is not necessary to read the text in the visual in order to understand the lesson of the section, because it is provided, it would be reasonable to make this large enough to be legible.

The text seems to be free of any major grammatical errors.

This text is written from an academic, western cultural perspective that is relevant to the particular topic and audience (i.e. “A guide to academic research”), but does not take into other ontological or epistemological scholarly perspectives (e.g. testimonios or oral histories as significant sources). The visuals and examples do privilege the U.S. and mainstream cultures, such as through a photo of a White woman using her Mac computer in a library, a photo of a football team, an illustration with the U.S. flag in it, an example question of “How has NASA helped America,” an example opinion of “George Clooney is the sexiest actor alive,” etc. The text is not overtly insensitive or offensive, but it also does not appear to take up or address non-dominant perspectives and cultures in any substantive way.

Reviewed by Audrey Besch, Temporary Faculty , East Tennessee State University on 10/31/19

This text is very comprehensive! From choosing sources to the final research project, this book does a wonderful job of providing all the steps. read more

This text is very comprehensive! From choosing sources to the final research project, this book does a wonderful job of providing all the steps.

Information is accurate for the purposes of writing research and using sources.

Up-to-date and relevant, this text does a good job of outlining various types of sources that can be used and the appropriate ways in which to use them.

Very easy to read content that would be great for students, especially those who are just starting the academic writing process for research.

The text remained consistent in it's use of terminology and framework.

Text has an appropriate use of subheadings and includes activity sections that focus on concepts. Material was broken into easy to grasp ways that didn't seem too lengthy.

Content is well organized and in a logical format for the content provided.

Book did not have any navigation issues and all images were appropriately used for content.

To the extent of my knowledge, there were no grammatical errors in this text.

There were no culturally insensitive issues or offensive language in this text that I could find.

Reviewed by Kris Frykman, Community Faculty, Minnesota State University System on 10/18/19

Comprehensive overview, with examples, to punctuate learning. read more

Comprehensive overview, with examples, to punctuate learning.

Clear, accurate process in showcasing academic research.

Appropriate book for researchers of all levels.

Chapter follow-up questions and videos are included to further enhance clarity.

Terminology and examples are included to further make the content accessible for the reader.

The book is divided in sections so that students can study and apply one concept at a time.

Content is clearly organized.

Charts, diagrams, examples, and videos are highlighted to exemplify key contents.

No discernable grammatical errors.

Appropriately culturally sensitive.

Reviewed by TyRee Jenks, Research Librarian & Library Instruction Coordinator, Montana State University - Billings on 7/31/19

The text is very comprehensive and covers all the necessary aspects of information literacy and student research. There is no index or glossary included, but terms are well explained within the text. The extensive coverage of topics, like types of sources and copyright, was thorough while not being so in-depth as to bore students. The activities, quizzes, and short videos reinforce the concepts covered in the chapters and add interest, however some quizzes would benefit from additional explanation as to why answers are right or wrong.

The content of the text seems to be accurate. Very minor spelling errors and a copy/paste duplicate. No apparent bias.

Content is up to date and relevant for students while being broad enough to be useful for a longer period of time. Updating information would be easy. The text contains a lot of hyperlinks that an instructor would need to stay on top of to keep the links current. In some cases the links were to very reliable sources that will remain stable for a long time (i.e. Purdue OWL) while others are more transient (i.e. YouTube videos).

In general the text is clear, including good explanations of terms and concepts. It contains very little jargon and the prose is accessible. In “The Details Are Tricky” section, the finer points of primary, secondary, or tertiary information could be confusing to students who are trying to comprehend the basics. The author’s inclusion of informative tables with sample responses as well as the blank template for students to use was helpful.

There is consistent use of terminology and layout throughout the text.

The book has good modularity, excellent graphics, and the text and/or activities can easily be used at the point of need in an information literacy class or one that is discipline specific. Chapters can be used individually or rearranged as needed.

Overall the organizational flow worked well, however the chapters on copyright and fair use might make more sense when grouped with the chapters on the ethical use of sources and how to cite sources.

The EPUB and web versions of the text are easy to navigate with a clickable table of contents and left/right arrow navigation at the bottom of each page. Other than some images that could be resized, the formatting lent itself to consistency throughout the text giving students a uniform experience. In some cases the URL links were just written text instead of hyperlinked which was a little inconsistent. Pleasant graphics added value, explained concepts, balanced out the text, and added visual interest. The inclusion of links that lead out to further explanations of concepts (i.e. the peer review process or how to read a scholarly article) are a nice addition.

There are no major grammatical errors that would be distracting to the reader.

The text is applicable to students in all disciplines, and there are no concerns about cultural relevance or insensitivity. The text is heavily OSU centric (i.e. referencing the OSU code of conduct and requiring students to log in to OSU resources for some activities and examples) and requires effort on the part of instructors at other institutions to make the necessary changes making the content applicable at their institution.

With modifications this text could be incorporated into a three credit information literacy course for undergraduates or into other disciplines. The fair use and copyright sections could be useful to instructors as well as students. Could easily integrate with the ACRL Framework. There is some great general information on writing and making an argument that are applicable across disciplines.

Reviewed by Eric Bradley, Research and Instruction Librarian, Goshen College on 5/31/19

The focus of the book is on published sources for college level research and writing. In this area it is comprehensive. It does not address other areas of academic research. read more

The focus of the book is on published sources for college level research and writing. In this area it is comprehensive. It does not address other areas of academic research.

The content is accurate, error-free, and politically neutral. The last piece makes this a excellent source in the current United States political climate.

Content reflects the current realities of the information landscape. Several of the chapters use up-to-date wording that may need to be updated more frequently, but the excellent modularity of the text allows for accommodation.

The book is straight forward and uses contemporary language of the information and academic landscapes.

The text follows a consistent framework throughout the book.

The text is divided in a way to teach across a course. While the text builds upon itself, many of the chapters stand alone well. I have skipped several chapters of the text and it has not caused any disruption with students.

Excellent organization. The text guides the reader step by step through the research process.

Interface rating: 4

The overall interface is strong. The images and charts are excellent, although the use of branded logos in some of the images may become dated.

No grammatical errors noted.

The text is focused on academic research practices for a North American context. While not culturally insensitive or offensive in any way, it does not take into consideration research practices of other cultures.

I use this text as a replacement of Booth et al.’s Craft of Research. Beside the benefits of being a open textbook, this text provides a more relevant guide to finding sources in the current academic environment.

Reviewed by Kathleen Murphy, Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Music Thearpy, Loyola University-New Orleans on 4/30/19

This book includes all relevant information to help students choose appropriate sources for an academic research paper. It clearly defines different types of sources that can be used, and the difference between primary and secondary sources. It gives an overview of how to search various databases, and defines and describes boolean operators. The chapter on ethical uses of sources clearly defines plagiarism and how and when to cite so as to avoid plagiarizing. The chapter on copyright is an excellent addition; that information is not common in many texts related to academic writing. Each chapter contains extra activities students can work on independently to help with understanding and application of the material covered.

Overall, I found the book to be accurate. I did find one error in Chapter 7. In the section titled "Challenges in Citing Sources" the entry labeled "Running out of Time" was repeated. In regards to bias--I did not find the content to be biased; however, the majority of links where students could go to get extra information were connected to Ohio State University. The one notable exception were the links to the Perdue Online Writing Lab.

The content is up-to-date and relevant. Choosing and using sources for an academic paper has not changed much. What has changed is how to access and find the sources to choose and use. This book does a nice job of explaining how to find sources--databases, google scholar, and search engines. My only concern is the frequent suggestion to search Wikipedia. As an academic, I find this a little troubling. To the author's credit, they did not that one should not cite Wikipedia or use information from Wikipedia in an academic paper. I am not able to comment on ease of updating information, as that is a technical issue.

The book is written in clear, accessible language, with limited "jargon." At times I found the writing to be too simple, written more for high school students than college students. Definitions are provided for all relevant terms.

The book is internally consistent. It moves through the process of choosing and using sources in a linear fashion. However, to their credit, the authors note that writing an academic research paper is not always a linear process.

Each chapter is broken up into smaller units that cover a topic relevant to the chapter theme. Sections of this book could be assigned as individual assignments based on areas of difficultly students seem to be having. Alternatively, a professor could develop a class session or two around each of the chapters. These book seems to be very versatile; there are links to previous chapters that readers can click on to refresh their memories.

The topics in the text are presented in a logical and clear way. The book moves through each topic associated with choosing and using sources in sequence that most researchers would follow. The table of contents, with main headings and subtopics provide a step-by-step guide to help undergraduate students through the research process.

There are many links in throughout the book that students can click on to get more information or to practice skills. Navigation back to the main text is a little trickier. Sometimes, clicking on the back arrow will get the reader back to the page s/he was studying before clicking on the hyperlink. More often, however, the back arrow will take the reader back to the Table of Contents, or front cover of the book. Not all the links worked when I went through the book

I did not fine any grammatical or mechanical errors. I think the book is well-written and appropriate for high school students. I think the language may be too simplistic for most college students.

I did not come across anything that was culturally insensitive or offensive in any way.

I think this book is an excellent resource for high school students, and maybe college freshman who need help in choosing and using sources for an academic paper. The book is logical, gives an overview of the process and provides excellent examples and extra activities to enhance learning. I think it also could be used as a self-study guide.

Reviewed by Miguel Valderrama, Adjunct Assistant Professor, New York City College of Technology on 4/7/19

This book is a great resource of all steps needed to be taken in an academic research process. The book's index clearly displays a suggested methodology to follow and makes it easier to comeback for the review of previous chapters. In general the book is easy to read and every time a new world or a particular terminology related to the topic comes up, it is clearly defined and put into context.

This book collects a series of methodologies that have been proven to be efficient when they are put into use during the process of academic research. These techniques are not only presented and described to the readers, they are also actively used in the various examples, pretty much in every chapter in the book. These techniques may not be the only way a person can start and develop a research process but they are certainly a clear and convenient way to do so for beginners. There may be complex terminology entered to the discussion which may slow down the reading process. However, this is effectively addressed by separated easy to access links; This provide more in detail definitions and exercises from a particular section.

This book is a guide that presents many particularities of research methods and techniques that have been used for long time. These methodologies have been proven to be very effective in academic research. This book not only collects many of these techniques but carefully relate them to new searching tools that are part of the communication era we live in nowadays. This was not the case just couple of decades ago. I anticipate long life to the methodologies presented in this text with years or decades before they could become obsolete. Within this context, the searching tools may keep changing but the methodologies that are used here could keep working efficiently; at least as a way to approach to a research process for an undergrad student.

The author uses a clear and easy way to understand the language and terminology that makes part of a research process. Without getting too deep into technical terminology the book marks clearly words that deserve more understanding and usually provides separate links which connects the reader with a deeper explanation. The text doesn't have very large paragraphs all around which to me allows readers to keep a good and dynamic paste. Links to previous discussed topics presents a quick way to review previous content without loosing the paste.

Consistency rating: 4

Through out the entire text it is consistent that at the beginning of every chapter there's a statement related to what the previous set of contents was, also in several parts of the book this first paragraph makes a point about how this relates to what it is about to be presented in that chapter. This is why several words allusive to the subject of research are reuse constantly in different chapters. This makes lots of sense to me as a way to keep the reader's familiarity with these terms which will also ended up increasing retentivity levels in the subject. Since the book is clearly broken down into steps they all seemed to be well placed in order to present a cohesive structure that guides the process of research.

Academic research it is a process that should be flexible by nature in many ways. Even though some parts of the process could be done simultaneously to others, this will definitely not apply to all of them. This book brings up an interesting way to order this process which even though may look rigid at times it tries to make sure that some parts are developed before others in the research. It is presented that way so that there's enough understanding of the bases before there can be any progression or even conclusions. This is mostly reflected in the techniques that are presented, where some of then have as their main job to detonate creative thinking. For example: the importance of the set of questions that are asked at the beginning is that the answers will be used mostly to clarify the end goals of a research.

This text is organized following a clear and efficient way to develop an academic research process. It is well distributed in chapters that are all connected to each other in one or other way. The book is efficient at establishing this connections, specially at the beginning and end of every chapter where there's mentioning of the previous and following topic's main ideas. This helps readers to keep track with the overall content.

This book presents an excellent graphic approach to expose its content. The electronic version has the really nice feature of having the index accessible at any point of the reading process. This text is full of links that are either deeper explanations of a particular topic or a set of exercises that are directly related to what the reader is learning. If the idea was to present the information in a format that doesn't look congested to the eyes and that it is not distracting the reader from the important ideas, the editors made an excellent job. This book can't be easier to read, follow through and understand.

Besides a couple of punctuation spaces here and then I was not able to perceive any major grammatical errors. The book is well written all around. Punctuation is pretty much excellent and its composition keeps the reader in track with the content effectible.

Particularly the topics used as examples were very diverse in therms of gender allusion, cultural backgrounds and specialized fields. Research is a process that apply to all disciplines and the professionals working in them. This makes the research process a particularly broad one. The book makes efforts to present this idea by using numerous examples that connect with different segments of the population at numerous levels.

This books is an excellent tool available to anyone who wishes to start a serious research process in almost any particular professional area or field, even amateur researchers can benefit from its content. The book was written to merge the topic content with a series of exercises, tests and examples using a cohesive testing dynamic that helps to increase retention. This dynamic becomes the most efficient way to understand what it takes to start a professional research. The steps to follow the process are laid out clearly in this guide and the important things that need to be taking in account during the research process are highlighted and deconstructed to obtain a deeper overall understanding by the reader or researcher. The fact that the reader is being quizzed constantly during the entire book generates a stronger connection with the important subjects and a good way to evaluate the reader's understanding in real time as well. Highly recommended to undergrad and graduate students and perhaps even amateur researchers becoming familiar with the process of research as well.

Reviewed by Cindy Gruwell, Professor/Research Librarian, Minnesota State on 1/11/19

Choosing and Using Sources does a very good job of covering the topic of Academic Research. Each chapter focuses on an aspect of the research process and thoroughly covers the content with easy to read text and examples/activities for student practice. Most importantly first-year students through seniors should find the content informative and presented in a collegial format.

All of the content is accurate and explained in a manner that is easy to grasp. There are some minor typos in some of the activities, but they do not confuse the reader. The text is bias-free and includes interesting examples that students can relate to.

The overall content is highly relevant and will age very well. Updates would definite be easy to handle and manipulate. By breaking down each chapter into a variety of content areas, readers will be able to focus and review areas of concern.

Having read several print and online texts of a similar nature, it was a pleasure to come across a text that is clean, consistent, and concise. Each topic has an appropriate amount of information to get the point across as well as tips that lead the reader to additional information. The presentation is consistent throughout without any bloating often found in print texts.

The authors of the text did an excellent job of producing an online text that is consistent and easy to use. No tricks that make it difficult to navigate or confusing to read.

One aspect of the text that I especially like is the modularity that allows for the use of a particular chapter or page(s). Too often texts have chapters that make readers feel like there is no end in sight. The concise nature of this work blends extremely well with the modularity of the complete text.

What makes this text easy to adapt is the layout from beginning to end. Each chapter and section scaffolds upon the other which will allow students to build their skills in a natural manner. Knowledge attained will easily transfer from one topic to another as they move through the book.

While I believe that the text is excellent and I have adopted it for my class, I do find myself frustrated by not being able to move from one section to another within a chapter without having to go back to the contents list. This surprised me because most books and tutorials have forward and backward links, especially within chapters.

There are a few grammatical (spelling) errors in several of the exercises, however, they do not interfere or confuse the reader.

This is definitely a professional work that has no cultural issues and is an excellent example of a non-biased text.

While looking for an OER text I was delighted to come across this book. The content and flow fit in with my class content extremely well and is an excellent resources for courses in the liberal arts, general research, and library-centric classes.

Reviewed by Kathy Moss, Clinical Professor, University of Missouri on 11/27/18

The hyperlinks and examples include a wide range of topics that include cooking, surgery, architecture and sports. read more

The hyperlinks and examples include a wide range of topics that include cooking, surgery, architecture and sports.

Credit is given to an editor, production and design specialists, as well as several content contributors. No additional information is provided to support inference regarding author credibility.

The open textbook Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research presented material that is relevant to my current issues course, including Background reading, Developing a complex research question, Classifying sources, and Evaluating sources.

The topics are presented clearly, using an engaging conversational style and frequent tips and activities. A reader who has no background in information science may be hampered by some terms used in the book (e.g., blog, podcast, Wikipedia, browser, database, Gawker, Reddit). The book does give intentional attention to the technology-naïve audience with some skills (Control-F) and topics (brief description of LexisNexis Academic, Lantern Online).

Terms and organizational framework are consistent throughout the text.

I plan to assign particular chapters of this text that are most relevant to my course's goals. The consistency of the text's terminology and organization should permit this reading plan with minimal distraction to the reader.

The information is clearly organized with a contents listing, chapter numbers and section headers. This organization facilitates easy access for learners with a specific interest in a single topic.

The author’s frequent use of hyperlinks invites students to explore topics more in-depth.

I note a few minor typographical errors that did not adversely affect my ability to comprehend the text.

The book includes examples of non-Western sources such as the allAfrica news database. Some of the links and examples are only available to individuals who have accounts with The Ohio State University. Though the book includes examples in audio and video formats, it could be improved by giving specific attention to topics related to accessibility.

The book provides the opportunity for readers to apply the topics by analyzing its frequent examples.

Reviewed by Lori Meier, Associate Professor, East Tennessee State University on 11/8/18

This text is exceedingly comprehensive. It addresses all elements of academic research (i.e. choosing questions, exploring and selecting sources, searching strategies, citation issues, copyright) as well as providing abundant links for student... read more

This book is accurate and comprehensive. I would not hesitate to use this resource with undergraduate or graduate students as a beginning primer for research.

The book is relevant and timely in regards to the various resources and tech tools it mentions (Google Scholar, EndNote, Ref Works). Given the subject matter I suspect that this book will have longevity to users.

The text is clear and provides definitions for jargon/technical terminology that is used. It is very comprehensive which might be a bit intimidating for the first time reader, but all elements needed for cogent research are included and therefore necessary. I appreciate the use of student scenarios as a way to step-by-step show the thinking process of choosing research questions.

Very consistent and thorough.

This text would be ideal for use as single chapters in courses where the content is needed. While the content is crafted with Ohio State University students in mind it is still very relevant for use by students and scholars. I am already thinking how I might use this next semester with an undergraduate honor's thesis student - both as modules to be read but also as a reference source.

The book is organized in a logical manner but spends only a brief amount of time about qualitative and quantitative research as peer-reviewed sources and only gives basic definitions for those two terms. I would perhaps suggest an additional section on qual/quant/mixed methods research methodology and perhaps a quick overview of research methods or samples via discipline. Additionally, a mention of the common IRB process for Human Subject Research might be helpful to those students using academic sources that discuss that process. It is a very clear text and this could be added with just a few pages of information that might be beneficial to students.

Navigation links worked well for me. The book is easy to read and the display features are not troublesome to me.

Grammatically sound.

Appropriate and is accessible to a wide audience.

Reviewed by Kathy Lamb, ELL Specialist/ English Instructor, Miami University on 8/2/18

The text covers most areas of academic research, and has a table of contents but no glossary, which is much needed. Topics are clear and concise, transitioning smoothly from general to more specific, such as “What is a Research Question?” to... read more

The content is accurate, error-free and unbiased.

The source is up-to-date and it would be relatively easy to update information.

The text is easily understand and flows in a clear manner. Ideas and topics progress easily and examples are used to offer context.

Ideas build one upon another and academic vocabulary is repeated throughout.

Some parts of the book seem a little “text heavy”, but overall it is well organized with efficient flow. The embedded links in the text connect earlier concepts

One problematic is that there lacks a glossary. The table of contents is very long, but broken down so that one is able to easily reference topics. Chapters are concise enough to be read in a timely manner and effectively used.

For some of the online activities it was confusing to discern which answers were correct or incorrect. And, after clicking on and completing an activity one must go back to the former page in order to navigate further. On the other hand, being able to access other information about the chapter topics via link is a handy tool.

There are no grammatical errors.

This book is culturally relevant and not offensive or insensitive in any way.

Reviewed by Sara Abrahamson, Faculty, Minneosta West Community and Technical College on 8/2/18

This text is very comprehensive. The complete research process is broken down from start to finish. read more

This text is very comprehensive. The complete research process is broken down from start to finish.

Very accurate information.

The content is very relative to today's researchers and does a fine job of detailing types of sources.

Very easy to read with content that is easily understood by even a first-time researcher.

The content was very consistent and easy to follow because if it.

LOVED the easy of reading because of the small, digestible informational pieces!

The flow of the text was perfect, following the research process from beginning to end.

I enjoyed the hyperlinked Activities, however, they did not all work for me.

No grammatical errors found.

Very culturally unbiased.

Excellent text that I wished I had years ago!

Reviewed by Justin Megahan, Librarian / Associate Professor, Fontbonne University on 6/19/18

The text does a good job covering academic research. There is a table of contents, but I feel like a glossary and index would be helpful for this book. read more

The text does a good job covering academic research. There is a table of contents, but I feel like a glossary and index would be helpful for this book.

The content is accurate. I did not notice any errors.

The content is up-to-date. There are many databases and websites referred to in the text so it is important to check those relevant links on occasion. It would be straightforward to update the text as needed.

The text clearly steps the reader through the research process. The process is discussed in detail over the 13 chapters.

The text is consistent.

The book is modular. Chapters can be rearranged without confusion. The Copyright Chapter is a good example of a component that can be used separately as a supplemental reading in another course.

The book is organized logically. The addition of a glossary and index could help navigation.

The book has images, charts, and videos that are useful. There are quick activity questions that tests the students’ knowledge on the current topic. These activities do link out to OSU’s site so it is important to make sure those links continue to stay active.

The text contains no grammatical errors.

This book does not have cultural concerns.

Many links direct the reader to OSU resources that have restricted access. The discussion of OSU resources and tools needs to be modified to fit the reader’s institutional resources. “ACTIVITY: Quantitative vs. Qualitative” has a link that is no longer working.

Reviewed by Jane Theissen, Reference Librarian/Professor, Fontbonne University on 5/21/18

The research process is explained in detail, from how to develop a research question to where and how to research through the application of copyright, fair use and citation styles. read more

The research process is explained in detail, from how to develop a research question to where and how to research through the application of copyright, fair use and citation styles.

The content is accurate and unbiased. Most of the links, which are plentiful and well placed, are either broken or link to resources at OSU's library, which I could not access. Use of this book would require time to correct this.

The content is stable. Other than updating the links, little would need to be done to use this text.

Very clearly written; jargon is appropriately explained. Self-checks allow students to make sure they understand the material.

Each section logically builds on the previous, and tone is consistent throughout.

The text has a great deal of modularity. Each section is listed in the Table of Contents and covers a few pages or less. There is no index. It is easy to find and move to sections quickly. the structure allows one to pull sections out for other courses (which I have done).

The research process is explained step-by-step with appropriate detail and excellent graphics.

Images, charts, and diagrams serve to explain and support the text. Many seem rather large and I found them a bit distracting. Additionally, there are page breaks in strange places, leaving large blocks of white space on pages while the narrative continued on the next page. This was very confusing. It would also be helpful if the links would open in a new window.

It seemed inclusive where applicable.

This text impressed me as appropriate for high school students or college freshmen.

Reviewed by Laura Heinz, Librarian, Texas Tech University on 3/27/18

This book provides beginning student researchers with a clear and complete path to the research process for class assignments and undergraduate research projects. read more

This book provides beginning student researchers with a clear and complete path to the research process for class assignments and undergraduate research projects.

The content is presented is accurate and in an unbiased manner for students to easily grasp the process and concepts.

This book was written in 2016 and may need some minor updates. The material is presented in a logical manner that leads students through the process as they begin their research. Each chapter can be used independently as the instructor fits the chapters into course content.

This book is easily understood by an undergraduate and doesn't require extra readings or content to be understood. It is concise and clear which will be appreciated by the student as they conduct research.

This book is consistent in it's framework which leads the student to each step logically avoiding confusion or frustration.

The chapters can easily be used independently and refer students to other chapters with supporting information.

The book is written to lead students in a logical manner through the research process. The length of the chapters allows a student to easily read the chapter for that step in their research, apply it and refer to it easily.

The book downloads easily onto a laptop or e-reader. The graphics display nicely on either size screen and enhance the text.

No grammatical errors were noticed.

This book is not culturally insensitive or offensive in any way. Examples used are appropriate.

This book introduces beginning student researchers to the academic research process in a thoughtful and deliberate manner. The books lack of jargon and abbreviations will help international students learn how to better navigate an academic library for research. Instructors in all disciplines should consider this book as an additional textbook for their classes requiring research for assignments, class projects and/or papers.

Reviewed by Hilary Johnson, Learning & Teaching Librarian, The Open University on 3/27/18

The text does not include an index or glossary. However, it covers a complex (and dry) subject in an economical and stimulating fashion. Each reader would learn about the subject from the basic text but the authors have enriched the text by embedding audio-visual resources, download-and-keep checklists and formative activities of excellent quality.Chapter 9 'Making an Argument' is particularly strong and complements Chapter 1's analysis of research questions well. It is an excellent resource for undergraduates, post-graduates and beyond, and could also be useful for professionals researching topics to support evidence-based practice protocols.

More tips about applying facets to search results on services like Summon, EDS or Primo would be a useful addiition. I was surprised the authors did not employ language to frame the skill development in the language of 'employability' and life-skills, which might hook readers who are not planning to engage in academic research in the long-term.

The accuracy of the book was excellent, My score would have been 5, except the advice about copyright legislation and fair use is only applicable to students of Ohio State or elsewhere in the USA; so an institution in the Britain, Ireland or Europe would not be able to use or recommend chapters 11 or 12. However, these chapters are well-judged for the intended audience; succinct and comprehensible, where so many guides are too woolly or arcane to be useful to a general readership.

Chapter 1 had a dead link to an audio-visual resource. The explanation of how to use Wikipedia for academic study was nuanced, classic and practical. The explanation of how to use truncation and wildcards were similarly time- (and platform-) proof. There is much current interest in 'fake news' and the manipulation of Facebook and Google algorithms. So it could be timely to add a section on the known issues and some practical strategies to compensate for them.

The authors use excellent, clear English that should be comprehensible to anyone with academic english reading proficiency. My only qualms related to an ambiguous use of the term "poster" (this word has a particular meaning in an academic setting which was not explained) and more extensively around the slightly simplistic and dated language used for the university library catalogue and abstract & indexing databases. One of the activity sheets is structured like a decision-tree and starts with the question "are you working from a database"; with modern resource discovery platforms and other aggregating tools, students may not be able to tell whether they are looking at results from a single database, all the databases from one supplier or multiple databases from a variety of suppliers.

The stylesheet and planning of content is elegant and the quality is consistent throughout the text.

Each chapter is split into useful subsections, with clear formatting to demarcate between topics, tips and activities. The authors have also helpfully embedded hyperlinks to relevant chapters or sections earlier or later in the book.The length of individual subsections is consistent to make reading online easy (balancing scrolling and page turning). However, the length of embedded audio-visual materials varies so a student planning their time might be surprised in places.

The text has a sensible progression of topics, with hyperlinks back and forwards to connect relevant topics. And the final chapter, 'Roles of Research Sources', pulls together the lessons learnt with a useful acronym (BEAM), giving the book a strong ending.

I accessed the text on a variety of browsers, screen sizes and operating systems without any problems with the interface.

I only spotted two minor errors - site instead of cite and White's definition (page 186) without an apostrophe.

Not all the video materials embedded are captioned making them inaccessible to some categories of disabled users.

Reviewed by Lydia Bales, Academic Skills Tutor & Librarian, Staffordshire University on 2/1/18

Considering the book is not overly large, the guide manages to be very through and comprehensive guide to locating sources and using them correctly. It even goes further in giving some great information on making an argument and writing out the research. The chapters are in easily digestible chunks covering the process of searching and evaluating resources in a useful and cross-discipline manner. It covers the source search process of research in an easily digestible manner.

The topics are accurate and have been written in a way that they will not date too much. The links and examples of the services provided may need updating to keep them accurate but the nature of the online format makes this easily possible. The Copyright chapter is obviously only applicable to those studying in the US. Having a version of this chapter available discussing copyright law in the UK could be useful any access the course for a different location.

The topics, examples and videos used are relevant and useful and should not date too much. The links and examples of the services provided may need updating to keep them accurate but the nature of the online format makes this easily possible. Some of the examples and links are specific to Ohio State and America and this can limit the relevance for students who do not have the ability to access Ohio State resources or are not based in America. Also the copyright section specfically is obviously only US copyright law limiting it's usefulness for students based in other locations.

The writing style is straightforward and easy to follow. It is sometimes slightly repetitive but overall the information is clearly presented and the vocabulary used is not too advanced. The style is informal and it makes a weighty topic much easier to process. I think it would be useful to have a glossary in the resource for students who maybe have not come across some of the topic specific words before and need them defining.

I was impressed with the consistency considering the work is made up of different author’s contributions. I could not identify different voices within the text, which helped improve the flow of the work. The arrangement of the contents tab is very useful to help navigate to specific sections of chapters as well as the overall chapter.

The layout of the book makes this modular. You can choose which sections to look at in any order and they read clearly and separately well. The other sections are signposted throughout the text and you can link back through to these using the hyperlinks provided. I think the order could be slightly improved by moving the citing and copyright information after the information on argument and writing but because you can choose how to read the book then it is not really an issue. I think it is important to note that if you cannot play the video content or the links in the book are Ohio State Specific the book does lose some of its positive features.

Overall, the structure is straightforward and logical. It flows in a manner that is easy to read and to process. Using the navigation you can work your way through the book in any order you feel is appropriate. As I stated I feel the referencing and copyright information could be in a different place but because you can choose to read this in a different order, it does not really matter.

Having read the online version on both a PC and a tablet I found the interface both easy to use and accessible. The page and chapter length worked well on both platforms and it was easy to access the links and activities contained within the resource. I could not access the videos on the PC due to not having Adobe Flash and it would be useful to have known I would require this to access the resource in its entirety. The video content is a refreshing change to just text and the images used are overall relevant. The videos do not all include a text version and this would be useful for accessibility. A few of them do have this option. Some of the images in the text viewed blurry on my PC and tablet. I am not sure if this was an issue with my own software or an error in the book.

I did not notice any errors during this read through. In some places, the text was a bit repetitive but this not disrupt the flow too drastically.

The examples used are not offensive and are diverse in their range. They have not given examples that define the guide for specific subset of students, which makes it more applicable.

Just for accessibility purposes, I think all the videos need a text version not just some. In addition, the RefWorks program has now been updated and it is called New Refworks with a changed logo and this could be updated in the book along with the guide to setting up Refworks if your institution subscribes. I feel that there are many links that you could not access unless you were an Ohio State user and this could disrupt the flow of the book for some users.

Reviewed by Lori Jacobson, Associate Director, Curriculum Development, William & Mary Writing Resources Center on 2/1/18

The book provides a comprehensive introduction to the use of sources in academic writing. read more

The book provides a comprehensive introduction to the use of sources in academic writing.

The book is a polished, professional and appropriate tool to help students improve their information literacy.

The content is relevant for undergraduate students and their instructors. It focuses primarily on fundamental approaches to finding, evaluating, and deploying sources in order to enter the scholarly conversation. While the authors occasionally mention a specific tool, or insert links to outside sources, these are placed within "Tip" boxes that can easily be updated.

Because this book was created for students at Ohio State University, it is sometimes quite specific about tools or processes that are unique to OSU. Instructors using this book at other institutions may sometimes need to suggest their own's institution's available tools to keep the text relevant for their students.

The book is well-crafted for an undergraduate audience, taking an easy-going, friendly tone and clearly defining key terms and concepts. It is also accessibly structured, making it fairly easy for users to jump between topics, rather than requiring a linear read. Links between related sections are provided wherever it is appropriate.

The book uses a consistent design scheme and structure. Features that appear in each chapter include graphics, tip boxes, examples, activities, and summaries.

Each unit of the text stands on its own and could be easily assigned as an individual reading. Rather than being self-referential, the text will suggest that more information on a related topic can be found in one of the other modules.

The text is organized to flow in roughly the same sequence as a typical research project. Students who are reading the text while working on a project should find individual sections logically presented and relevant. This is clearly not a text designed as background reading; rather it functions best as "just in time" information for students working through the research process.

I found the text quite easy to use in it its online form. It is visually appealing, easy to navigate, and thoughtfully arranged.

I noticed a couple of typos, but no significant grammatical errors.

The examples provided are of broad interest, and most readers will have some familiarity with them. There were no insensitive or offensive comments or examples.

Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research is a practical tool for novice researchers. It asks students to begin the process with a research question, and then provides a step-by-step approach to creating the question. All the other chapters flow from this effective beginning, and should increase students' information literacy by helping them understand types of sources available to researchers, the relationship between sources and information needs, how sources should be evaluated, and how they can be deployed effectively and ethically. Additional chapters on argumentation and copyright round out the book's overall usefulness to students engaged in a research project. This book could be easily paired with a staged research project, and would provide students with the "just-in-time" information they need to successfully complete the assignment.

Reviewed by Kristin Green, Reference and Instruction Librarian, Penn State Worthington Scranton on 2/1/18

The aspects of academic research that are prudent to cover within the first year of any undergraduate student's general education are all covered within this textbook. From an introduction to the ethics of source use to crafting basic Boolean search strings, all facets of entering scholarly discourse are addressed in brief chapters that feel modern and accessible. While instructors may wish to supplement or replace some of the exercise sets in the text with their own assessments, the content of the text provides ample coverage if selected to serve as a primary textbook for a foundational information literacy course.

The book is accurate in addressing the current state of the information landscape as encountered in the realm of academic research, as well as the legalities of copyright and fair use.

All content within this book is current and the content within chapters sections are written in a style that today's undergraduate students will be able to learn easily from. Many of the concepts, processes, and principles that are covered in the text have an inherent longevity that will prolong the relevance of this text past its initial publication date. However some chapter sections, tutorials, and videos are institution-specific reducing the overall relevancy of using the entire text at other locations.

The text is written in a clear and concise style that current students will find very accessible. The authors consciously defined any technical terminology or jargon as it was introduced throughout the chapters. Furthermore, the technical concepts that were more complex to define are often accompanied by visuals to help convey what is being defined.

The terminology and format of the book, along with the linked exercise sets and visualizations, provide a solid consistency that will helps students focus on learning the content rather than being bogged down with understanding the textbook format.

Instructors could easily parse different chapters of this book to use for modular instruction, especially in "one-shot" or other limited instructional scenarios. Some of the chapters are a bit self-referential which may generate a minor degree of confusion if used out of the holistic context.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 3

While there is a logical flow to most of the chapters, some seem a little out of place such as the "Making an Argument" chapter. I would have preferred a division of chapters into sections, where the writing-related chapters were separated from the source-related chapters. I also think the chapters that covered Copyright, Fair Use, ethical source use, and citations would have a stronger flow if organized together in their own section.

The ability to navigate through the book from the table of contents page is a great feature for students, especially when the instructor is choosing to assign only particular chapters or work through some of the chapters in a different sequence. The linked exercise sets are also easy to navigate through, allowing students to focusing on applying learned concepts rather than learning new interfaces. However, throughout my review some of the linked external content would not open for me and links to external materials always have the possibility of changing which may result in future inaccessibility

No grammatical errors were detected when reviewing this book.

This book is not offensive nor culturally insensitive in any manner.

For any instructor looking for an open textbook to orient undergraduate students to the basics of the academic research and writing processes while simultaneously providing context of contemporary issues surrounding these scholarly activities, this is a comprehensive and accessible choice!

Reviewed by Anne Behler, Information Literacy Librarian & Instruction Coordinator, The Pennsylvania State University on 2/1/18

This text offers a comprehensive breakdown of the academic research process, with special effort made to demystify jargon that may present itself in either the classroom or library environment. Beginning with establishing a research question and carrying through to integrating and citing sources, the text includes practical tools for students to use in their own research, as well as links to supplemental information. If anything, the text errs on the side of providing too much information, such that a novice researcher may feel overloaded.

The text offers an accurate articulation of the research process, and avoids bias by covering a wide variety of potential information sources, including the use of web search engines other than Google.

Because the information landscape is constantly shifting, the text will require fairly frequent review. This is particularly important when it comes to how web sources are addressed. For example, the book does not address fake news and/or dealing with problematic web resources, and it glosses over use of social media as an information source. However, the concepts related to the research process itself change very little, and the information presented about them has staying power.

The text is written in accessible language, and works to address uses of jargon that are typical within the academic environment by providing explanations for what professors typically want when they request a particular item in the research process. This is an effective way to establish relevance with students, as well as clarify academic expectations.

The language within the text is consistent and accessible, with helpful insertions of definitions and/or links to explanatory supplementary information online.

The text's sections are clearly and logically labeled, and could very easily be plugged into a course in part or whole.

The order of topics in the text follow the research assignment process, from point of assignment decoding through to writing and source citation. Given the audience for the text and its intended purpose, this makes great sense.

The text contains links to many outside web sources that may provide helpful supplemental information for the reader; however many of these links were found to be dead. Comprehensive review of all links is highly recommended. In addition, I recommend continuing review of available videos related to the topics, as many selected are either rudimentary or contain dated material.

The writing and grammatical quality of this text are of the highest quality.

The text is culturally relevant and inclusive in its examples.

As stated, this book holds great utility and relevance, but requires updating for links to external web resources. It will also need to be adapted to keep up with the changing landscape of information sources themselves.

Reviewed by Craig Larson, Librarian, North Hennepin Community College on 2/1/18

The book is very comprehensive, sometimes almost too much so (sections on copyright seem to be more detailed than the average college student would need or perhaps be interested in; the section on the lifecycle of information, while interesting, also is a bit questionable as to its overall relevance). Instructors who choose this book for a one- or two-credit information literacy course will have much more material at their hands than they can reasonably cover in a semester. This book would make a good companion volume to just about any course involving research.

The content is accurate and unbiased. As an example, I was interested to find that the author actually recommends that students use Wikipedia, at least in the very early stages of research, to get an overall picture of their topic. So many college instructors, regardless of the subject, seem to have a strong aversion to Wikipedia. Here, the author actually goes into some detail on how using the references in an entry can lead the researcher to additional sources he/she might not find through other means. Some of the activities are a bit misleading or written in such a way that there could be more than one right answer, which isn't necessarily an error, but could be tightened up a bit.

The content is largely relevant and up-to-date, though I was a bit surprised to not find a section addressing "fake news," which has become such a watchword over the past year. I was also a bit surprised that, although the author has a section talking about which "neighborhood" certain types of information "hangs out," there wasn't a discussion of different domain names, such as ".edu," ".org," and ".com" and what they indicate to readers. Also hampering the book's relevance somewhat is an overabundance of examples and activities that require an Ohio State student ID to log-in. Many of these would have to be re-worked or re-written for the book to be useful at other schools.

In large part, the book is clearly written and new ideas are clearly explained. The writer does a pretty good job of avoiding jargon and technical terminology or where it can't be avoided, of providing examples and clear definitions of terms. Some of the activities aren't so clearly written that there is one obviously correct answer. Also, some of the scoring of activities isn't clear enough to indicate to the user what was wrong and why it was wrong or even the correct answer that should have been chosen. Not every concept is adequately explained or thoroughly developed (for instance, the crucial process of moving from an initial reading to a research question could use further clarification and development). Another area that could use further discussion and development would be how to use databases.

The book is largely consistent, though there are occasions where the consistency falls through. For example, most of the accompanying activities will open in a new window, but not all. There were several occasions where this reader closed out an activity window and closed out the entire book as well. This is an area that someone really should take a look at, as it can be confusing and irritating for the user. Also, the fact that many of the book's activities require an Ohio State student ID effectively locks out users from other institutions.

The book is largely modular, with sections that can easily be broken apart and assigned at different points in the course. There is a very useful table of contents, broken down by subject into smaller pieces that can easily be accessed. As mentioned previously, the book is very comprehensive, almost too much so at times, so having this table of contents is very helpful.

The book is fairly-well organized, though there are things placed in odd locations that could be touched on earlier or later, as the case may be. For instance, there is a good discussion fairly late in the book about deciding whether to quote, paraphrase, or summarize, which would have been much more useful if it was placed in the section of the book that directly addresses each of those activities. Instead, it is placed in a section on academic integrity (which, again, is very Ohio State-specific, too much so, really). I also question the relevance of a chapter on creating an academic argument, which if it is to be included at all, would seem to make much more sense earlier in the book, when students are learning the basics of research and how to apply it to their writing.

The book is largely free of significant issues, although as mentioned previously, many of the activities require an Ohio State student ID to log-in and use, which makes them useless to students from other institutions. Also, the activities are sometimes difficult to follow--one doesn't know why one answered incorrectly or what the correct answer even is in some instances. And the fact that some activities open a new browser window and some don't can also be confusing. There are a few activities that lead to broken links.

There are the occasional run-on sentences and spelling mistakes in the text. It's almost impossible not to have some issues in this area. However, the infrequent errors don't detract from the book or its overall usefulness, though it might be a good idea for someone to go through the text and try to clear some of these up.

The book does a good job of avoiding being culturally insensitive or offensive. Activities and examples are written in such a way as to be inclusive. Many of the examples link directly to sites that deal with minority themes and issue.

I think, on the whole, this is a very useful book and one that could be put to immediate use in many instances. However, the number of activities and examples that require an Ohio State student ID to access make this less relevant than it could be if the author had striven for more universal examples.

Reviewed by Mairéad Hogan, Lecturer, National University of Ireland, Galway on 2/1/18

This book covers the subject matter in a comprehensive and detailed way. The way in which the material is presented is very suitable for students who have not previously been involved in academic research as it starts at the very beginning and assumes no prior knowledge. It has additional features that help to reinforce the material, such as activities and MCQs. These help to reinforce the learning and test the reader’s understanding. Additionally, the examples used are very useful and helpful in gaining understanding of the subject matter.

It goes into the material in depth and not only tells students how to progress their research but also explains clearly why they should be doing it this way. For example, it explains to students how to differentiate between good and bad sources. However, I have one small concern with this aspect. They do not tell students how to differentiate between different standards of peer-reviewed journals. They do mention looking at citation count but state that is not a useful measure for very recent articles. Some discussion on determining the quality of the journal itself would be helpful. For example, looking at citation counts for the journal, rather than the article would be one example, as would looking at rankings.

Overall, I would see this as an excellent reference book to last students through their academic careers.

The material itself is accurate. However, many of the links to additional material either do not work or are inaccessible to those without OSU credentials.

The material is mainly presented in a way that will last. However, many of the links no longer work so these should be checked and alternatives put in on a regular basis. Additionally, there are links to videos that may not be there in the future, although all I clicked on were available. However, the text description of the videos did not work. Many of the activities (MCQ’s etc) have a dated feel about them in terms of layout and interaction. The design of them could do with some updating.

The writing itself is very clear and easy to understand. Diagrams are used to good effect to clarify concepts (e.g. use of Venn diagrams to explain Boolean concepts). However, some of the terminology is not as clearly defined as it could be. While terms are generally explained clearly in the text, it would be nice to have a glossary of terms. Additionally, the MCQs are not always clear as if the reader gets an answer wrong it is not always apparent which is the correct one.

The book is consistent in writing style and interface.

The book is structured in a modular format whereby the reader can dip in and out of different sections, as they need to. Equally, for a student starting out, it is structured in a way that is likely to follow the steps in the same order as the student, making it a good companion to their research projects.

The book was organised in a very natural and sensible way and flowed smoothly from one topic to another. Links were provided to related sections of the book where relevant so that if the reader forgot what was meant by a particular topic, they could easily hop back and forth. The book started at the very beginning with good coverage of developing a research question and then progressed through tools and sources to help with this. The additional activities were all web based, which works fine if you have easy access. However, I was using a kindle with poor broadband so struggled to access it at times. It also felt a bit disruptive leaving the book to do the activities. It’s also not always clear whether links lead to another part of the book or to an external site. The tips are a useful addition. The stand out when flicking through the book and help to reinforce the important points. It is also useful the ways steps are clearly broken down into sub-steps.

I downloaded it to Kindle, and found a number of issues. It struggled to deal with larger fonts, resulting in some text not being visible.. There were also references to “the bottom of the page” but the bottom of the page varies depending on font size. Not all of the activities worked. Some of the activities required OSU credentials to access them, which was frustrating.

There were some minor grammatical and typographical errors but nothing major.

The book is very US centric in its use of examples. For example, there is an American football example and news sources referred to are US based generally. Additionally, copyright discussion is US centric.

Overall, I found this to be an excellent book that will help students in their research projects. I think it is a book that they will use for a number of years as it is has sufficient depth to help at different levels. The one main change I would make would be to broaden OSU references and activities so they are referring to databases in general, for example, rather than simply talking about the OSU one. Much of the material is relevant regardless of institution but a reader unfamiliar with databases would not be aware of this and might skip over some very useful information.

Reviewed by Anthony Patterson, Assistant Professor, North Carolina Central University on 2/1/18

Choosing and Using Sources is an extremely thorough text taking readers through the research process from formulating research questions to fair use and copy right issues. I particularly liked the online examples and resources including quizzes and videos. The table of contents is thorough but there is not a glossary. While this is a strong text some discussion of theory and how theoretical frameworks are used in academic writing.

While the text could have addressed additional areas, the authors were accurate and detailed. Chapter 8 - How to Cite Sources is well done and accurately takes novel researchers through when they should and should not provide citations.

The authors present how to develop, approach, and conduct sound research in a well thought out format. This text is up-to-date addressing issues like Wikipedia and Google Scholar. While issues around these information sources will change, the way this text is set up, it can easily be updated in the future.

The book is well written, clear, and easy to follow. Jargon such as primary, secondary, and tertiary sources were explained clearly with appropriate examples. This text will be accessible for my students and most others pursuing advanced degrees.

The authors are consistent throughout the text when discussing topics like presenting arguments and the relationship this has with concepts like research questions and the sources researcher select. While consistency is expected is difficult to do especially when writing as a team. More impressively is the consistency of supplemental materials throughout the text.

The book has long chapters and occasionally I had some difficulty knowing where one section ended and another began but overall it is readily divisible. Another important aspect of the text are the supplemental materials like online quizzes and videos which are also clearly align with the sections in the text.

I was skeptical at first when I began reading but the overall organization of this text is good. Even though the text is about writing and sources, a section of theory and incorporating theoretical frameworks would have strengthen the book. However the topics selected flowed well and led potential researchers through a logical process.

A few problems linking to sum supplemental materials but overall I was impressed by the quality of the graphics as well as the links to quizzes and videos that were provided.

I did not come across any grammatical or typographical issues.

I did not see any cultural insensitive examples or information provided. However I also did not see a lot of racial or ethnic diversity in examples throughout this text. Overall, I feel the authors approached the subject matter appropriately.

Reviewed by Rachelle Savitz, Assistant Professor, Clemson University on 2/1/18

The text is quite comprehensive regarding finding, using, and understanding sources. It provides the process of sourcing from start to finish with examples and activities provided throughout to support the reader. Various ways to find sources are described. There is a focus throughout on software and databases for the students at the authors institution and that can be confusing to readers from other institutions. The information provided regarding citing, ethics and copyright, and fair use was informative and would be beneficial to the reader. There were sections throughout that could have been more in depth and more specific. For instance, when going over the various ways to cite sources, additional examples could be provided and the version/edition should be listed. For instance, was the APA citation in APA 6th edition format? Also, make sure to address citing from secondary sources as students do this often and tend to cite what they read even if they read it from another text. The TOC was helpful and allowed ease of understanding what was to be covered in each section. One main complain that I have was regarding the additional information provided to help the reader in writing a paper. This information would be helpful for basic college writing but not for academic writing, thesis or dissertation writing. The sections required for some of these papers are not discussed and the text eludes that the sections provided regarding writing an argumentative piece would be appropriate for all. Also, synthesizing information could be explained a bit more and with more depth. Synthesizing includes more than critiquing and summarizing. All in all, the sourcing information is spectacular and the additional information could be expanded upon.

Accuracy of sourcing was spot on. Some of the additional categories discussed, as mentioned in the first section of this review, could be expanded upon to fully explain that category, if it is to be included in the book. The examples and activities provided were quite good and would be very beneficial for students to apply what they are learning in real-life contexts. Links were provided for extending information. I did not attempt to open every link but making sure they are up-to-date will be important as time goes forward. I also feel that the section on popular texts can be misleading. Stating that the Washington Post is "popular" eludes that it is not reliable or valid. This is not necessarily true as many experts in various fields write sections in "popular" newspapers.

As previously stated, a lot of links go to OSU resources. This could be problematic for any reader that is not at OSU. More information should be provided to support any student in the world as that part would be confusing to many students.

The text is easy to read and follow. All new information is explained and then examples and activities are provided. This is student friendly and allows any reader to quickly follow along and understand what is being stated, especially regarding the sourcing elements. As stated above, there are some sections that could/should be expanded upon for clarity and this might be best for beginning university students but the text was easy to understand in regards to sourcing, citing, and fair use. More information on how to use the sources and sections of papers would be beneficial to all students.

Each chapter seemed to follow a similar structure that followed the TOC.

Modularity rating: 3

Reading the book online provides ability to chunk the text based on assignments and can be read chapter by chapter, entirety or starting at different places. Due to the extensive amount of outside links and examples, this would be quite different if read in paper format. This book truly has to be read online to ensure benefit from all of the additional activities, links, examples, sources, etc. In addition, the many links specific to OSU would not be helpful for other students.

The organization is consistent from chapter to chapter. Information is explained and then examples and activities are provided to further knowledge. This works well for readers that needs examples.

Using a laptop provided no issues. However, when using a smartphone, the pages changed in size and various display features did not load properly or at all.

Very few grammatical errors were noticed.

No cultural issues noticed other than the many OSU references and sources. This could be offensive to other institutions as they will not be able to access many of the links.

Reviewed by Scott Rice, Associate Professor, Appalachian State University on 2/1/18

The book is very comprehensive which sometimes detracted from its usefulness. There were a few units that may be superfluous, but I did appreciate that the author seemed to err on the side of inclusivity, leaving it to other adoptees how much... read more

The book is error-free and appears to be free of bias.

The book is pitched to an Ohio State University audience, so some of the resources pointed to would not be the same as a potential adopter's institution might select. In addition, the book needs some updating regarding the impact of social media on the information cycle. Social media formats are mentioned, but a fuller treatment of how they fit into the information climate would be a good addition.

The text was clear and easy to read, and provided numerous examples for its points. It also did not rely on jargon in its explanations, which makes it much more accessible.

The text was consistent in its use of terms. I found its tone consistent, as well as the level of explanation for the wide variety of concepts explored.

The organization of the text into units makes it very easy to break the content apart into smaller units and use it for a variety of purposes. I could see using the content for different parts of several courses, as well as incorporating it into e-learning content.

The topics are presented in a logical fashion, following the path that a typical research assignment might take. This will also make it easier to fit within the flow of a course that uses the textbook to teach about the process of academic research.

The interface of the text itself works appropriately, but some of the ancillary quizzes and extra material did not work so well. Many of the graphics did not work as well within the pdf format as they do in the web format.

The textbook was free of grammatical errors and was easy to read.

The text did not appear to be culturally insensitive.

I am exploring the creation of a for-credit information literacy class at my institution and this book is a possible candidate for adoption for the course.

Reviewed by Bryan Gattozzi, Lecturer, General Studies Writing, Bowling Green State University on 2/1/18

I was impressed how the text began helping students understand the benefits of leading a research project by writing research question(s), following with assessment of research methods, and thinking about research writing as an avenue to test a... read more

The book didn't seem to dismiss any possible research method. Instead it provided suggestions of how and when any individual research method may be relevant.

The book was published last academic year and the content included is still relevant, mostly because best-practices in research (and research writing) haven't changed much.

The volume of research methods students can use given the internet's power is ever increasing, yet the book does well to isolate a handful of long standing tenets that academic writers have used for decades while allowing for discussion of web-based writing and multi-modal presentation methods instructors may increasingly require students to use.

Each section is concise, clear, and easy to follow . . . for me.

I assume students will be capable of reading the text, performing quizzes provided, and plotting out a research path to complete their assignment(s).

Then again, as an academic I obsess over these issues. I can see a student yawning while reading this text.

The content isn't especially fun to read yet the information provided in relevant and time-saving if students are willing to relax, read actively, and apply the material to the assignment their instructor has given.

I don't imagine many students would seek the book out and read about research methods, yet an instructor can pair excerpts from the book with specific assignments along a student's research path to help the student retain and apply the helpful suggestions in the book.

The text does well to allow students to name the process they're going through when composing a research question then deciding on what research path fits their question. Students are guided to consider what blend of qualitative / quantitative, primary / secondary / tertiary, or public / professional / scholarly research will fit their research and writing goals.

The book refers back to the same terms throughout and provides students with active learning worksheets to plot a research AND writing plan to complete their work, one they could conceivably follow throughout their academic and professional career.

Each subheading contains, on average, not more than a page of content allowing instructors the ability to easily limit reading assignments from the book to concise, focused sections.

The book is very process-based, and follows the workflow necessary to write a successful academic researched assignment.

The limit of this strategy might be students being overwhelmed with so much discussion of process they'd be paralyzed to inaction.

An instructor, then, would have to be direct in assigning reading materials relevant to a student's immediate research goal.

I like how the text follows the path a student would follow: from narrowing a research question, selecting and reviewing research materials, then choosing how to implement them ethically in writing.

It also details how to process research considerations students may not consider including how to archive research results, to respect copyright law when publishing blog posts or submitting student work to an online repository.

The text contains many online activities, sample research artifacts, and instructional handouts. Some require on Ohio State student authentication. The text is still useful without access to these materials, though an instructor would have to alert students to this issue.

Text was proofread well.

Didn't see any culturally insensitive content.

Reviewed by Jonathan Grunert, Assistant Professor of Library Services: Information Literacy Coordinator, Colorado State University - Pueblo on 2/1/18

This textbook covers the concepts found in the ACRL frameworks in a way that is meaningful and accessible to academic researchers at all levels. It adequately provides a discussion of the complete research process, with clear signposts as to which... read more

The content appears to be accurate to 2016, with some acknowledgement that finding sources is an activity that has seen many changes in the past few decades, and will likely seem more, and rapidly.

Information discovery and retrieval is a rapidly changing process in a changing field. But much of the content in this textbook—as far as general advice and instruction for finding resources and the ways to use them—remains relevant. As information processes change and as information uses change, I have no doubt that librarians will be at the forefront of maintaining the relevance of a textbook like this one through various edition changes.

This textbook is clear, and accessible to researchers at all levels. Jargon, where present, is well-explained, and the contexts for the various components of the textbook are provided.

The text and frameworks in this book are consistent with ACRL frameworks as well as with the ways librarians tend to talk about finding and using sources. Furthermore, the book consistently uses the same terminologies to clearly explain sometimes difficult practices.

I would be very comfortable using any chapter of this book to teach a component of the academic research process. The chapters are discrete, with well-defined boundaries. The modularity of this textbook helps reinforce the overarching idea in this book: the iterative research process. Students might read the chapters in virtually any order, and come away with a valuable understanding of the research process.

This textbook presents the research process in the way that many students and faculty think about the process—from the perspective of the end goal, and through the organizational structure of an academic paper. But, it also indicates throughout the process places when the researcher needs to revisit an earlier step, to modify the project, or to make the end product more meaningful.

No issues in the interface; nothing distracting from the content.

Some minor punctuation errors, but no grammatical errors that distract from the content.

This textbook comes from an American perspective for ways of searching for, retrieving, and using information, as well as the traditionally American ways of constructing arguments. Though there is not discussion of other cultural ways of arguing academically, this textbook does not dismiss or otherwise denigrate other cultures; nor is it insensitive in any way.

Many examples are university-specific to the libraries at Ohio State University, as should be expected from a textbook such as this. As such, this book will be most helpful to students using the book at OSU. However, instructors using this book need to be aware of this focus, and must prepare to supplement with materials accessible by researchers outside OSU.

Reviewed by Susan Nunamaker, Lecturer, Clemson University on 2/1/18

This textbook is comprehensive. It goes in-depth covering the topics of research questions (specifically how to narrow down topics), types of sources, sources and information needs, precision searching, search tools, evaluating sources, ethical use of sources, how to cite sources, making an argument, writing tips, copyright basics, fair use, and roles of resource sources. The textbook hits all of the topics that I plan to cover in my upcoming classroom-based research course with the exception of techniques for completing and writing a literature review. The textbook touches on the topic through a section on "background reading", but does not go in-depth. Otherwise, the textbook covers every aspect of academic research.

I found no errors or bias issues in my initial first read of the textbook.

The information and techniques provided within this textbook are up-to-date and relevant for academic research. I reviewed several textbooks before choosing this one for my upcoming masters-level classroom-based research course. I chose this book because of its relevance in regard to the practical skills needed in order to complete research assignments within the course, as well as, writing a capstone research paper.

This textbook is clear and exceptionally readable. It is organized by research skills in an order that makes sense to the reader. For example, the book begins with a chapter on choosing one's research question. Verbiage is clear and concise for all levels of academia to be able to effectively utilize this text.

This textbook is consistent in terms of terminology and framework. Each chapter of the textbook builds on the last. The reader is not necessarily expected to have prior knowledge of research before reading chapter one, but should easily be able to have a good frame of reference for academic research by the end of the textbook due to its high-quality framework for scaffolding knowledge with each chapter.

This textbook does a great job of sectioning academic research into small bites for the reader. It was easy for me to create modules from the textbook's chapters, spreading the information within the text over an 8-week course. The modularity of this textbook was a selling point for utilizing the textbook with students.

This is a well-organized textbook. Each chapter builds on prior chapters. Chapters are organized in a logical manner. The first chapter begins with the purpose of research questions and builds content to assist the reader in narrowing down options for research questions. The textbook progresses to assist the reader in building skills as an academic researcher throughout the textbook.

No interface issues were discovered during my initial exposure to the online format. I printed the PDF (because I still love paper) and all display features printed properly. The online navigation is easy to use and pleasing to the eye, as well.

No grammar issues were detected during my initial review of the textbook.

This text is not culturally insensitive or offensive in my opinion.

This is an excellent textbook if you are looking to utilize it to introduce students to the academic research and writing process. Its layout and design and conducive to module-based instruction, and the content is well thought out and beneficial.

Reviewed by Diane Kauppi, Library Faculty, Technical Services & Systems, Ruth A Myers Library at Fond du Lac Tribal & Community College on 2/1/18

The text did a great job of covering the subject and the table of contents were laid out well. The content was well thought out. read more

The text did a great job of covering the subject and the table of contents were laid out well. The content was well thought out.

I found the accuracy to be good. The content is a good representation of what a student needs to know in order better understanding library research.

The content itself is good & should stand the test of time for the near future. The only exception is that even though it's only one year from the publishing date (2016) many of the links are broken. And I would have preferred a OER text that was geared more generally for application to any institution vs. the inclusion of OSU specific references, links, resources.

For a text written to a 4-year university/college audience the text was good. For a 2-year community college audience some of the terminology would need to be defined.

I found the consistency to be good. It followed through each section with including tips, activities, etc.

I think the modularity was good. And the text could easily be broken down into smaller sections to be used as units by themselves or refresher units. The only issue would be where there are links within a module that link to other modules. Add to this that these links didn't work-- I rec'd errors each time I tried a module link.

The overall organization and flow as great. As stated on p 6 ("... as though you are conducting a research project while reading them [the sections]...") this made my logical side happy.

I like the links to activities for students to practice the skills being taught. The problem though was that many of the links no longer work. Additionally, many of the links are to areas not available to users who are not affiliated with OSU. And as mentioned in another review section, module links to other modules didn't work either.

I found the grammar to be quite good with only a few exceptions or where it was clunky at times.

I thought the text was neutral in this area. Nothing that blatantly jumped out at me.

I appreciated the link to application of research to other areas of our lives outside of academic research. I try to get this point across to students, especially when they are hesitant and resistant to library research. I found the "tips" & "summaries" to be a nice added 'pop' & easy for referring back to later. I liked the bold letters/words for emphasis. And the suggestion to "brush up" on p 31 was a nice touch vs outwardly assuming they don't know. The downloadable templates are a great resource for students. Overall, I found the text to be a good resource.

Reviewed by Kristine Roshau, Instructional Technology Specialist and PT Faculty Librarian, Central Oregon Community College on 8/15/17

This text is extensive! Like the title suggests, it truly is a full guide to academic research, from developing a topic, finding sources, and using them appropriately. It also follows the logical order of the search process, from identifying an information need, evaluating source quality (and purpose), and how to perform complex searches. It also highlights several common areas where academic research can be performed, from the college library catalog to specialized databases and how to find academic sources on the free web.

The book also covers what to do once sources have been found, including the importance of properly citing sources, ethical use of source material, and how to cite unusual or non-standard source material. It then moves into addressing the writing process: developing an argument and idea, writing tips, and a large section on copyright, fair use, creative commons, and public domain.

The table of contents is very granular, which is helpful. The sections vary in length, but given the overall size of the book (190 pages) having a very specific TOC is useful when returning to the text as a reference source.

I did not find any objectionable or questionable content. The authors have done a good job of selecting examples for each section (often with associated online activities or examples linked out to the web) that are varied and unbiased, but also represent realistic examples of what students might be encountering during their research process. I was really pleased when looking through the section on citing sources - styles can change, but the book is written in such a way as to be comprehensive about the purpose of citing sources, and links out to many helpful web sources, citation tools, etc so the information will remain accurate in the textbook even if the style guides themselves are updated in the future.

The section on copyright is similarly done.

See previous note - it is clear the authors have taken care to include examples that will remain relevant, not evaporate into popular culture, and provide flexibility where the content may be updated or changes (such as copyright law and citation style guides). They do provide a LOT of external links and activities, not all produced by Ohio State. So it's possible that some of their links may break in the future. It does appear that they have made an effort to either link to open sources they control, or which are unlike to change significantly (ie: government websites).

If I were using this text, I would probably modify some of the resource sections (eg: databases) to reflect those that the students at my institution have access to, though the writers do make a point of identifying OSU access-only resources where applicable. I would also update the copyright/plagiarism section to include our college's student handbook blurbs, etc.

The tone is extremely approachable in all of the areas I checked. This is extremely important in academic research where there are a lot of areas of possible legal entanglement, and the authors have done a credible job of breaking down complex concepts into approachable prose and examples.

The textbook is consistent in both writing and structure; however, I do with the table of contents was split into sections in the same way the content is. Page numbers are given though, so that's not really a big deal. There were one or two places where I saw formatting errors, but nothing overly distracting - it did not adversely effect the content.

It is visually appealing and for the most part, easy to navigate. No huge blocks of text, and it also intersperses activities, tips, and examples. The text is also organized in such a way that it can be used as a reference, without needing to be read from start to finish in order to make sense, which is helpful for the researcher who may need to pop in for just pieces of the work.

However, there is a strong presence of external sources (often OSU library webpages) and activities that are linked out of the text. The writing itself is certainly standalone, but the book would lose a lot of its character if it were printed and not viewed digitally. I would have liked a References or bibliographic section that listed some of these resources, but there wasn't one, meaning the user would not be able to search for the resource if the linked text didn't work.

I can see the potential for too many asides for activities to be distracting, but they are generally held to the end of their relevant sections, so it wasn't too overwhelming. The organization follows a logical research process, walking the reader through from beginning to end.

As mentioned before, there are a few places where it looks like images have distorted the intended formatting, pushing items to empty pages, etc. But these instances are rare. A few of the images could be higher resolution, but they were certainly legible (and I was viewing this text at 125% zoom on a larger screen, so my experience is probably not representative of every reader).

It is long though, and I would have loved to be able to jump to sections through anchor bookmarks in the content page - that would be a nice touch.

I also found a few broken links, which is not totally surprising, given the volume of them in this book.

None noticed in this review.

No objectionable content found - the authors have chosen inclusive examples wherever possible, while remaining realistic about subjects students might be researching.

Not all of the links to activities are self-describing (there are no plain URLs, but many of the activity links contain the same 'Open Activity in Web Browser' text, which would be confusing if a user was navigating with a screen reader.

Reviewed by Deborah Finkelstein, Adjunct Professor, George Mason University on 6/20/17

The book is very comprehensive. The authors consistently explain concepts well and provide easy-to-understand examples that are approachable for the undergraduate audience. For example, the authors don’t just say, “narrow down your source,” they go through steps to narrow it down, walking students through the process. (p 9) Very thorough. They also spend a page and a half giving examples of “Regular Question” vs. “Research Question.” (p 13-14) This ensures that students will understand the difference. They also do well with explaining fact vs. option, objective vs. subjective, primary vs. secondary vs. tertiary sources, popular vs. professional vs. scholarly magazines, when to quote vs. paraphrase vs. summarize, and other concepts that are critical to performing research.

The book does not have an index. The table of contents is quite thorough and very useful in understanding the breakdown of the book or locating certain topics.

The book is error-free.

There are many digital examples in the text. As long as authors make updates as technology inevitably changes in the future, the book should remain relevant.

The book has a conversational tone that is connective, trustworthy, and approachable for the undergraduate audience. This makes it easy to read and easy to understand.

The book is very consistent with tone, and terminology.

In the introduction, the book encourages students to “jump around a bit in this guide to meet your needs.” (p 5). The book stays true to this idea. Students could read the book straight through, but it is well-designed for “jumping around.” The sections stand alone, and instructors could easily assign sections in the book out of order. This book could be used as the only textbook in a classroom, or an instructor could use these modules to supplement an existing textbook. Topics are easily found in the book thanks to an excellent table of contents, a clear organizational structure, and a great use of headers.

The book is well-organized and follows a logical structure. Individual topics are also well-organized. The authors break processes into step-by-step, making is easy for students to learn.

Great use of visual aids. For example, there is a chart on how to narrow down research topic (p 9), and a chart on the roles of resources in research (p 179). These items are great for visual learners, and they make the text come alive while emphasizing important concepts.

The book shares links to outside sources. This provides students that would like more information that is beyond the book with resources. It additionally provides students links to activities, such as one that asks them if a source is primary, secondary, or tertiary (p 34). On occasion, it links to outside companies, such as citation management software, news outlets, and social media, making the book a resource. In this way, the book utilizes the medium of a digital book.

The book is free of grammatical errors.

The book is culturally sensitive. The book is designed for Ohio University students. Examples given occasionally apply to Ohio, such as when the authors are providing examples of newspapers, they list two out of six that are from Ohio, including the campus newspaper (p 43) There is also a link to the OSU Libraries’ newspaper database (p 44), and when talking about citation management software, they mention the three that are available at OSU. It’s not a large enough issue that one should not use the book; it’s still easy to understand, but it is a limitation and worth mentioning to students.

I teach a 300-level English class on performing research and writing research papers. I plan to utilize this book next semester due to the excellent organization of modules, the approachable tone, and the great explanations and examples.

Reviewed by Constance Chemay, Head of Public Services, Library Services; Asst. Professor, User Instruction, River Parishes Community College, Gonzales, LA on 6/20/17

The book does an excellent job covering the subject, and even goes beyond what its title suggests, with chapters on writing and formulating an argument. The chapters on copyright and fair use are exceptional. However, it lacks both a glossary and an index. Some terms are defined in their appropriate chapters, but not all. Some students, particularly first-year or those who may be enrolled in developmental courses, would benefit greatly from a glossary. The activities, while appropriate for their contexts, are mixed in their effectiveness; some provide good feedback with clarification, but most offer little more than a smiley face for a correct answer or an “x” for a wrong answer with no other feedback.

For the most part, this book is accurate and unbiased, but one area where I noticed discrepancies is the chapter on citing sources. MLA released its 8th edition in April 2016, yet the examples provided are 7th edition. I also noticed errors in the example for APA; only the first word, proper nouns, and those following major punctuation marks are to be capitalized in article titles following APA formating guidelines. Regarding bias, the book is unbiased; however, I disagree with the discussion of news sources regarding mainstream versus non-mainstream (or mainline as used in the text); main-stream media includes "traditional" sources, e.g., television, newspapers, and radio, as opposed to online sources, especially social media. The authors’ inclusion of Fox News, a right-leaning national television news network, a contemporary of CBS, NBC, and ABC, as non-mainline rather than mainline shows bias, in my opinion. It’s difficult to find news from any news source, mainstream or not, right, left or center, that doesn’t have some bias or opinions in its reporting.

This textbook itself is written so that it will be relevant for a long time. However, there are some exceptions. The discussion of citation styles uses examples for MLA that reflect the 7th edition rather than the 8th, which was released in April 2016. The book covers this discrepancy somewhat with its tip regarding choosing a citation style, with its remarks that styles do change and its recommendation to check with one’s instructors. Another issue is the potential for link rot regarding external websites; in fact there are a few dead links in the text and activities already. A couple of online resources mentioned and linked to, IPL2 and the Statistical Abstracts of the US, have been retired for at least a couple of years, which makes me wonder about when the book was actually last reviewed edited.

The book is well-written, easy to read, conversational. Most technical language is defined and used appropriately.

This book is consistent in terms of its terminology and framework.

This book is extremely modular in its organization at the chapter level and within the chapters. It can be easily reordered to meet specific course or instructor needs. It does refer to other sections of the text, but these references are appropriate, emphasizing more in-depth information elsewhere in the book. Sections that are unique to OSU can be replaced/revised to make the text relevant to other institutions as needed.

It is well organized and reflects the processes and stages of research. While the research process is not linear, the topics are presented in a logical manner that guides students through the process. I did note that a couple of sections in chapter 7, on ethical use of sources don’t really seem to fit there, however. The paragraphs on page 118 discussing a lack of understanding of the materials and lack of time might fit better in other chapters.

While the online version works well, the PDF format has issues. Some of the in-text navigation links work (the TOC links) while others found throughout the text don’t, often giving an “error: unknown export format” message. There are also a few dead links in both the online and PDF formats, as well as in some of the online activities. Some links direct users to OSU Libraries’ resources, either their catalog or their licensed databases, but not all such links are clearly identified as such.

Grammatical Errors rating: 3

For the most part, this text is well-written, grammatically; however, it does have a few grammatical/typographical errors, possibly more than one might expect from a text of this length, and assuming that the author is most likely a committee rather than an individual, more eyes reviewing the text should catch such errors. There are also instances of tense inconsistencies, shifting from present to past in the same sentence. Two paragraphs on page 47, under “Finding Data in Articles . . .,” repeat the same four sentences verbatim in different order. This occurs again on page 88. While these are not grammatical errors, they are certainly editorial errors. Most of the online activities have typos, as well, more so than the textbook.

This textbook is not culturally insensitive or offensive.

I do like this book. I think it puts the topic in terms that students can readily use and understand. I'd even recommend the chapters on copyright and fair use to faculty! I do think that it could benefit from the inclusion of a glossary and an index, as well as regular and frequent review, especially in regards to the linked resources. The PDF version definitely needs revisions since it seems that most of the in-text referral links throughout the text don’t work. Since it is tailored to OSU’s library resources, any instruction librarian using the book can substitute content relevant to his/her institution; non-library faculty using the text can consult their own librarians for help with this.

Reviewed by Dawn Kennedy, Ed.S, Health Education, Anoka-Ramsey Community College on 4/11/17

Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research serves as an excellent guide for teaching the research process. It takes the learner through the process of academic research and writing in an easy to understand manner. As an educator in a community college setting, I am working with students who are new to the research process. This text will be useful when working with students to start developing the appropriate process of research writing. The text has neither a back-of-the-book index nor a glossary. It is beneficial that key terms are defined throughout the chapters.

The information presented in the text is accurate at this point in time and unbiased. One concern is that some of The information presented in the text is accurate at this point in time and unbiased. One concern is that some of the links do not work.

Content is up-to-date at this point in time. Most examples and exercises are arranged separately from the main text and can be updated as needed. Some of the content links to the Ohio State University Libraries databases which may not be assessable to students outside that institution.

This text is clearly written, well-illustrated, and user-friendly for the undergraduate audience. It avoids technical jargon and provides definitions where appropriate.

Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research is consistent in terms of terminology and framework.

Regarding the book’s modularity, users of this text can be selective in chapter choice. In this sense the text is useful to instructors and students who wish to focus on a single component and /or use the text as a reference. For a better understanding of the research process in its entirety, reading the text in the order written may prove to be more beneficial.

The text's organization mirrors the research process in a logical, clear manner. Chapters 1-8 lead the reader through the basics of research literacy and research skills; chapters nine and ten explain the process for making an argument and writing tips; Subsequent chapters zero in on copyright and Fair Use information. Key concepts and points are supported with highlights, examples and colorful illustrations.

The text displays generous use of visuals which are clear and free of distortion. The activities provided support the concepts and skills being addressed and are easy to navigate. One concern is the activities which are linked to Ohio State University may not provide access to all, resulting in limited access of information and frustration for the reader.

• The text is not culturally insensitive or offensive in any way.

This is a text does an excellent job of explaining the research process in a logical manner. The text uses examples, illustrations, and skill practice to support the learning process. I recommend this text for use in it's entirely for teaching and learning the research process and as a resource for the rest of us.

Reviewed by Scott Miller, Reference and Instruction Librarian, Rogue Community College on 4/11/17

The book is very comprehensive and even goes beyond what might be expected in this kind of textbook. Along with choosing and using sources, the authors include a section on making an argument. Topics are dealt with appropriately and the text employs tests and activities along the way. I found some of the activities were not particularly well designed and sometimes answers to questions were based on assumptions by the authors as to context that in real life may or may not be appropriate. For instance, they claim that the periodical/journal title "Coral Reefs" is a scholarly journal, but judging by the title alone in a real life exercise there is no way to know whether it is scholarly or popular in nature.

There could have been more discussion about context and how it defines whether a sources is primary, secondary or tertiary. '

What the this textbook does not have is any kind of index or glossary, which I found disappointing.

I did not find any instances of inaccuracies in the text. I did find, however, some assumptions in the text that were not always warranted. I took issue with the assumption that mainline news sources are objective (p. 42). It is very clear that news articles are often biased. I think telling students that mainline news sources are objective effectively disarms instead of promotes critical thinking by students doing research.

On page 126 there is a discussion about using quotations where the authors say that all quotes are to be put within quotation marks. This is not true of block quotes in MLA or APA style and they omit any mention of it.

This textbook should retain its relevancy for several years, but it will lose its effectiveness very soon, since many of the dozens and dozens of links in the text will surely break before long. In the short term the links are a great feature, but they do severely limit the longevity of the book. I also found them annoyingly pervasive.

It should also be noted that the MLA citation example on page 122 uses the outdated MLA 7th edition guidelines.

Overall, I thought the book was very clearly written and easy to follow. The one section I struggled reading was the section on sources and information need. It seemed to want much more editing and was often wordy and almost obscure.

I did not notice any lack of consistency in terminology or framework.

This is one the book's strengths. It was clearly organized into topics and subtopics which sometimes could be addressed in an order chosen by an instructor. There were, however, occasional self-references to earlier sections or previously used external sources.

Moving from the simpler aspects of choosing and evaluating sources to the more complex uses of them and how arguments are constructed made good sense.

Interface rating: 2

I found the interface to have significant problems. At least a dozen links would not work from the PDF text when opened in Firefox. I often got the message, "error: unknown export format." The links seemed to work when viewing the text online, however.

The textbook's usefulness outside of Ohio State is severely limited by the frequent use of sources only available through OSU student logins. The textbook was written for OSU students, but it really fails as a textbook for any other institution unless it is significantly modified.

I found a few missing punctuation marks, and only two missing or wrong words in sentences. For a textbook this long, that's very good.

The textbook used interesting and non-offensive examples.

While it's a good textbook for choosing and using information sources it suffers from being too specifically written for OSU students, as well as including an overabundance of links that will reduce its longevity. Not including any kind of index or glossary is also a drawback.

Reviewed by Vanessa Ruccolo, Advanced Instructor of English, Virginia Tech on 2/8/17

Ch. 1 has a great overview of regular versus research questions and the difference between qualitative and quantitative research. Ch. 2 covers primary, secondary, and tertiary sources as well as popular, professional, and scholarly. Ch. 3 includes a source plan (i.e. what do you need the sources for and what is your plan). Ch. 4 gives tips and hints for searching on a library database. Ch. 5 gives different search options, like the library or Google Scholar. Ch. 6 is all about evaluating the sources you find, including clues about sussing out bias and thoroughness, as well as discussing currency of topic. Ch. 7 discusses why you should cite sources. Ch. 8 discusses ways to cite sources. Ch. 9 is looking at argument as dialog and what is necessary in that exchange and a recommended order of components. Ch. 10 covers quoting, paraphrasing,and summarizing and signal phrases. Ch. 11, 12 are copyright and fair use. Ch. 13 covers the roles or research.

I will use Ch. 1 and 2 in my classes, as I think the breakdown of research is useful and clear. Ch. 3 also has useful imbedded tools that will help students plan; Ch. 4 and 5 might be used as references post-library visit. I will also use Ch. 6 and Ch. 10.

I think the information provided for distinguishing scholarly, popular, and professional is helpful and I hope the resources help students understand good, reliable sources a bit better. The same is true for searching for sources, and I think the sections on search engines and evaluation of sources are going to be quite useful.

While the information on copyright, fair use, and why and ways to cite sources is fine, I won't be using these for my English classes as I find them not as helpful or relevant.

I think the book is quite accurate in terms of information provided. They use sources that both I and my students use, so clearly the book is addressing real needs in the classroom. It also makes suggestions that reinforce the concepts our librarians share with the students and instructors, so I find this to be extremely helpful.

The book suggests Purdue OWL, a source I also use; however, I realized this year that OWL was behind in updating some of the MLA citation changes. So that's something maybe for the book authors to note or address when recommending websites.

With that said, I think the book covers key specifics like university library websites, Google Scholar, and search engines, in broad enough terms to keep it relevant. Also, the graphics are simple and not dated, and there is one drawing of the "outernet" that shows what social media, Youtube, etc. would look like in the "real, outer" world. This drawing is the only thing I saw that might be dated soon, but its point is still solid.

Very easy to read, clear terminology and explanation of terms, and lists are also provided to help break up each page's prose, which means the information is presented in a visually clear form as well.

I think the consistency of terminology as well as the scaffolding makes sense on the whole. I didn't seem places where the language changed or seemed to have several writers or definitions.

Perhaps one of the best parts of this book is how each chapter is contained, succinct, includes an activity, but still builds on and with the other chapters. Each chapter is stand-alone and clear and easy to read online, or if you chose to print it. The creators clearly had the online reader in mind, however, and the chapter lengths and fonts are comfortable.

Overall, I like the organization, specifically for chapters 10-6. I would change the order of the final chapters so that Ch. 9 and 10 come before Ch. 7, 8, 11, 12. I would also move Ch. 13 "The Roles of Research" to earlier in the book, perhaps around Ch. 3 or Ch. 6. If I use these materials, I will reorder some of the chapters for my class so that the scaffolding and explanations work a bit more side by side.

Again, comfortable, easy-to-read pages, simple graphics and the charts used are helpful and appropriate. I especially appreciated that the authors didn't use images that showed people or figures that could both date the book and also make students feel talked down to - I hate images like this and refuse to use textbooks that incorporate them, so kudos!

Additional resources are easy to access.

I wish the email option (for sending yourself a page) pulled up a screen in which I could type the email I wanted it sent to. Instead, it pulls up Messenger, which I don't use.

The Table of Contents didn't let me jump to the chapter when I pulled down the menu. Was that just my computer/browser?

Now, I didn't read through as though I was grading (it is winter break, after all!) but nothing jumped off the page. If something had, if there had been a mistake, I would still use the text; if there had been several, I would have considered abandoning it for class. However, the information is still so good I i might have told my students to find the grammar mistakes as part of an assignment just so that I could use the research parts still; however, I didn't not see any.

No, nothing. Perhaps if the authors include more examples for citations they could pull from culturally different sources then, but the material here was so broad in terms of textual sources it was in no way exclusive.

I will be using parts of this book in my English classes. Well done to the authors - a helpful, free supplement.

Reviewed by Dale Jenkins, Advanced Instructor, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech) on 2/8/17

Having taught freshmen how to write college research papers for the past 18 years, I gave the text high marks on addressing all of the key elements college students need to engage in academic research. read more

The text implements content from a host of sources which is extremely useful, but the grammar needs a few tweaks.

This represents a strong aspect of the text. The writers did a good job of winnowing out unnecessary components of the research process, although my freshmen would not delve into the Fair Use and Copyright chapters.

The book gets outstanding marks on clarity. Students will find this to be a definite strength of the text.

The authors did a good job with consistency. I kept my students in mind as I evaluated this aspect of the text.

Students would find this book extremely accessible in terms of modularity. I don't see them being overwhelmed by the text or high-brow jargon.

I noted a logical progression to all thirteen of the chapters. Students in upper-level classes would find the chapters on Fair Use and Copyright more significant in their academic studies.

The hyperlinks and the interactive elements of the book will be extremely appealing to students as well as being substantive.

The book still needs some work in this regard. Pronouns don't always agree with the antecedents, and I noted several shifts in voice in the text.

The text doesn't have any instances of cultural insensitivity, and I pay close attention to this aspect of textbooks when I peruse them for potential use in my courses.

The hyperlinks, using different types of media, and the chapters on "Why Precision Searching?" and the discussion of plagiarism proved to be well-crafted and accessible for students. I also commend the authors for the lack of jargon that would leave students in its wake.

Reviewed by Jarrod Dunham, Instructor - English Composition, Portland Community College on 2/8/17

A very comprehensive guide to the writing of the research paper. I've taught research writing for several years, and this book covers all the material I'd typically cover in a class. Previously I've not used a textbook in that class, but I'm teaching an online section this term and find that the book offers a very effective substitute for the lectured and activities I'd otherwise be presenting in class.

This text is accurate and up-to-date with the most recent developments and issues in the field.

This text is very much up-to-date. It shows an awareness of changing conventions in academic writing, and emphasizes the latest technological tools for researching and managing citations. It frequently links to outside resources, which could be problematic in the event those resources were removed or relocated, but in practice I never encountered such an issue.

Clarity is one of the book's strengths. It is written in clear, simple, and concise prose, resisting the kind of "academese" that is frequently employed in textbooks and gives students a false impression of what academic writing should look like. I found all of the content very easy to understand, and, although it's intended for slightly more advanced classes, accessible for Freshman writing students.

The text is highly consistent, both in terms of the terminology it employs, its organizational structure, and its systematic incorporation of tips, learning activities, and quizzes.

The book is divided into 13 chapters, each of which addresses particular aspects of research writing and can be employed on its own, or in conjunction with other related chapters. I found that assigning chapters in order was generally perfectly appropriate, although there was no issue with assigning the odd chapter out of order - links to previous or later content are provided where appropriate, so students can easily navigate to other relevant sections of the text.

This text is very nicely organized. It moves from the beginning stages of the pre-writing process - choosing a topic and identifying appropriate guiding questions - through the research to the writing of the paper itself. I found that the organizational structure of the text very closely mirrored the structure I use myself in teaching research writing. As such, adopting this text for the course (and adapting the course to the text) was a delightfully straightforward exercise.

The interface of the text is excellent. It is very easy to navigate, very attractive, and all tools work as intended. Some features are only available to those with Ohio State University log-ins, which yields a handful of frustrating moments, but in general I didn't find this to be a significant issue.

The text is error free and written in a simple, accessible, and engaging style. It's not merely an easy read, but one that effectively models clear and concise academic prose for writing students.

To the extent such issues come into play, the text is inclusive and culturally sensitive. The content of the text is mostly neutral on such issues - they simply tend not to come into play - but I was pleased to find a comprehensive chapter on the ethical use of sources, which introduces an ethical dimension to the research and writing process that many students may not anticipate or otherwise be prepared to navigate.

Overall I was quite pleased with this text. In my online section of Research Paper Writing, I have assigned nine of the thirteen chapters, and am very pleased with the breadth of content covered thereby. With one exception, I've been able to assign those chapters in the order they appear in the book, which simplified the planning process for myself, and offers a structure to the course that will be more readily apparent to my students as well. Late chapters on Copyrights Basics and Fair Use struck me as unnecessary and a little off topic, but it is of course easy to simply not assign those chapters, and since this is not a print book they have no bearing on materials costs.

For an online class like the one I am currently teaching, this is an excellent primary text. Even in a face-to-face class it could prove to be a very useful supplemental text. Normally I resist the use of supplemental texts in face-to-face classes, but since this one is free it is ideal for that purpose: instructors and students can simply rely on it to whatever extent feels useful.

Reviewed by Jennifer Lantrip, Reference Librarian, Umpqua Community College on 2/8/17

This book is an excellent source for guiding undergraduate students through the research process, from understanding the purposes for doing research and writing a research question, to composing a thesis and contributing to a scholarly conversation. Students learn where and how to find relevant sources and how to evaluate and use them ethically. The main text is supplemented with links to useful resources, videos, worksheets, examples, and exercises. These are all high quality sources, making this a comprehensive resource for teaching information literacy and the research process. While no index or glossary is provided, terms are well defined within the text. Links are provided to other sections within the text where terms are further discussed.

The content is error-free, unbiased, and accurate. Ideas and concepts are in accordance with the Association of College and Research Libraries’ “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education,” with the exception of several small sections that could easily be clarified or adapted.

The opening section of Chapter 3 states that researchers should find sources in order to meet their information needs. However, it states that one information need is “to convince your audience that your answer is correct or, at least, the most reasonable answer.” This should be clarified for students so that they understand that they should start their research with an open mind as opposed to looking for sources which support their predetermined thesis.

The section “The Sources to Meet Needs” in Chapter 3 states that convincing one’s audience is an information need and that students should find sources based upon what their audience would be convinced by. Researchers should not choose their sources based upon what would convince their audience, but rather upon what sources best answer their research question. The most relevant and highest quality sources should not be omitted from the research process because the researcher does not think that his/her audience would be convinced by them. It is part of the researcher’s job to educate and convince his/her audience why the chosen sources and the research are relevant and of high quality.

Chapter 13 mentions briefly, “Putting your sources to work for you in these roles can help you write in a more powerful, persuasive way—to, in fact, win your argument.” It is very important for researchers to make convincing arguments through using quality sources, doing quality research, and presenting the information in an understandable way. Students should understand that the goal of scholarly conversation is not to “win” arguments, but rather to contribute to the world’s shared knowledge. While one argument may hold for a time, it will most likely be refined in some way by future researchers.

The main content of each chapter is current and does not contain terms that will soon be outdated. Specific examples and exercises are arranged separately from the main chapter text and can be updated independently. Some of the content discusses and links to Ohio State University Libraries databases which are unavailable to students at other institutions. While some of this knowledge is transferable, the specific information about these databases is unique to OSU Libraries. It would be useful if this information could be generalized in the main flow of the text so that it would be applicable for students at other institutions.

This text is very readable and easy to understand. Concepts are explained clearly. Exercises and examples are provided to help students grasp each new concept. It is written in a casual tone that appears to make an effort to put its readers at ease while giving solid information about how to complete research and writing assignments successfully.

The terminology used in this book and its framework are consistent. Each chapter, chapter sections, examples, and exercises are organized in a consistent manner throughout the book, making it easy to follow. Students can refer to specific sections of the book or read it straight through. Because links are provided to sections of the book where important terms are defined or discussed further, students can easily jump to relevant sections of the book.

The book is divided into chapters and subsections which lead the reader seamlessly and logically through the research process. The book could easily be assigned to be read linearly, but it would also work well for instructors to assign specific chapters as applicable to the course content.

This book takes students through the research process in logical steps, from choosing and refining research questions, to producing and sharing what they have learned. For students who are unfamiliar with the research process, it would be most useful to read the book linearly as each chapter prepares students for future chapters.

This text is easy to navigate in both the PDF and online versions. Images are clear. There are currently no broken links. The contents in the PDF version could be made clearer by making a greater distinction between the main chapter and chapter section titles.

The text has negligible grammatical errors.

This text is not culturally insensitive or offensive.

I highly recommend this book for teaching information literacy and the research process to undergraduates.

Reviewed by Patricia Akhimie, Asst. Prof of English, Rutgers University-Newark on 2/8/17

This textbook does not include an index or glossary but is full-text searchable, returning a an easy to read and access menu of clickable search results to take readers directly to the desired information. In addition, an expandable Table of Contents for the book is available as a tab so that readers can view an overview of topics and jump to other sections at any time. This textbook offers a review of research methods that is certainly comprehensive. Instructors will likely find that individual sections, rather than the whole work, are most useful in planning lessons and constructing student assignments in research based and writing intensive courses at the undergraduate level.

This textbook is accurate in its representation of research methods and of the reasoning behind these approaches. In addition, details about citation styles, and search tools, seem error-free. Treatments of the more complex aspects of research, such as constructing an argument, are unbiased and thorough.

The textbook should be useful to students and instructors for some time. It should be noted, however, that research software and citation styles are updated, though infrequently. Thus, the video walkthroughs of particular databases, for example, may be obsolete or misleading after some time.

This textbook is remarkably lucid and approachable for undergraduate readers. Discussions of complex ideas are illustrated with useful graphics that readers and instructors will find particularly helpful. The video walkthroughs are perhaps the most attractive illustrations for instructors. These guides will be appealing and easy to use for students intimidated by large databases and their idiosyncrasies.

The textbook is immanently usable. It is consistent in its tone as well as in its use of terms.

It is clear that this textbook has been designed with modularity in mind. Individual sections will be more useful than others, depending on the type and level of the class. In addition, sections can easily be assigned at different points over the course of a semester. For example, sections might be assigned at intervals that reflect the stages of the development of undergraduate student’s independent research paper. The section on formulating research questions might appear early in the semester, the section on citation styles toward the end.

The organization of the book reflects the stages of research. This means that navigating the textbook will be intuitive.

Navigating this textbook will be intuitive, the Table of Contents tab makes moving between sections very easy.

Readers will find the textbook free of simple typos and errors.

Readers will find the textbook inclusive. Some readers may find that the attempt made in the textbook to speak to research in the humanities, social sciences and sciences has meant that discussions can be vague at times but this is to be expected in a textbook on this topic aimed at a broad range of readers and researchers.

Reviewed by Heather Jerónimo, Assistant Professor, University of Northern Iowa on 2/8/17

This text is a comprehensive review of the various types of sources one might need to complete a research project or paper. The book begins with a clear explanation of how to formulate a research question, while the majority of the chapters focus on finding and evaluating sources. The topics in this text are well-chosen and reflect several aspects of academic writing in which beginning researchers might struggle, such as how to do a precision search, understanding biased versus unbiased sources, and how to decide between quoting or paraphrasing. This book is written at a level that undergraduates should easily be able to comprehend, while the content of the chapters gets increasingly detailed and complex throughout the book. There is no index or glossary at the back of the book, but there is a very complete table of contents at the beginning of the text. Readers might find it useful if the chapter titles in the table of contents were in bold, as the detailed breakdown of sections—while helpful—can be overwhelming when one is looking for the main categories of the book.

The text provides helpful and unbiased examples for how to do research in many different areas. The practice activities relate quite well to the content of the chapters, although some links do not work. One of the strengths of the text is its applicability in a general sense to many different types of research.

In most chapters the information is kept very general, allowing the text to enjoy relative longevity, as the process of how to conduct academic research, cite quotes, etc., likely will not change drastically in the near future. For example, in the section on databases, different types of databases are explained, but the author does not reference many specific databases to which students may or may not have access. With an understanding of the concept, students then are equipped to find the databases that pertain to their field and that are offered by their institutions. There are several references to Ohio State throughout the text that will not be helpful to all readers, but they do not impede the reader’s comprehension of the text.

It is a very readable text, written at a level that makes it easily accessible to undergraduate students. The author has avoided jargon that would be confusing to the readers.

Even though the book gives examples of various types of research and sources, it maintains a high level of consistency throughout.

The chapters are clearly divided in a way that allows the reader the option to skip between chapters or to read the chapters in succession. This text could be put to a variety of uses within the classroom. As an instructor, one could use it as a primary text for a Research Methods or Composition class. One could also suggest that students read only certain sections in a class that was not primarily focused on the writing of research papers but that had a research component. This text is a valuable how-to manual that students can reference throughout their academic journey.

The text has a logical organization and flow. The book transitions from more basic information at the beginning to more specialized knowledge in later chapters, allowing students to gradually become more immersed in the topic. The structure permits students to read the text from cover to cover, or to read only the information and chapters about which they are curious. The activities serve as good checkpoints to assess students’ knowledge and break up longer readings.

The interface of the text is easy to manage and does not distract from the content. The placement and accessibility of the activities provide quick and easy checks to assess whether students have understood the concepts of the chapters. The images support the text and are linked closely to the message.

There are few grammatical errors in this text.

The text is not culturally insensitive or offensive. Like many textbooks, it could be more intentional in its inclusion of a variety of races, ethnicities, and backgrounds, perhaps in the examples or practice activities.

Reviewed by Dr. William Vann, Information Studies Faculty, Minneapolis Community and Technical College on 12/5/16

While there is neither a back-of-the-book index nor a compiled glossary in this outstanding textbook (key terms are defined, however, throughout the chapters), one cannot deny its comprehensiveness. In fact, this text covers so much ground it is unlikely to be used in its entirety for any single college course. Information literacy and research skills courses will find the first eight chapters to be a robust introduction to their subject matter, replete with interactive activities and auto-graded assessments. Composition courses engaged in research-based writing will likely work through the first eight chapters selectively, but then dwell on chapters nine and ten on argument formation and writing. Such courses may also benefit from the excellent chapter thirteen on Joseph Bizup's BEAM method of deploying research sources in scholarly communication. Chapters eleven and twelve on copyright and fair use, respectively, are likely to be used only by advanced undergraduates, faculty, and professional librarians, but they do serve as a handy reference nonetheless.

All of the chapters of this textbook contain authoritative and accurate information, in line with national information literacy standards and sound pedagogical methods for composition and critical thinking. The only section of the text I took issue with was the "Fact or Opinion" part of the second chapter, where the authors try to distinguish between fact, opinion, subjective information, and objective information. The authors' attempt results in claims like "the death penalty is wrong" being rendered as opinions, while claims like "women should stock up on calcium to ensure strong bones" are judged to be subjective information. Facts and objective information are superior, on this way of thinking, because they are the result of research studies, particularly empirical, quantitative ones.

I suspect that this way of drawing the distinction would do little to challenge the naive relativism most undergraduates bring to the classroom. (How many of us, when analyzing a text with beginning undergraduates, have had to entertain the question "Isn't that just the author's opinion though?") A better approach would be to talk about claims that are empirically justified (facts), claims that are justified, but not empirically (value judgments - "x is wrong", prescriptive claims - "women should do x"), and claims that are not adequately justified by any means (opinions). In this way, answering a research question like "Is the death penalty unjust?" is not merely an exercise in subjective opinion-making, but rather an exploration of reasoned argumentation, only some of which may be empirical or based on research studies.

The text is current and will likely be so for some time. Examples, activities, and tips are marked off from the main chapter prose, so will be easy to refresh when necessary.

There is no lack of technical terms in the world of information studies, but this textbook does a fine job of providing definitions where appropriate in each chapter. Concepts and methods are explained in context, and illustrative, easy-to-follow examples adorn each chapter.

The only area of the text that falls a little short on clarity is the interactive activities. These are usually multiple choice or matching questions, but some of the word choice in questions left this reader confused, and in some cases the instructions could have been more explicit.

Being authored by committee, we might expect this textbook to suffer in the consistency category. Yet it does not, thanks again to the fine editing job by Cheryl Lowry. Perhaps the book's provenance as a series of online tutorials put together by librarians and faculty at OSU is partly responsible for this.

As the authors suggest on the first page, the research process isn't always linear. So reading a text modeled on the research process oughtn't to be a straightforward chapter-by-chapter march either. Consequently, faculty and students can comfortably read this text selectively and skip chapters as needed. For the most holistic understanding of the research process, however, it would be sensible to work through at least chapters one through eight in their entirety.

I appreciate how the text's organization mirrors the research process itself. The first chapter takes on research questions, exactly where student researchers need to begin their projects. Subsequent chapters explore types of information sources, how to find and evaluate them, and finally how to deploy them in a well-argued scholarly product. The writing in each chapter is clear and crisp, with important concepts amplified by colorful visualizations.

As mentioned above, the chapters on copyright and fair use which occur near the end of the book feel like a logical interruption to the book's flow, and they might well fit more comfortably as appendices for occasional reference by advanced undergraduates, faculty, and librarians.

The "look and feel" of this textbook is clean and very intuitive to navigate through. The design strikes a pleasing balance between prose, graphics, and special formatting features like the explanatory, grey-background "TIPS" found in each chapter. Subheadings, bulleted and ordered lists, and judicious font choices make the text easy to read in all its online file formats.

One weakness of the interface is that several of the linked activities point to OSU Libraries' resources, thus requiring OSU authentication to be accessed. While it is understandable that the authors wanted to include their libraries' proprietary information sources in the activities - these are the sources their students and faculty will be using in actual practice, after all - this obviously makes this text less of an "open" textbook. Those outside of the OSU community who would like to adopt this textbook will therefore have to come up with their own replacement activities in such cases, or do without.

A few of the links in the text did lead me to a curious OSU server error message: "Error: Unknown export format", but I expect these links will be repaired as they are reported to the authors.

This textbook has clearly been edited with careful eyes by Cheryl Lowry, as grammatical errors are few to none. The grammatical hygiene of the text can probably also be attributed to its collective authorship - over a dozen librarians and faculty of the Ohio State University Libraries developed the content, which was born out of a series of online tutorials.

This textbook is culturally relevant in its use of examples and depictions of college students.

This text is a substantial contribution to the open textbook movement, and its quality easily meets or exceeds anything comparable in the commercial publishing arena. Highly recommended.

Reviewed by Kelly McKenna, Assistant Professor, Colorado State University on 12/5/16

The book provides a thorough introduction and how to regarding sources in academic writing. With the exception of the first chapter on writing research questions, the rest of the book is focused on sources, which is relevant for any type of academic writing not just research papers. The information is relevant across disciplines and readable to a wide audience. It is clearly written for and geared towards undergraduate students, particularly from Ohio State University. The index is detailed making it easy to locate specific information and includes hyperlinks for clear navigation. A slightly altered index format would make the chapter topics more readily available and accessed. All subjects and chapters are aligned rather than clearly indicating each of the chapters found within the text.

Content throughout the book is accurate and clearly written. There does not appear to bias in reading the material. The book includes numerous resources linked throughout the text, however some are no longer active resulting in error messages.

Due to the significant number of links throughout the book, it is likely updates will be necessary on a consistent basis. These links are extremely beneficial, so ensuring they are accurate and up to date is essential to the content of this book. Much of the book reads as a "how to" regarding sources, so although practices for scholarly writing will likely not become obsolete the sources and technology used to locate the sources will evolve.

The informal tone of the text is engaging and applicable for the intended audience. The writers are aware of their audience, avoiding technical jargon. Also, throughout the book they provide numerous examples, resources, activities, and tips to provide insight and relevancy to students.

The structure of the book is clear and well organized with each chapter providing scaffolding for the next. Although the text is internally consistent regarding terminology there are formatting differences between and within some chapters. Blue boxes throughout the text contain tips, examples, answers, etc. Organization, readability, and consistency could be improved if these were constant throughout the text similar to the presentation of activities in the text.

Sections of the book could be easily assigned and read in isolation. Subsections of material are clearly marked and chapters are presented in organized fashion with clear delineation between segments. The inclusion of numerous activities, examples, resources, and tips improve modularity.

The book is created as a tool for students completing academic writing and follows this course. Topics contained in the book are presented in a clear and logical structure. As mentioned above, with exception of the first chapter, the material is relevant to all undergraduate academic writing, not just research.

The layout and display work well as a PDF or electronic book. Numerous visuals are included throughout and are free of distortion or other distracting or confusing issues. As mentioned above, the index could be improved by clearly articulating the subheadings as within a chapter.

The book contains minimal to no grammatical errors.

The book is not culturally insensitive or offensive in any way.

Some sections of the book are specific to Ohio State University potentially limiting its relevancy and audience in specific chapters or sections.

1. Research Questions
2. Types of Sources
3. Sources and Information Needs
4. Precision Searching
5. Search Tools
6. Evaluating Sources
7. Ethical Use of Sources
8. How to Cite Sources
9. Making an Argument
10. Writing Tips
11. Copyright Basics
12. Fair Use
13. Roles of Research Sources

Ancillary Material

About the book.

Choosing & Using Sources presents a process for academic research and writing, from formulating your research question to selecting good information and using it effectively in your research assignments. Additional chapters cover understanding types of sources, searching for information, and avoiding plagiarism. Each chapter includes self-quizzes and activities to reinforce core concepts and help you apply them. There are also appendices for quick reference on search tools, copyright basics, and fair use.

What experts are saying about Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research :

“…a really fantastic contribution that offers a much needed broadened perspective on the process of research, and is packed to the brim with all kinds of resources and advice on how to effectively use them. The chapter on plagiarism is really excellent, and the chapter on searching for sources is utterly brilliant.”

– Chris Manion, PhD Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum at Ohio State University

“… an excellent resource for students, with engaging content, graphics, and examples—very compelling. The coverage of copyright is outstanding.”

– J. Craig Gibson Co-chair of ACRL's Task Force on Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education

About the Contributors

Cheryl Lowry , training and education specialist, Ohio State University Libraries.

Contribute to this Page

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Data as Sources

Using data as sources can help with all of your research project’s information needs:

Learn more background information.
Answer your research question. The evidence that data provides can help you decide on the best answer for your question.
Convince your audience that your answer is correct. Data often give you evidence that your answer to your research question is correct or at least a reasonable answer.
Describe the situation surrounding your research question.
Report what others have said about your research question.

Video: Reinterpreting Little Red Riding Hood

What is data? The word means many things to many people. (Consider “data” as it relates to your phone contract, for instance!) For our purposes, a definition we like (Erway, 2013) is “units of information observed, collected, or created in the course of research.”

Data observed, collected, or created for research purposes can be numbers, text, images, audio clips, and video clips. But in this section on using data as sources, we’re going to concentrate on numerical data.

More women than men voted in the last presidential election in a majority of states.
A certain drug shows promising results in the treatment of pancreatic cancer.
Listening to certain genres of music lowers blood pressure.

So using numeric data in those portions of your final product that require evidence can strengthen your argument for your answer to your research question. At other times, even if data is not necessary, numeric data can be particularly persuasive and sharpen the points you want to make in other portions of your final product devoted to, say, describing the situation surrounding your research question. See Making an Argument .

For example, for a project with the research question “How do some birds in Australia use “smart” hunting techniques to flush out prey, including starting fires?,” you might find a journal article with data about how many people have observed these techniques and estimates of how frequently the techniques are used and by how many bird species.

Obtaining Data

There are two ways of obtaining data:

Obtain data that already has been collected and analyzed. That’s what this section will cover.
Collect data yourself. This can include activities such as making observations, conducting surveys or interviews, recordings, or data by computers/machines.

Finding Data in Articles, Books, Web Pages, and More

Numeric data can be found all over the place. It can be found as part of other sources- such as books; articles in journals, newspapers, and magazines; and web pages. In these cases, the data do not stand alone as a distinct element, but instead are part of the larger work.

When searching for data in books and articles and on web pages, terms such as statistics or data may or may not be useful search terms. That’s because many writers don’t use those terms in their scholarly writing. They tend to use the words findings or results when talking about the data that could be useful to you. Also, statistics is a separate discipline, and using that term will turn up lots of journals in that area, which won’t be helpful to you. So use the search terms data and statistics with caution, especially when searching library databases. See Precision Searching for more information on searching.

Even without using those search terms, many scholarly sources you find are likely to contain data. Once you find potential sources, skim them for tables, graphs, or charts. These items are displays or illustrations of data gathered by researchers. You can use this data in your work when and only when you provide a complete citation.

If the data you find in a book, article, or web page is particularly helpful and you want more, you could contact the author to request additional numeric research data. Researchers will often discuss their data and its analysis – and sometimes provide some of it (or occasionally, all). Some may link to a larger numeric research data set. However, if a researcher shares his or her data with you, it may be in a raw form. This means that you might have to do additional analysis to make it useful in answering your question.

Depending on your research question, you may need to gather data from multiple sources to get everything you need to answer your research question and make your argument. See Making an Argument .

For instance, in our example related to food banks above, we suggested where you could find statistics about the number of people who get food from American food banks. But with that research question (“Why is there a gap in the number of people who qualify for food from food banks and the number of people who use food banks?”), you would also need to find out from another source how many people qualify for food banks based on their income and compare that number with how many people use food banks.

Finding Data, Data Depositories, and Directories

Sometimes the numeric data you need may not be in the articles, books, and websites that you’ve found. But that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been collected and packaged in a usable format. Governments (federal and local) and research institutions along with the United Nations and nearly every country in the world, often publish data they have collected in discipline-specific data depositories that make data available online. Here are some examples:

United States Census Bureau
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics
National Center for Education Statistics
GeoData.gov

Other data are available through vendors who publish the data collected by researchers. Here are some examples:

International Monetary Fund Statistical Databases
World Health Organization Data
Envirofacts

Don’t know if a depository could contain data in your discipline? Check out a data directory such as the Registry of Research Data Repositories .

Data Visualization

Modern software can help you display your data in ways that are striking and often even beautiful. But the best criterion for judging whatever display you use is whether it helps you and your audience understand your data better than only text, maybe even noticing points that you would have otherwise missed.

Specific kinds of charts and graphs accomplish different things, which is important to keep in mind as you evaluate data and data sources. For instance:

Line charts are usually used to show trends, comparing data over time.
Scatter plots show the distribution of data points.
Bar graphs usually compare categories of data.
Pie charts show proportions of a whole.

It’s important to decide what you want a display to do before making your final choice. Studying your data first so you know what you have will help you make that decision. Also, it may be conventional in your discipline to display your data in certain ways. Examining the sources you were assigned to read in your course or asking your professor will help you learn what’s considered conventional.

Your professors will be examining your visual display to make sure you did not misrepresent the data. For example, the proportions of slices in a pie chart all have to add up to 100%. If yours don’t, you’ve done something wrong.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the choices to be made between potential displays and what each can do: Here are two sites to help you sort them out once you know your data:

Data Viz Project
The Data Visualisation Catalogue

If you aren’t ready yet to use some of the specialized tools for display, make it a point to learn how to use the data display capabilities in Microsoft Word and/or Excel. You can find helpful tutorials on the Web.

Proper Use of Data

Once you have your data, you can examine them and interpret them. Sometimes, you can do so easily. But not always.

…you had a lot of information? Sometimes data can be very complicated and may include thousands (or millions…or billions…or more!) of data points. You may find yourself using special software, such as Excel, SAS, and SPSS, in such situations.

Many people may tend to look for data to prove their hypothesis or idea, as opposed to answering their research questions. However, you may find that the opposite happens: the data may actually disprove your hypothesis. You should never try to manipulate data so that it gives credence to your desired outcome. While it may not be the answer you wanted to find, it is the answer that exists. You may, of course, look for other sources of data – perhaps there are multiple sources of data for the same topic with differing results. Inconclusive or conflicting findings do happen and can be the answer (even if it’s not the one you wanted!).

Conflicting results on the same topic are common. This is the reality of research because, after all, the questions researchers are studying are complicated. When you have conflicting results you can’t just ignore the differences—you’ll have to do your best to explain why the differences occurred.

Critical Thinking in Academic Research Copyright © 2022 by Cindy Gruwell and Robin Ewing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Loading metrics

Open Access

Eleven quick tips for finding research data

Contributed equally to this work with: Kathleen Gregory, Siri Jodha Khalsa, William K. Michener, Fotis E. Psomopoulos, Anita de Waard, Mingfang Wu

Affiliation Data Archiving and Networked Services, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Hague, Netherlands

Affiliation National Snow and Ice Data Centre, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America

Affiliation College of University Libraries & Learning Sciences, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States of America

Affiliation Institute of Applied Biosciences, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Thessaloniki, Greece

Affiliation Research Data Management Solutions, Elsevier, Jericho, Vermont, United States of America

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Australia National Data Service, Melbourne, Australia

Kathleen Gregory,
Siri Jodha Khalsa,
William K. Michener,
Fotis E. Psomopoulos,
Anita de Waard,
Mingfang Wu

Published: April 12, 2018

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006038
Reader Comments

Citation: Gregory K, Khalsa SJ, Michener WK, Psomopoulos FE, de Waard A, Wu M (2018) Eleven quick tips for finding research data. PLoS Comput Biol 14(4): e1006038. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006038

Editor: Francis Ouellette, Genome Quebec, CANADA

Copyright: © 2018 Gregory et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: William K. Michener was supported by NSF (#IIA-1301346 and #ACI-1430508). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

This is a PLOS Computational Biology Education paper.

Introduction

Over the past decades, science has experienced rapid growth in the volume of data available for research—from a relative paucity of data in many areas to what has been recently described as a data deluge [‎ 1 ]. Data volumes have increased exponentially across all fields of science and human endeavour, including data from sky, earth, and ocean observatories; social media such as Facebook and Twitter; wearable health-monitoring devices; gene sequences and protein structures; and climate simulations [‎ 2 ]. This brings opportunities to enable more research, especially cross-disciplinary research that could not be done before. However, it also introduces challenges in managing, describing, and making data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable by researchers [‎ 3 ].

When this vast amount and variety of data is made available, finding relevant data to meet a research need is increasingly a challenge. In the past, when data were relatively sparse, researchers discovered existing data by searching literature, attending conferences, and asking colleagues. In today’s data-rich environment, with accompanying advances in computational and networking technologies, researchers increasingly conduct web searches to find research data. The success of such searches varies greatly and depends to a large degree on the expertise of the person looking for data, the tools used, and, partially, on luck. This article offers the following 11 quick tips that researchers can follow to more effectively and precisely discover data that meet their specific needs.

Tip 1: Think about the data you need and why you need them.
Tip 2: Select the most appropriate resource.
Tip 3: Construct your query strategically.
Tip 4: Make the repository work for you.
Tip 5: Refine your search.
Tip 6: Assess data relevance and fitness -for -use.
Tip 7: Save your search and data- source details.
Tip 8: Look for data services, not just data.
Tip 9: Monitor the latest data.
Tip 10: Treat sensitive data responsibly.
Tip 11: Give back (cite and share data).

Tip 1: Think about the data you need and why you need them

Before embarking on a search for data, consider how you will use the desired data in the context of your overall research question. Are you seeking data for comparison or validation, as the basis for a new study, or for another reason? List the characteristics that the data must have in order to fulfil your identified purpose(s), including requirements such as data format, spatial or temporal coverage, availability, and author or research group. In many cases, your initial data requirements and the identified constraints will change as you progress with the search. Pausing to first analyse what you need and why you need it can lead to a more analytic search, save searching time and facilitating the actions described in Tips 2–6.

Tip 2: Select the most appropriate resource

Directories of research-data repositories, such as re3data.org ( http://www.re3data.org ) and FAIRsharing ( https://fairsharing.org ), web search engines, and colleagues can be consulted to discover domain-specific portals in your discipline. Subject domain is but one criterion to consider when selecting an appropriate data repository. Various certification processes have also been implemented to help develop trustworthiness in repositories and to make their data-governing policies more transparent. For example, repositories earning the CoreTrustSeal ( https://www.coretrustseal.org/about ) Trustworthy Data Repository certification must meet 16 requirements measuring the accessibility, usability, reliability, and long-term stability of their data. Knowing what standards and criteria a repository applies to data and metadata provides more confidence in understanding and reusing the data from that repository.

Domain-specific portals provide ways to quickly narrow your search, offering interfaces and filters tailored to match the data and needs of specific disciplinary domains. Map interfaces for data collected from specific locations (see the National Water Information System, https://maps.waterdata.usgs.gov/mapper/index.html ) and specific search fields and tools (see the National Centre for Biotechnology Information’s complement of databases, ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/guide/all/ ) facilitate discovering disciplinary data. Other domain-focused repositories, such as the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC, http://nsidc.org/data/search/ ), collect and apply knowledge about user requirements and incorporate domain semantics into their search engines to help data seekers quickly find appropriate data. Data aggregators, including DataONE ( https://www.dataone.org ) for environmental and earth observation data, VertNet ( http://vertnet.org ) and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, https://www.gbif.org ) for museum specimen and biodiversity data, or DataMed ( https://datamed.org ) for biomedical datasets, enable searching multiple data repositories or collections through a single search interface. Some portals may not provide data-search functionality but instead provide a catalogue of data resources. A notable example is the AgBioData ( https://www.agbiodata.org/databases ) portal, which lists links to 12 agricultural biological databases dedicated to specific species (e.g., cotton, grain, or hardwood), where you can directly search for data.

The accessibility of data resources is another important consideration. University librarians can provide advice about particular subscription-based resources available at your institution. Research papers in your field can also point to available data repositories. In domains such as astronomy and genomics, for example, citations of datasets within journal articles are commonplace. These references usually include dataset access information that can be used to locate datasets of interest or to point toward data repositories favoured within a discipline.

Tip 3: Construct your query strategically

Describing your desired data effectively is key to communicating with the search system. Your description will determine if relevant data are retrieved and may inform the order of the hits in the results list. Help pages provide tips on how to construct basic and advanced searches within particular repositories (see for example Research Data Australia https://researchdata.ands.org.au —click on Advanced Search → Help). Note that not all repositories operate in the same manner. Some portals, such as DataONE ( https://www.dataone.org ), use semantic technologies to automatically expand the keywords entered in the search box to include synonyms. If a portal does not use automatic expansion, you may need to manually add various synonyms to your search query (e.g., in addition to ‘demography’ as a search term, one might also add ‘population density’, ‘population growth’, ‘census’, or ‘anthropology’).

sea level (site:.edu)

Tip 4: Make the repository work for you

Repository developers invest significant time and energy organizing data in ways to make them more discoverable; use their work to your advantage. Familiarize yourself with the controlled vocabularies, subject categories, and search fields used in particular repositories. Searching for and successfully locating data is dependent on the information about the data, termed metadata, that are contained in these fields; this is particularly true for numeric or nontextual data. Browsing subject categories can also help to gauge the appropriateness of a resource, home in on an area of interest, or find related data that have been classified in the same category.

Researchers can also register or create profiles with many data repositories. By registering, you may be able to indicate your general research data interests which can be utilized in subsequent searches or receive alerts about datasets that you have previously downloaded (see also Tip 7).

Tip 5: Refine your search

In many cases, your initial search may not retrieve relevant data or all of the data that you need. Based on the retrieved results, you may need to broaden or narrow your approach. Apart from rephrasing your search query and using search operators, as discussed in Tip 3, facets or filters specific to individual repositories can be used to narrow the scope of your results. Refinements such as data format, types of analysis, and data availability allow users to quickly find usable data.

Examining results that look interesting (for example, by clicking on links for ‘more information’) can be a signal of the type of information that you find relevant. These results can then be linked to related ones (e.g., from the data provider, from different time series), and in subsequent searches, other results algorithmically determined to be related will be brought to the top of the results list.

Tip 6: Assess data relevance and fitness for use

Conduct a preliminary assessment of the retrieved data prior to investing time in subsequent data download, integration, and analytic and visualization efforts. A quick perusal of the metadata (text and/or images) can often enable you to verify that the data satisfy the initial requirements and constraints set forth in Tip 1 (e.g., spatial, temporal, and thematic coverage and data-sharing restrictions). Ideally, the metadata will also contain documentation sufficient to comprehensively assess the relevance and fitness for use of the data, including information about how the data were collected and quality assured, how the data have been previously used, etc. Some data repositories such as the National Science Foundation’s Arctic Data Centre ( https://arcticdata.io ) enable the data seeker to generate and download a metadata quality report that assesses how well the metadata adhere to community best practices for discovery and reusability. Clearly, if none of your criteria for data are met, you may not wish to download and use the associated data.

Attention should also be paid to quality parameters or flags within the data files. Make use of a visualization tool or statistics analysis tool, if provided, to examine quality or fitness of data for intended use before downloading data, especially if the data volume is large and the dataset includes many files.

Tip 7: Save your search and data-source details

Record the data source and data version if you access or download a data product. This may be accomplished by noting the persistent identifier, such as a digital object identifier (DOI) or another Global Unique Identifier (GUID) assigned to the data. Recording the URL from which you obtained the data can be a quick way of returning to it but should not be trusted in the long term for providing access to the data, as URLs can change. It is also a good practice to save a copy of any original data products that you downloaded [‎ 5 ]. You may, for example, need to go back to original data sources and check if there have been any changes or corrections to data. Registering with the data portal (as described in Tip 3) or registering as a user of a specific data product allows the repository to contact you when necessary. Such information may be needed when you publish a paper that builds on the data you accessed. If there are any errors found in the original data, registering with the data service allows them to contact you to see if there is an impact on any research conclusions that you have drawn from this data.

If you have registered with a portal, it may also be possible to save your searches, allowing you to resume your data search at a later time with all previously defined search criteria. Some portals use RESTful search interfaces, which means you can bookmark a results set or dataset and return to it later simply by going to the bookmark.

Tip 8: Look for data services, not just data

The data you seek may be available only via an application programming interface (API) or as linked data [‎ 6 ]. That is, instead of a file residing on a server, the data that best suits your purposes is provided as a service through an API. Examples of such services include the climate change projection data available through the NSW Climate Data Portal ( http://climatechange.environment.nsw.gov.au/Climate-projections-for-NSW/Download-datasets ), in which data are dynamically generated from a simulation model; Google Earth Engine ( https://earthengine.google.com ); or Amazon Web Services (AWS) public datasets ( https://aws.amazon.com/public-datasets/ ). Data made available from these services may not be searchable from general web search engines, but data services may be registered to data catalogues or federations such as Research Data Australia, DataONE, and other resources listed in re3data.org and FAIRsharing. Many repositories that host extremely large volumes of data such as sequencing, environmental observatory, and remotely sensed data provide access to tools, workflows, and computing resources that allow one to access, visualize, process, and download manageable subsets of the data. Often, the processing workflows that one might use to process and download a dataset can also be downloaded, saved, and used again in subsequent searches.

Tip 9: Monitor the latest data

One of the most effective ways to identify new data submissions is to monitor the latest literature, as many journals such as Nature , PLOS , Science , and others require that the data underlying a publication also be published in a public (e.g., Dataverse https://dataverse.org , Dryad http://datadryad.org , or Zenodo https://zenodo.org ) or discipline-based repository (e.g., EASY from Data Archiving and Networked Services [DANS] https://easy.dans.knaw.nl/ , GenBank https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/ , or PubChem https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ).

In addition, many domain-based repositories, such as environmental observatories and sequencing databases, are constantly accepting similar types of data submissions. Publishers and some digital repositories also offer alerting services when new publications or data products are submitted. Depending on the resource, it may be possible to set up a recurring search API or a Rich Site Summary (RSS) feed to automatically monitor specific resources. For example, the NSIDC offers a subscription service where new data meeting a list of user-generated specifications are automatically pushed to a location specified by the user.

Tip 10: Treat sensitive data responsibly

In most cases, after you have located relevant data, you can download them straight away. However, there are cases, such as for medical and health data, endangered and threatened species, and sacred objects and archaeological finds, where you can only see a data description (the metadata) and are not able to download the data directly due to access restrictions imposed to protect the privacy of individuals represented in the data or to safeguard locations and species from harm or unwanted attention. Guidance with respect to sensitive data is available through the 2003 Fort Lauderdale Agreement ( https://www.genome.gov/pages/research/wellcomereport0303.pdf ), the 2009 Toronto Agreement ( https://www.nature.com/articles/461168a ) [ 7 ], the Australian National Data Service ( http://www.ands.org.au/working-with-data/sensitive-data ), and individual institutional and society research ethics committees.

Sensitive data are often discoverable and accessible if identity and location information are anonymized. In other cases, an established data-access agreement specifies the technical requirements as well as the ethical and scientific obligations that accessing and using the data entail. Technical requirements may include aspects such as auditing data access at the local system, defining read-only access rights, and/or ensuring constraints for nonprivileged network access. You can still contact the data owner to explain your intended use and to discuss the conditions and legal restrictions associated with using sensitive data. Such contact may even lead to collaborative research between you and the data owner. Should you be granted access to the data, it is important to use the data ethically and responsibly [ 8 ] to ensure that no harm is done to individuals, species, and culture heritages.

Tip 11: Give back (cite and share data)

There are three ways to give back to the community once you have sought, discovered, and used an existing data product. First, it is essential that you give proper attribution to the data creators (in some cases, the data owners) if you use others’ data for research, education, decision making, or other purposes [ 9 ]. Proper attribution benefits both data creators/providers and data seekers/users. Data creators/providers receive credit for their work, and their practice of sharing data is thus further encouraged. Data seekers/users make their own work more transparent and, potentially, reproducible by uniquely identifying and citing data used in their research.

Many data creators and institutions adopt standard licenses from organizations, such as Creative Commons, that govern how their data products may be shared and used. Creative Commons recommends that a proper attribution should include title, author, source, and license [ 10 ].

Second, provide feedback to the data creators or the data repository about any issues associated with data accessibility, data quality, or metadata completeness and interpretability. Data creators and repositories benefit from knowing that their data products are understandable and usable by others, as well as knowing how the data were used. Future users of the data will also benefit from your feedback.

Third, virtually all data seekers and data users also generate data. The ultimate ‘give-back’ is to also share your data with the broader community.

This paper highlights 11 quick tips that, if followed, should make it easier for a data seeker to discover data that meet a particular need. Regardless of whether you are acting as a data seeker or a data creator, remember that ‘data discovery and reuse are most easily accomplished when: (1) data are logically and clearly organized; (2) data quality is assured; (3) data are preserved and discoverable via an open data repository; (4) data are accompanied by comprehensive metadata; (5) algorithms and code used to create data products are readily available; (6) data products can be uniquely identified and associated with specific data originator(s); and (7) the data originator(s) or data repository have provided recommendations for citation of the data product(s)’ [ 11 ].

Acknowledgments

This work was developed as part of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) ‘WG/IG’ entitled ‘Data Discovery Paradigms’, and we acknowledge the support provided by the RDA community and structures. We would like to thank members of the group for their support, especially Andrea Perego, Mustapha Mokrane, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Peter McQuilton, and Michel Dumontier who read this paper and provided constructive suggestions.

1. Gray J. Jim Gray on eScience: A transformed scientific method. In: Hey T, Tansley S, Tolle K, editors. The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery. Richmond, WA: Microsoft Research; 2009. p.xvii–xxxi. Available from: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/fourth-paradigm-data-intensive-scientific-discovery/ .
2. Fox G, Hey T, Trefethen A. Where does all the data come from? In: Kleese van Dam K, editor. Data-Intensive Science. Chapman and Hall/CRC; Boca Raton: Taylor and Francis, May 2013. p. 15–51.
View Article
PubMed/NCBI
Google Scholar
4. Warner, R. Google Advanced Search: A Comprehensive List of Google Search Operators [Internet]. 2015. Available from: https://bynd.com/news-ideas/google-advanced-search-comprehensive-list-google-search-operators/ . [cited 2017 Oct 26]
6. Heath T, Bizer C. Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a global data space. In: Hendler J, van Harmelen F, editors. Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web: Theory and Technology. Morgan & Claypool; 2011. p. 1–136.
8. Clark K, et al. Guidelines for the Ethical Use of Digital Data in Human Research. www.carltonconnect.com.au: The University of Melbourne; 2015. Available from: https://www.carltonconnect.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Ethical-Use-of-Digital-Data.pdf . [cited 2018 Feb. 1].
9. Martone M, editor. Data Citation Synthesis Group: Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles. FORCE11. San Diego, CA; 2014. [cited 2018 Feb 1]. Available from: https://www.force11.org/group/joint-declaration-data-citation-principles-final .
10. Creative Commons. Best practices for attribution [Internet]. 2014 [cited 2017 Sep 10]. Available from: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution .
11. Michener W. K. Data discovery. In: Recknagel F, Michener WK, editors. Ecological informatics: Data management and knowledge discovery. Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland; 2017.

15 Steps to Good Research

Define and articulate a research question (formulate a research hypothesis). How to Write a Thesis Statement (Indiana University)
Identify possible sources of information in many types and formats. Georgetown University Library's Research & Course Guides
Judge the scope of the project.
Reevaluate the research question based on the nature and extent of information available and the parameters of the research project.
Select the most appropriate investigative methods (surveys, interviews, experiments) and research tools (periodical indexes, databases, websites).
Plan the research project. Writing Anxiety (UNC-Chapel Hill) Strategies for Academic Writing (SUNY Empire State College)
Retrieve information using a variety of methods (draw on a repertoire of skills).
Refine the search strategy as necessary.
Write and organize useful notes and keep track of sources. Taking Notes from Research Reading (University of Toronto) Use a citation manager: Zotero or Refworks
Evaluate sources using appropriate criteria. Evaluating Internet Sources
Synthesize, analyze and integrate information sources and prior knowledge. Georgetown University Writing Center
Revise hypothesis as necessary.
Use information effectively for a specific purpose.
Understand such issues as plagiarism, ownership of information (implications of copyright to some extent), and costs of information. Georgetown University Honor Council Copyright Basics (Purdue University) How to Recognize Plagiarism: Tutorials and Tests from Indiana University
Cite properly and give credit for sources of ideas. MLA Bibliographic Form (7th edition, 2009) MLA Bibliographic Form (8th edition, 2016) Turabian Bibliographic Form: Footnote/Endnote Turabian Bibliographic Form: Parenthetical Reference Use a citation manager: Zotero or Refworks

Adapted from the Association of Colleges and Research Libraries "Objectives for Information Literacy Instruction" , which are more complete and include outcomes. See also the broader "Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education."

Skip to main content
Skip to primary sidebar
Skip to footer
QuestionPro

Solutions Industries Gaming Automotive Sports and events Education Government Travel & Hospitality Financial Services Healthcare Cannabis Technology Use Case AskWhy Communities Audience Contactless surveys Mobile LivePolls Member Experience GDPR Positive People Science 360 Feedback Surveys
Resources Blog eBooks Survey Templates Case Studies Training Help center

Home Market Research Research Tools and Apps

Sources of Data: What They Are, Types & Examples

The sources of data are reliable and widely used for research. This article explains the types of data sources with examples.

Data is the backbone of any data analysis work done in the research process. Data is a collection of unorganized facts and numbers from different sources. The sources of data can be different depending on what the research needs. Data analysis and interpretation are based solely on gathering different kinds of data from their sources. Researchers or analysts do the work of data collection to collect information.

LEARN ABOUT: Best Data Collection Tools

From this blog, we will learn about the definition of data sources with types and examples. So, stay with us to know more about it.

What are the sources of data?

In short, the sources of data are physical or digital places where information is stored in a data table, data object, or some other storage format.

Data can be gathered from two places: internal and external sources. The information collected from internal sources is called “primary data,” while the information gathered from outside references is called “secondary data.”

For data analysis , it all must be collected through primary or secondary research. A data source is a pool of statistical facts and non-statistical facts that a researcher or analyst can use to do more work on their research. Data analytics and data analysis are closely related processes that involve extracting insights from data to make informed decisions.

LEARN ABOUT: Level of Analysis

There are mostly two kinds of origins of information:The Sources of Data: Definition, types, and examples

Statistical
Census

Researchers use both data sources a lot in their work. The data is collected from these using either primary or secondary research methods.

Examples of sources of data

Here is an example of the data sources in action. Imagine a fashion brand that sells products online. The website uses an inventory database to determine whether an item is available. In this case, the inventory tables are a data source that the web application uses to serve the website to customers.

Types of data sources

Statistical data sources.

Statistical data sources are surveys and other statistical reports used for official purposes. Here, people are asked several questions, which can be either qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative data sources don’t use numbers, while quantitative data do.

The data sampling method uses both kinds of statistical data. Usually, a sample survey is used to do a statistical survey. In this method, sample data is collected and then analyzed using statistical analysis plan and techniques. The surveys can also be done using the questionnaire method.

Census data sources

According to this method, the data are taken from the census report that was published earlier. It’s the opposite of statistical surveys. The Census method closely examines all parts of the population during the research process. Here, the data is collected over a certain amount of time, called the reference time. The researchers do their research at a particular time and then analyze it to conclude.

Census is done in the country for official purposes. The respondents are asked questions, which they answer. This interaction can take place in person or over the phone. However, the census is a source of data that takes a lot of time and effort because it involves the whole population.

Learn More: Data Collection Methods: Types & Examples

Additional sources of data

In addition to the above data sources, other origins are also considered when collecting data. These are what they are:

Internal sources of data

Internal data references are things like reports and records that are published within the organization.

Internal data references are used to do primary research on a given topic. As a researcher, you can go to internal sources to get information. All the work of the study is easy for it.

Some of the different internal data are accounting resources, sales force reports, internal experts, and miscellaneous reports. Practical business intelligence relies on the synergy between analytics and reporting , where analytics uncovers valuable insights, and reporting communicates these findings to stakeholders.

External sources of data

When data collection happens outside of the organization, it is called an external data source. In every way, they are outside of the company. As a researcher, you can work for external data collection.

The data from external origins is harder to gather because it is much more varied, and there can be many of them. There are different groups into which external data can be put. They are given below:

Government publications

Researchers can get a massive amount of information from government sources. Also, you can get much of this information for free on the Internet.

Non-government publications

Researchers can also find industry-related information in non-government publications. The only research problem with non-government publications is that their data may sometimes be biased.

Syndicate services

Some companies offer Syndicate services. As part of this, they collect and organize the same marketing information for all their clients. Surveys, mail diary panels, electronic services, wholesalers, industrial firms, retailers, etc., are ways they get information from households.

Experimental sources of data

In this data source, the information comes from related experiments and related tools. The researcher experiments to get all of the information they need.

Researchers can find out about the different ways that experiments can be set up. The four most common ways to run an experiment are:

CRD – Completely randomized design

A Completely Randomized Design is a simple experimental outline used in data analytics . It is based on randomization and replication. It is mostly used to compare the experiments.

RBD –Randomized block design

Randomized Block Design is an experimental design that divides the experiment into small units called blocks. Random experiments are run on each block, and the results are analyzed using the unit of analysis of variance technique (ANOVA). RBD originated in the agricultural sector.

LEARN ABOUT: ANOVA testing

LSD – Latin square design

Latin Square Design is an experimental design similar to CRD and RBD blocks but also has rows and columns. It comprises NxN squares with the same number of rows, columns, and letters that only appear once in a row. So, the differences are easy to find, and the experiment is less likely to go wrong. A Latin square design is something like a Sudoku puzzle.

FD – Factorial designs

Factorial design is an experimental design in which each experiment has two factors, each with a possible value, and additional combinational elements are derived from the results of the previous trial.

LEARN ABOUT: 12 Best Tools for Researchers

The sources of data are a complicated term. Simply put, a data source is a physical or digital place where the data in question is kept in a data table, data object, or another storage format.

Contact the QuestionPro team of experts if you need help researching. QuestionPro can help you get the most out of your data and guide you through the process.

LEARN MORE FREE TRIAL

MORE LIKE THIS

SWOT Analysis: What It Is And How To Do It?

Sep 27, 2024

Alchemer vs SurveyMonkey: Which Survey Tool Is Best for You

Sep 26, 2024

SurveySparrow vs SurveyMonkey: Choosing the Right Survey Tool

User Behavior Analytics: What it is, Importance, Uses & Tools

Other categories.

Academic Research
Artificial Intelligence
Assessments
Brand Awareness
Case Studies
Communities
Consumer Insights
Customer effort score
Customer Engagement
Customer Experience
Customer Loyalty
Customer Research
Customer Satisfaction
Employee Benefits
Employee Engagement
Employee Retention
Friday Five
General Data Protection Regulation
Insights Hub
Life@QuestionPro
Market Research
Mobile diaries
Mobile Surveys
New Features
Online Communities
Question Types
Questionnaire
QuestionPro Products
Release Notes
Research Tools and Apps
Revenue at Risk
Survey Templates
Training Tips
Tuesday CX Thoughts (TCXT)
Uncategorized
What’s Coming Up
Workforce Intelligence

Instant insights, infinite possibilities

Data collection in research: Your complete guide

Last updated

31 January 2023

Reviewed by

Cathy Heath

Short on time? Get an AI generated summary of this article instead

In the late 16th century, Francis Bacon coined the phrase "knowledge is power," which implies that knowledge is a powerful force, like physical strength. In the 21st century, knowledge in the form of data is unquestionably powerful.

But data isn't something you just have - you need to collect it. This means utilizing a data collection process and turning the collected data into knowledge that you can leverage into a successful strategy for your business or organization.

Believe it or not, there's more to data collection than just conducting a Google search. In this complete guide, we shine a spotlight on data collection, outlining what it is, types of data collection methods, common challenges in data collection, data collection techniques, and the steps involved in data collection.

Analyze all your data in one place

Uncover hidden nuggets in all types of qualitative data when you analyze it in Dovetail

What is data collection?

There are two specific data collection techniques: primary and secondary data collection. Primary data collection is the process of gathering data directly from sources. It's often considered the most reliable data collection method, as researchers can collect information directly from respondents.

Secondary data collection is data that has already been collected by someone else and is readily available. This data is usually less expensive and quicker to obtain than primary data.

What are the different methods of data collection?

There are several data collection methods, which can be either manual or automated. Manual data collection involves collecting data manually, typically with pen and paper, while computerized data collection involves using software to collect data from online sources, such as social media, website data, transaction data, etc.

Here are the five most popular methods of data collection:

Surveys are a very popular method of data collection that organizations can use to gather information from many people. Researchers can conduct multi-mode surveys that reach respondents in different ways, including in person, by mail, over the phone, or online.

As a method of data collection, surveys have several advantages. For instance, they are relatively quick and easy to administer, you can be flexible in what you ask, and they can be tailored to collect data on various topics or from certain demographics.

However, surveys also have several disadvantages. For instance, they can be expensive to administer, and the results may not represent the population as a whole. Additionally, survey data can be challenging to interpret. It may also be subject to bias if the questions are not well-designed or if the sample of people surveyed is not representative of the population of interest.

Interviews are a common method of collecting data in social science research. You can conduct interviews in person, over the phone, or even via email or online chat.

Interviews are a great way to collect qualitative and quantitative data . Qualitative interviews are likely your best option if you need to collect detailed information about your subjects' experiences or opinions. If you need to collect more generalized data about your subjects' demographics or attitudes, then quantitative interviews may be a better option.

Interviews are relatively quick and very flexible, allowing you to ask follow-up questions and explore topics in more depth. The downside is that interviews can be time-consuming and expensive due to the amount of information to be analyzed. They are also prone to bias, as both the interviewer and the respondent may have certain expectations or preconceptions that may influence the data.

Direct observation

Observation is a direct way of collecting data. It can be structured (with a specific protocol to follow) or unstructured (simply observing without a particular plan).

Organizations and businesses use observation as a data collection method to gather information about their target market, customers, or competition. Businesses can learn about consumer behavior, preferences, and trends by observing people using their products or service.

There are two types of observation: participatory and non-participatory. In participatory observation, the researcher is actively involved in the observed activities. This type of observation is used in ethnographic research , where the researcher wants to understand a group's culture and social norms. Non-participatory observation is when researchers observe from a distance and do not interact with the people or environment they are studying.

There are several advantages to using observation as a data collection method. It can provide insights that may not be apparent through other methods, such as surveys or interviews. Researchers can also observe behavior in a natural setting, which can provide a more accurate picture of what people do and how and why they behave in a certain context.

There are some disadvantages to using observation as a method of data collection. It can be time-consuming, intrusive, and expensive to observe people for extended periods. Observations can also be tainted if the researcher is not careful to avoid personal biases or preconceptions.

Automated data collection

Business applications and websites are increasingly collecting data electronically to improve the user experience or for marketing purposes.

There are a few different ways that organizations can collect data automatically. One way is through cookies, which are small pieces of data stored on a user's computer. They track a user's browsing history and activity on a site, measuring levels of engagement with a business’s products or services, for example.

Another way organizations can collect data automatically is through web beacons. Web beacons are small images embedded on a web page to track a user's activity.

Finally, organizations can also collect data through mobile apps, which can track user location, device information, and app usage. This data can be used to improve the user experience and for marketing purposes.

Automated data collection is a valuable tool for businesses, helping improve the user experience or target marketing efforts. Businesses should aim to be transparent about how they collect and use this data.

Sourcing data through information service providers

Organizations need to be able to collect data from a variety of sources, including social media, weblogs, and sensors. The process to do this and then use the data for action needs to be efficient, targeted, and meaningful.

In the era of big data, organizations are increasingly turning to information service providers (ISPs) and other external data sources to help them collect data to make crucial decisions.

Information service providers help organizations collect data by offering personalized services that suit the specific needs of the organizations. These services can include data collection, analysis, management, and reporting. By partnering with an ISP, organizations can gain access to the newest technology and tools to help them to gather and manage data more effectively.

There are also several tools and techniques that organizations can use to collect data from external sources, such as web scraping, which collects data from websites, and data mining, which involves using algorithms to extract data from large data sets.

Organizations can also use APIs (application programming interface) to collect data from external sources. APIs allow organizations to access data stored in another system and share and integrate it into their own systems.

Finally, organizations can also use manual methods to collect data from external sources. This can involve contacting companies or individuals directly to request data, by using the right tools and methods to get the insights they need.

What are common challenges in data collection?

There are many challenges that researchers face when collecting data. Here are five common examples:

Big data environments

Data collection can be a challenge in big data environments for several reasons. It can be located in different places, such as archives, libraries, or online. The sheer volume of data can also make it difficult to identify the most relevant data sets.

Second, the complexity of data sets can make it challenging to extract the desired information. Third, the distributed nature of big data environments can make it difficult to collect data promptly and efficiently.

Therefore it is important to have a well-designed data collection strategy to consider the specific needs of the organization and what data sets are the most relevant. Alongside this, consideration should be made regarding the tools and resources available to support data collection and protect it from unintended use.

Data bias is a common challenge in data collection. It occurs when data is collected from a sample that is not representative of the population of interest.

There are different types of data bias, but some common ones include selection bias, self-selection bias, and response bias. Selection bias can occur when the collected data does not represent the population being studied. For example, if a study only includes data from people who volunteer to participate, that data may not represent the general population.

Self-selection bias can also occur when people self-select into a study, such as by taking part only if they think they will benefit from it. Response bias happens when people respond in a way that is not honest or accurate, such as by only answering questions that make them look good.

These types of data bias present a challenge because they can lead to inaccurate results and conclusions about behaviors, perceptions, and trends. Data bias can be avoided by identifying potential sources or themes of bias and setting guidelines for eliminating them.

Lack of quality assurance processes

One of the biggest challenges in data collection is the lack of quality assurance processes. This can lead to several problems, including incorrect data, missing data, and inconsistencies between data sets.

Quality assurance is important because there are many data sources, and each source may have different levels of quality or corruption. There are also different ways of collecting data, and data quality may vary depending on the method used.

There are several ways to improve quality assurance in data collection. These include developing clear and consistent goals and guidelines for data collection, implementing quality control measures, using standardized procedures, and employing data validation techniques. By taking these steps, you can ensure that your data is of adequate quality to inform decision-making.

Limited access to data

Another challenge in data collection is limited access to data. This can be due to several reasons, including privacy concerns, the sensitive nature of the data, security concerns, or simply the fact that data is not readily available.

Legal and compliance regulations

Most countries have regulations governing how data can be collected, used, and stored. In some cases, data collected in one country may not be used in another. This means gaining a global perspective can be a challenge.

For example, if a company is required to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it may not be able to collect data from individuals in the EU without their explicit consent. This can make it difficult to collect data from a target audience.

Legal and compliance regulations can be complex, and it's important to ensure that all data collected is done so in a way that complies with the relevant regulations.

What are the key steps in the data collection process?

There are five steps involved in the data collection process. They are:

1. Decide what data you want to gather

Have a clear understanding of the questions you are asking, and then consider where the answers might lie and how you might obtain them. This saves time and resources by avoiding the collection of irrelevant data, and helps maintain the quality of your datasets.

2. Establish a deadline for data collection

Establishing a deadline for data collection helps you avoid collecting too much data, which can be costly and time-consuming to analyze. It also allows you to plan for data analysis and prompt interpretation. Finally, it helps you meet your research goals and objectives and allows you to move forward.

3. Select a data collection approach

The data collection approach you choose will depend on different factors, including the type of data you need, available resources, and the project timeline. For instance, if you need qualitative data, you might choose a focus group or interview methodology. If you need quantitative data , then a survey or observational study may be the most appropriate form of collection.

4. Gather information

When collecting data for your business, identify your business goals first. Once you know what you want to achieve, you can start collecting data to reach those goals. The most important thing is to ensure that the data you collect is reliable and valid. Otherwise, any decisions you make using the data could result in a negative outcome for your business.

5. Examine the information and apply your findings

As a researcher, it's important to examine the data you're collecting and analyzing before you apply your findings. This is because data can be misleading, leading to inaccurate conclusions. Ask yourself whether it is what you are expecting? Is it similar to other datasets you have looked at?

There are many scientific ways to examine data, but some common methods include:

looking at the distribution of data points

examining the relationships between variables

looking for outliers

By taking the time to examine your data and noticing any patterns, strange or otherwise, you can avoid making mistakes that could invalidate your research.

How qualitative analysis software streamlines the data collection process

Knowledge derived from data does indeed carry power. However, if you don't convert the knowledge into action, it will remain a resource of unexploited energy and wasted potential.

Luckily, data collection tools enable organizations to streamline their data collection and analysis processes and leverage the derived knowledge to grow their businesses. For instance, qualitative analysis software can be highly advantageous in data collection by streamlining the process, making it more efficient and less time-consuming.

Secondly, qualitative analysis software provides a structure for data collection and analysis, ensuring that data is of high quality. It can also help to uncover patterns and relationships that would otherwise be difficult to discern. Moreover, you can use it to replace more expensive data collection methods, such as focus groups or surveys.

Overall, qualitative analysis software can be valuable for any researcher looking to collect and analyze data. By increasing efficiency, improving data quality, and providing greater insights, qualitative software can help to make the research process much more efficient and effective.

Learn more about qualitative research data analysis software

Should you be using a customer insights hub.

Do you want to discover previous research faster?

Do you share your research findings with others?

Do you analyze research data?

Start for free today, add your research, and get to key insights faster

Editor’s picks

Last updated: 18 April 2023

Last updated: 27 February 2023

Last updated: 22 August 2024

Last updated: 5 February 2023

Last updated: 16 April 2023

Last updated: 9 March 2023

Last updated: 30 April 2024

Last updated: 12 December 2023

Last updated: 11 March 2024

Last updated: 4 July 2024

Last updated: 6 March 2024

Last updated: 5 March 2024

Last updated: 13 May 2024

Latest articles

Related topics, .css-je19u9{-webkit-align-items:flex-end;-webkit-box-align:flex-end;-ms-flex-align:flex-end;align-items:flex-end;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;-webkit-box-flex-wrap:wrap;-webkit-flex-wrap:wrap;-ms-flex-wrap:wrap;flex-wrap:wrap;-webkit-box-pack:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;justify-content:center;row-gap:0;text-align:center;max-width:671px;}@media (max-width: 1079px){.css-je19u9{max-width:400px;}.css-je19u9>span{white-space:pre;}}@media (max-width: 799px){.css-je19u9{max-width:400px;}.css-je19u9>span{white-space:pre;}} decide what to .css-1kiodld{max-height:56px;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}@media (max-width: 1079px){.css-1kiodld{display:none;}} build next, decide what to build next, log in or sign up.

Get started for free

Utility Menu

fa3d988da6f218669ec27d6b6019a0cd

A publication of the harvard college writing program.

Harvard Guide to Using Sources

The Honor Code
Evaluating Sources

From the many volumes and electronic resources that you have access to through the Harvard library system to the many resources available on the Web, finding information has never been easier. But at times, the sheer volume of information available to you can be overwhelming: How will you know which sources to rely on? How will you decide which sources are appropriate for a particular assignment? How can you determine if the data on a website is trustworthy? What's the difference between what a peer-reviewed journal offers and what a website like Wikipedia offers ?

Although the most useful sources for a given assignment will depend on the assignment itself, as well as on the kinds of sources generally relied upon in your field of study, there are some universal rules that will help you decide whether to use a source. Once you determine whether a source is worth looking at, you'll still need to figure out what you will do with it in your paper , how to cite the information and ideas you draw from it, and how to avoid plagiarism . When you write for an academic audience, you are responsible for making sure that any information you provide and any ideas you cite come from sources that are both reliable and appropriate for your assignment. The most reliable sources are those that have been vetted by scholars in the field—articles published in peer-reviewed journals and books published by academic publishers.

No matter what you're working on, keep in mind that not all sources are appropriate for your project; just because someone has written something down doesn't mean it is a reliable source. Before you decide to rely on a source, you should evaluate the source and decide whether it is appropriate to use in your paper. You should always determine the qualifications of the author, the purpose of the source (that is, in what context it was created), the scope of the source (what it covers and in what depth), and, where relevant, the currency of the source.

Locating Sources
Evaluating Journal Articles
Evaluating Web Sources
Evaluating Online Media Content
What’s Wrong with Wikipedia?
Making Decisions Based on Your Discipline
Integrating Sources

PDFs for This Section

Using sources
Online Library and Citation Tools

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

Knowledge Base

Methodology

Research Methods | Definitions, Types, Examples

Research methods are specific procedures for collecting and analyzing data. Developing your research methods is an integral part of your research design . When planning your methods, there are two key decisions you will make.

First, decide how you will collect data . Your methods depend on what type of data you need to answer your research question :

Qualitative vs. quantitative : Will your data take the form of words or numbers?
Primary vs. secondary : Will you collect original data yourself, or will you use data that has already been collected by someone else?
Descriptive vs. experimental : Will you take measurements of something as it is, or will you perform an experiment?

Second, decide how you will analyze the data .

For quantitative data, you can use statistical analysis methods to test relationships between variables.
For qualitative data, you can use methods such as thematic analysis to interpret patterns and meanings in the data.

Methods for collecting data, examples of data collection methods, methods for analyzing data, examples of data analysis methods, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about research methods.

Data is the information that you collect for the purposes of answering your research question . The type of data you need depends on the aims of your research.

Qualitative vs. quantitative data

Your choice of qualitative or quantitative data collection depends on the type of knowledge you want to develop.

For questions about ideas, experiences and meanings, or to study something that can’t be described numerically, collect qualitative data .

If you want to develop a more mechanistic understanding of a topic, or your research involves hypothesis testing , collect quantitative data .


Qualitative		to broader populations. .
Quantitative		.

You can also take a mixed methods approach , where you use both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Primary vs. secondary research

Primary research is any original data that you collect yourself for the purposes of answering your research question (e.g. through surveys , observations and experiments ). Secondary research is data that has already been collected by other researchers (e.g. in a government census or previous scientific studies).

If you are exploring a novel research question, you’ll probably need to collect primary data . But if you want to synthesize existing knowledge, analyze historical trends, or identify patterns on a large scale, secondary data might be a better choice.


Primary	.	methods.
Secondary

Descriptive vs. experimental data

In descriptive research , you collect data about your study subject without intervening. The validity of your research will depend on your sampling method .

In experimental research , you systematically intervene in a process and measure the outcome. The validity of your research will depend on your experimental design .

To conduct an experiment, you need to be able to vary your independent variable , precisely measure your dependent variable, and control for confounding variables . If it’s practically and ethically possible, this method is the best choice for answering questions about cause and effect.


Descriptive		. .
Experimental

Here's why students love Scribbr's proofreading services

Discover proofreading & editing

Research methods for collecting data
Research method	Primary or secondary?	Qualitative or quantitative?	When to use
	Primary	Quantitative	To test cause-and-effect relationships.
	Primary	Quantitative	To understand general characteristics of a population.
Interview/focus group	Primary	Qualitative	To gain more in-depth understanding of a topic.
Observation	Primary	Either	To understand how something occurs in its natural setting.
	Secondary	Either	To situate your research in an existing body of work, or to evaluate trends within a research topic.
	Either	Either	To gain an in-depth understanding of a specific group or context, or when you don’t have the resources for a large study.

Your data analysis methods will depend on the type of data you collect and how you prepare it for analysis.

Data can often be analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. For example, survey responses could be analyzed qualitatively by studying the meanings of responses or quantitatively by studying the frequencies of responses.

Qualitative analysis methods

Qualitative analysis is used to understand words, ideas, and experiences. You can use it to interpret data that was collected:

From open-ended surveys and interviews , literature reviews , case studies , ethnographies , and other sources that use text rather than numbers.
Using non-probability sampling methods .

Qualitative analysis tends to be quite flexible and relies on the researcher’s judgement, so you have to reflect carefully on your choices and assumptions and be careful to avoid research bias .

Quantitative analysis methods

Quantitative analysis uses numbers and statistics to understand frequencies, averages and correlations (in descriptive studies) or cause-and-effect relationships (in experiments).

You can use quantitative analysis to interpret data that was collected either:

During an experiment .
Using probability sampling methods .

Because the data is collected and analyzed in a statistically valid way, the results of quantitative analysis can be easily standardized and shared among researchers.

Research methods for analyzing data
Research method	Qualitative or quantitative?	When to use
	Quantitative	To analyze data collected in a statistically valid manner (e.g. from experiments, surveys, and observations).
Meta-analysis	Quantitative	To statistically analyze the results of a large collection of studies. Can only be applied to studies that collected data in a statistically valid manner.
	Qualitative	To analyze data collected from interviews, , or textual sources. To understand general themes in the data and how they are communicated.
	Either	To analyze large volumes of textual or visual data collected from surveys, literature reviews, or other sources. Can be quantitative (i.e. frequencies of words) or qualitative (i.e. meanings of words).

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Chi square test of independence
Statistical power
Descriptive statistics
Degrees of freedom
Pearson correlation
Null hypothesis
Double-blind study
Case-control study
Research ethics
Data collection
Hypothesis testing
Structured interviews

Research bias

Hawthorne effect
Unconscious bias
Recall bias
Halo effect
Self-serving bias
Information bias

Quantitative research deals with numbers and statistics, while qualitative research deals with words and meanings.

Quantitative methods allow you to systematically measure variables and test hypotheses . Qualitative methods allow you to explore concepts and experiences in more detail.

In mixed methods research , you use both qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis methods to answer your research question .

A sample is a subset of individuals from a larger population . Sampling means selecting the group that you will actually collect data from in your research. For example, if you are researching the opinions of students in your university, you could survey a sample of 100 students.

In statistics, sampling allows you to test a hypothesis about the characteristics of a population.

The research methods you use depend on the type of data you need to answer your research question .

If you want to measure something or test a hypothesis , use quantitative methods . If you want to explore ideas, thoughts and meanings, use qualitative methods .
If you want to analyze a large amount of readily-available data, use secondary data. If you want data specific to your purposes with control over how it is generated, collect primary data.
If you want to establish cause-and-effect relationships between variables , use experimental methods. If you want to understand the characteristics of a research subject, use descriptive methods.

Methodology refers to the overarching strategy and rationale of your research project . It involves studying the methods used in your field and the theories or principles behind them, in order to develop an approach that matches your objectives.

Methods are the specific tools and procedures you use to collect and analyze data (for example, experiments, surveys , and statistical tests ).

In shorter scientific papers, where the aim is to report the findings of a specific study, you might simply describe what you did in a methods section .

In a longer or more complex research project, such as a thesis or dissertation , you will probably include a methodology section , where you explain your approach to answering the research questions and cite relevant sources to support your choice of methods.

Is this article helpful?

Other students also liked, writing strong research questions | criteria & examples.

What Is a Research Design | Types, Guide & Examples
Data Collection | Definition, Methods & Examples

What is your plagiarism score?

Home » Data Collection – Methods Types and Examples

Data Collection – Methods Types and Examples

Table of Contents

Data Collection

Definition:

Data collection is the process of gathering and collecting information from various sources to analyze and make informed decisions based on the data collected. This can involve various methods, such as surveys, interviews, experiments, and observation.

In order for data collection to be effective, it is important to have a clear understanding of what data is needed and what the purpose of the data collection is. This can involve identifying the population or sample being studied, determining the variables to be measured, and selecting appropriate methods for collecting and recording data.

Types of Data Collection

Types of Data Collection are as follows:

Primary Data Collection

Primary data collection is the process of gathering original and firsthand information directly from the source or target population. This type of data collection involves collecting data that has not been previously gathered, recorded, or published. Primary data can be collected through various methods such as surveys, interviews, observations, experiments, and focus groups. The data collected is usually specific to the research question or objective and can provide valuable insights that cannot be obtained from secondary data sources. Primary data collection is often used in market research, social research, and scientific research.

Secondary Data Collection

Secondary data collection is the process of gathering information from existing sources that have already been collected and analyzed by someone else, rather than conducting new research to collect primary data. Secondary data can be collected from various sources, such as published reports, books, journals, newspapers, websites, government publications, and other documents.

Qualitative Data Collection

Qualitative data collection is used to gather non-numerical data such as opinions, experiences, perceptions, and feelings, through techniques such as interviews, focus groups, observations, and document analysis. It seeks to understand the deeper meaning and context of a phenomenon or situation and is often used in social sciences, psychology, and humanities. Qualitative data collection methods allow for a more in-depth and holistic exploration of research questions and can provide rich and nuanced insights into human behavior and experiences.

Quantitative Data Collection

Quantitative data collection is a used to gather numerical data that can be analyzed using statistical methods. This data is typically collected through surveys, experiments, and other structured data collection methods. Quantitative data collection seeks to quantify and measure variables, such as behaviors, attitudes, and opinions, in a systematic and objective way. This data is often used to test hypotheses, identify patterns, and establish correlations between variables. Quantitative data collection methods allow for precise measurement and generalization of findings to a larger population. It is commonly used in fields such as economics, psychology, and natural sciences.

Data Collection Methods

Data Collection Methods are as follows:

Surveys involve asking questions to a sample of individuals or organizations to collect data. Surveys can be conducted in person, over the phone, or online.

Interviews involve a one-on-one conversation between the interviewer and the respondent. Interviews can be structured or unstructured and can be conducted in person or over the phone.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are group discussions that are moderated by a facilitator. Focus groups are used to collect qualitative data on a specific topic.

Observation

Observation involves watching and recording the behavior of people, objects, or events in their natural setting. Observation can be done overtly or covertly, depending on the research question.

Experiments

Experiments involve manipulating one or more variables and observing the effect on another variable. Experiments are commonly used in scientific research.

Case Studies

Case studies involve in-depth analysis of a single individual, organization, or event. Case studies are used to gain detailed information about a specific phenomenon.

Secondary Data Analysis

Secondary data analysis involves using existing data that was collected for another purpose. Secondary data can come from various sources, such as government agencies, academic institutions, or private companies.

How to Collect Data

The following are some steps to consider when collecting data:

Define the objective : Before you start collecting data, you need to define the objective of the study. This will help you determine what data you need to collect and how to collect it.
Identify the data sources : Identify the sources of data that will help you achieve your objective. These sources can be primary sources, such as surveys, interviews, and observations, or secondary sources, such as books, articles, and databases.
Determine the data collection method : Once you have identified the data sources, you need to determine the data collection method. This could be through online surveys, phone interviews, or face-to-face meetings.
Develop a data collection plan : Develop a plan that outlines the steps you will take to collect the data. This plan should include the timeline, the tools and equipment needed, and the personnel involved.
Test the data collection process: Before you start collecting data, test the data collection process to ensure that it is effective and efficient.
Collect the data: Collect the data according to the plan you developed in step 4. Make sure you record the data accurately and consistently.
Analyze the data: Once you have collected the data, analyze it to draw conclusions and make recommendations.
Report the findings: Report the findings of your data analysis to the relevant stakeholders. This could be in the form of a report, a presentation, or a publication.
Monitor and evaluate the data collection process: After the data collection process is complete, monitor and evaluate the process to identify areas for improvement in future data collection efforts.
Ensure data quality: Ensure that the collected data is of high quality and free from errors. This can be achieved by validating the data for accuracy, completeness, and consistency.
Maintain data security: Ensure that the collected data is secure and protected from unauthorized access or disclosure. This can be achieved by implementing data security protocols and using secure storage and transmission methods.
Follow ethical considerations: Follow ethical considerations when collecting data, such as obtaining informed consent from participants, protecting their privacy and confidentiality, and ensuring that the research does not cause harm to participants.
Use appropriate data analysis methods : Use appropriate data analysis methods based on the type of data collected and the research objectives. This could include statistical analysis, qualitative analysis, or a combination of both.
Record and store data properly: Record and store the collected data properly, in a structured and organized format. This will make it easier to retrieve and use the data in future research or analysis.
Collaborate with other stakeholders : Collaborate with other stakeholders, such as colleagues, experts, or community members, to ensure that the data collected is relevant and useful for the intended purpose.

Applications of Data Collection

Data collection methods are widely used in different fields, including social sciences, healthcare, business, education, and more. Here are some examples of how data collection methods are used in different fields:

Social sciences : Social scientists often use surveys, questionnaires, and interviews to collect data from individuals or groups. They may also use observation to collect data on social behaviors and interactions. This data is often used to study topics such as human behavior, attitudes, and beliefs.
Healthcare : Data collection methods are used in healthcare to monitor patient health and track treatment outcomes. Electronic health records and medical charts are commonly used to collect data on patients’ medical history, diagnoses, and treatments. Researchers may also use clinical trials and surveys to collect data on the effectiveness of different treatments.
Business : Businesses use data collection methods to gather information on consumer behavior, market trends, and competitor activity. They may collect data through customer surveys, sales reports, and market research studies. This data is used to inform business decisions, develop marketing strategies, and improve products and services.
Education : In education, data collection methods are used to assess student performance and measure the effectiveness of teaching methods. Standardized tests, quizzes, and exams are commonly used to collect data on student learning outcomes. Teachers may also use classroom observation and student feedback to gather data on teaching effectiveness.
Agriculture : Farmers use data collection methods to monitor crop growth and health. Sensors and remote sensing technology can be used to collect data on soil moisture, temperature, and nutrient levels. This data is used to optimize crop yields and minimize waste.
Environmental sciences : Environmental scientists use data collection methods to monitor air and water quality, track climate patterns, and measure the impact of human activity on the environment. They may use sensors, satellite imagery, and laboratory analysis to collect data on environmental factors.
Transportation : Transportation companies use data collection methods to track vehicle performance, optimize routes, and improve safety. GPS systems, on-board sensors, and other tracking technologies are used to collect data on vehicle speed, fuel consumption, and driver behavior.

Examples of Data Collection

Examples of Data Collection are as follows:

Traffic Monitoring: Cities collect real-time data on traffic patterns and congestion through sensors on roads and cameras at intersections. This information can be used to optimize traffic flow and improve safety.
Social Media Monitoring : Companies can collect real-time data on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to monitor their brand reputation, track customer sentiment, and respond to customer inquiries and complaints in real-time.
Weather Monitoring: Weather agencies collect real-time data on temperature, humidity, air pressure, and precipitation through weather stations and satellites. This information is used to provide accurate weather forecasts and warnings.
Stock Market Monitoring : Financial institutions collect real-time data on stock prices, trading volumes, and other market indicators to make informed investment decisions and respond to market fluctuations in real-time.
Health Monitoring : Medical devices such as wearable fitness trackers and smartwatches can collect real-time data on a person’s heart rate, blood pressure, and other vital signs. This information can be used to monitor health conditions and detect early warning signs of health issues.

Purpose of Data Collection

The purpose of data collection can vary depending on the context and goals of the study, but generally, it serves to:

Provide information: Data collection provides information about a particular phenomenon or behavior that can be used to better understand it.
Measure progress : Data collection can be used to measure the effectiveness of interventions or programs designed to address a particular issue or problem.
Support decision-making : Data collection provides decision-makers with evidence-based information that can be used to inform policies, strategies, and actions.
Identify trends : Data collection can help identify trends and patterns over time that may indicate changes in behaviors or outcomes.
Monitor and evaluate : Data collection can be used to monitor and evaluate the implementation and impact of policies, programs, and initiatives.

When to use Data Collection

Data collection is used when there is a need to gather information or data on a specific topic or phenomenon. It is typically used in research, evaluation, and monitoring and is important for making informed decisions and improving outcomes.

Data collection is particularly useful in the following scenarios:

Research : When conducting research, data collection is used to gather information on variables of interest to answer research questions and test hypotheses.
Evaluation : Data collection is used in program evaluation to assess the effectiveness of programs or interventions, and to identify areas for improvement.
Monitoring : Data collection is used in monitoring to track progress towards achieving goals or targets, and to identify any areas that require attention.
Decision-making: Data collection is used to provide decision-makers with information that can be used to inform policies, strategies, and actions.
Quality improvement : Data collection is used in quality improvement efforts to identify areas where improvements can be made and to measure progress towards achieving goals.

Characteristics of Data Collection

Data collection can be characterized by several important characteristics that help to ensure the quality and accuracy of the data gathered. These characteristics include:

Validity : Validity refers to the accuracy and relevance of the data collected in relation to the research question or objective.
Reliability : Reliability refers to the consistency and stability of the data collection process, ensuring that the results obtained are consistent over time and across different contexts.
Objectivity : Objectivity refers to the impartiality of the data collection process, ensuring that the data collected is not influenced by the biases or personal opinions of the data collector.
Precision : Precision refers to the degree of accuracy and detail in the data collected, ensuring that the data is specific and accurate enough to answer the research question or objective.
Timeliness : Timeliness refers to the efficiency and speed with which the data is collected, ensuring that the data is collected in a timely manner to meet the needs of the research or evaluation.
Ethical considerations : Ethical considerations refer to the ethical principles that must be followed when collecting data, such as ensuring confidentiality and obtaining informed consent from participants.

Advantages of Data Collection

There are several advantages of data collection that make it an important process in research, evaluation, and monitoring. These advantages include:

Better decision-making : Data collection provides decision-makers with evidence-based information that can be used to inform policies, strategies, and actions, leading to better decision-making.
Improved understanding: Data collection helps to improve our understanding of a particular phenomenon or behavior by providing empirical evidence that can be analyzed and interpreted.
Evaluation of interventions: Data collection is essential in evaluating the effectiveness of interventions or programs designed to address a particular issue or problem.
Identifying trends and patterns: Data collection can help identify trends and patterns over time that may indicate changes in behaviors or outcomes.
Increased accountability: Data collection increases accountability by providing evidence that can be used to monitor and evaluate the implementation and impact of policies, programs, and initiatives.
Validation of theories: Data collection can be used to test hypotheses and validate theories, leading to a better understanding of the phenomenon being studied.
Improved quality: Data collection is used in quality improvement efforts to identify areas where improvements can be made and to measure progress towards achieving goals.

Limitations of Data Collection

While data collection has several advantages, it also has some limitations that must be considered. These limitations include:

Bias : Data collection can be influenced by the biases and personal opinions of the data collector, which can lead to inaccurate or misleading results.
Sampling bias : Data collection may not be representative of the entire population, resulting in sampling bias and inaccurate results.
Cost : Data collection can be expensive and time-consuming, particularly for large-scale studies.
Limited scope: Data collection is limited to the variables being measured, which may not capture the entire picture or context of the phenomenon being studied.
Ethical considerations : Data collection must follow ethical principles to protect the rights and confidentiality of the participants, which can limit the type of data that can be collected.
Data quality issues: Data collection may result in data quality issues such as missing or incomplete data, measurement errors, and inconsistencies.
Limited generalizability : Data collection may not be generalizable to other contexts or populations, limiting the generalizability of the findings.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

Research Objectives – Types, Examples and...

Delimitations in Research – Types, Examples and...

Scope of the Research – Writing Guide and...

Figures in Research Paper – Examples and Guide

References in Research – Types, Examples and...

Thesis – Structure, Example and Writing Guide

Data Sources

Search Strategies
Quick Statistics
Business & Economics This link opens in a new window
Demographics
Health, Nursing, Nutrition
International/Area Studies
Labor/Workforce
Public Opinion
U.S. Census ↗ This link opens in a new window
Voting & Elections
Gender & Sexuality
Data Archives
Data Portals
GIS/Spatial Data ↗ This link opens in a new window
Textual Data
Software & Analysis

Citing data

More resources for citing data.

Classes & Workshops
Resources for Politics Honors Seminars

General Information

For assistance, please submit a request . You can also reach us via the chat below, email [email protected] , or join Discord server .

If you've met with us before, tell us how we're doing .

Stay in touch by signing up for our Data Services newsletter .

Service Desk and Chat

Bobst Library , 5th floor

Staffed Hours: Fall 2024

Mondays: 12pm - 5pm Tuesdays: 12pm - 5pm Wednesdays: 12pm - 5pm Thursdays: 12pm - 5pm Fridays: 12pm - 5pm

Data Services closes for winter break at the end of the day on Friday, Dec. 22, 2023. We will reopen on Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024.

Data should be cited within our work for the same reasons journal articles are cited: to give credit where credit is due (original author/producer) and to help other researchers find the material. If you use data without citation, that is deeply problematic for academic integrity as well as reproducibility purposes. Pay attention to licenses (here's a page on those) and give attribution!

A data citation includes the typical components of other citations:

Author or creator: the entity/entities responsible for creating the data Date of publication: the date the data was published or otherwise released to the public Title: the title of the dataset or a brief description of it if it's missing a title Publisher: entity responsible for hosting the data (like a repository or archive) URL or preferably, a DOI: a link that points to the data Data Accessed: since most data are published without versions, it's important to note the time that you accessed the data in case newer releases are made over time.

Citation standards for data sets differ by journal, publisher, and conference, but you have a few options generally (depending on the situation):

Use the format of a style manual as determined by a publisher or conference, such as IEEE or ACM. If you use a citation manager (highly recommended for organizing research reading!) like Zotero (which we support at NYU - check out our Zotero guide ), you can have them export your citations in whatever format you need.
Use the author or repository's preferred citation that they list on the page where you downloaded the data initially.

Here's an example of how to find the citation information for a dataset hosted on Zenodo , a generalist repository that houses data, code, and more:

All scholarly or academic work requires that you cite your sources, whether you are writing a long paper or a quick report. Why is citing your research so important?

Researching and writing a paper ideally involves a process of exploring and learning. By citing your sources, you are showing your reader how you came to your conclusions and acknowledging the other people's work that brought you to your conclusions. Citing sources:

Documents your research and scholarship
Acknowledges the work of others whose scholarship contributed to your work
Helps your reader understand the context of your argument
Provides information for your reader to use to locate additional information on your topic
Establishes the credibility of your scholarship
Provides you with an opportunity to demonstrate your own integrity and understanding of academic ethics

Partially adapted from "When and Why to Cite Sources." SUNY Albany. 2008. Retrieved 14 Jan 2009.

Data-Planet Data Basics Data Basics is a module in Data-Planet that provides resources and examples for citing datasets and statistics when incorporating them into research.
IASSIST Quick Guide to Data Citation Includes examples from APA, MLA, and Chicago styles.
How to Cite Data A comprehensive guide with examples from Michigan State University Libraries.
<< Previous: Software & Analysis
Next: Classes & Workshops >>
Last Updated: Sep 26, 2024 12:27 PM
URL: https://guides.nyu.edu/datasources

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Publications
Account settings

The PMC website is updating on October 15, 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

Advanced Search
Journal List
PLoS Comput Biol
v.14(4); 2018 Apr

Eleven quick tips for finding research data

Kathleen gregory.

1 Data Archiving and Networked Services, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Hague, Netherlands

Siri Jodha Khalsa

2 National Snow and Ice Data Centre, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America

William K. Michener

3 College of University Libraries & Learning Sciences, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States of America

Fotis E. Psomopoulos

4 Institute of Applied Biosciences, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Thessaloniki, Greece

Anita de Waard

5 Research Data Management Solutions, Elsevier, Jericho, Vermont, United States of America

Mingfang Wu

6 Australia National Data Service, Melbourne, Australia

This is a PLOS Computational Biology Education paper.

Introduction

Tip 1: Think about the data you need and why you need them.
Tip 2: Select the most appropriate resource.
Tip 3: Construct your query strategically.
Tip 4: Make the repository work for you.
Tip 5: Refine your search.
Tip 6: Assess data relevance and fitness -for -use.
Tip 7: Save your search and data- source details.
Tip 8: Look for data services, not just data.
Tip 9: Monitor the latest data.
Tip 10: Treat sensitive data responsibly.
Tip 11: Give back (cite and share data).

Tip 1: Think about the data you need and why you need them

Tip 2: Select the most appropriate resource

Tip 3: Construct your query strategically

If you are looking for data that span different disciplines, or if you cannot find a suitable domain repository and opt instead for a general search engine, learn how to make the most of search operators. The ‘site:’ operator, for example, restricts web domains for returned results. For example, using this search string

sea level (site:.edu)

will return results only from sites whose URLs end in.edu when using Google or Bing. You can find out what operators are supported by your selected search engine by searching for them directly. For example, the query ‘google search operators’ results in pages such as [‎ 4 ] describing all operators that can be used in your query. Constructing a query with search operators is like writing a program script: They allow you to precisely communicate what you are searching for, with the reward being the retrieval of more on-topic results.

Tip 4: Make the repository work for you

Tip 5: Refine your search

Tip 6: Assess data relevance and fitness for use

Tip 7: Save your search and data-source details

Tip 8: Look for data services, not just data

Tip 9: Monitor the latest data

Tip 10: Treat sensitive data responsibly

Tip 11: Give back (cite and share data)

Third, virtually all data seekers and data users also generate data. The ultimate ‘give-back’ is to also share your data with the broader community.

Acknowledgments

Funding Statement

William K. Michener was supported by NSF (#IIA-1301346 and #ACI-1430508). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Unconventional Data Sources Fuel Research Innovations

Featured - Observer
Interdisciplinary

Market-research panels offer researchers access to millions of participants, specializing in the ability to engage hard-to-reach groups. But their use is currently limited to less than 15% of psychological studies.
Population-level administrative data offer an affordable and detailed source of information for longitudinal studies.
Data from global positioning systems (GPS) can be integrated with other types of data, such as heart rate or life satisfaction, and can be analyzed with familiar statistical methods like correlations and regressions.
Special ethical and data quality considerations may be needed when researchers use unconventional data sources.
By engaging in interdisciplinary collaborations, researchers are more likely to be exposed to new approaches to research, including the use of unconventional data sources.

Administrative data support research on rare and long-term outcomes • GPS data can provide new insights on movement behavior • Interdisciplinary work leads to innovative thinking

As a postdoctoral researcher studying experimental psychology at New York University (NYU) in the early 2000s, Leib Litman had no problem finding participants for his large studies on episodic memory.

“NYU is this huge place,” Litman said in an interview with the Observer . “There is an endless participant pool of undergraduates that you have access to pretty much at any time of the year, except maybe in the summer where it gets a little bit more difficult to recruit participants.”

But when he later moved on to a faculty position at a small, private college, he realized access to large numbers of students was a luxury he would no longer be afforded. This need for participants to fuel his research led Litman and a colleague in computer science, Jonathan Robinson, to create a suite of online tools that would expedite the process of identifying participants.

“I’ll never forget the first time we did a research study online and collected 500 people in a matter of an hour,” Litman said. “It was really one of those life-changing moments when I realized, you know, this is a complete revolution in science.”

Litman is now one of the cofounders and chief research officer for CloudResearch , an online research and participant recruitment platform. He is also a professor of psychology at Touro University’s Lander College.

What started as a solution to a personal research problem now serves tens of thousands of researchers at over 5,000 institutions. Litman remembers one of the first times he unveiled the project to the research community at an APS Annual Convention about a decade ago.

“It was like standing room only,” he said. “People were extremely, extremely interested because it was very clear that the problems that I was having, everybody else was having, too.”

Since then, online studies have become the norm for psychological research, and CloudResearch’s Connect is one of the major platforms that researchers turn to for participant recruitment. But CloudResearch also offers another option to find participants that Litman believes has been largely underutilized for behavioral research: market-research panels.

With their Prime Panels platform, CloudResearch aggregates over 100 million participants from 300 market-research panels—a participant pool that massively eclipses the approximately 100,000 available on Connect.

Yet Litman estimates that only about 10%–15% of psychological studies turn to market-research panels for participant recruitment, though they are more common in other disciplines like political science.

In a recent article for Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science , Litman and his colleagues provided a tutorial on the best practices in using market-research panels for behavioral science to help researchers decide if panels are the right approach for their studies (Moss et al., 2023).

Panels are run by market-research platforms with the goal of recruiting participants to understand consumer behavior and perceptions around a particular product. They vary in their approach, but they usually include a rewards program that incentivizes participation. Panels specialize in targeting different populations, organized by factors such as demographic segments, geographic regions, or language-specific recruitment. They also allow researchers to sample participants from most countries around the world.

“The main benefit of aggregating across multiple platforms is the ability to reach people at the kinds of scales that can’t be matched at all with any single platform,” Litman said. “Like when you’re looking for difficult-to-reach clinical participants or participants within specific cities or even ZIP code areas. For consumer research, you can find people who are using products in a very specific way.”

The challenge with using market-research panels is the lack of control over the platform, which can lead to data quality issues. Researchers do not control how much participants are paid and need to screen carefully to weed out fraudulent participation.

“There are a lot of papers that are written that just contain misinformation because they didn’t do enough to clean the data,” Litman said.

CloudResearch has combatted the issue of bad data quality by creating Sentry, a tool that automatically filters out low-quality and fraudulent responses by examining the technical and behavioral characteristics of each participant before they enter a survey. The tool takes about 20 seconds per participant and filters out about 30% of panel traffic. Even so, researcher vigilance is a must.

“The vast majority of fraud is removed through that mechanism,” Litman said. “But there’s only so much we could do, and so it is a partnership between CloudResearch and the researchers.”

Litman has seen the landscape of psychological research change drastically over the past decade, with online research revolutionizing what’s possible for social sciences, but he asserts that the ease of accessing participants brings new challenges that researchers must learn to problem-solve.

“It has to be done right, otherwise you run the risk of misinforming science and misinforming the public,” he said.

Administrative data support research on rare and long-term outcomes

Another methodological approach less chosen by psychologists is the use of data from administration systems. These data are created as individuals interact with government and private administrative systems in areas such as health care, social welfare, criminal justice, and education.

In the United States, multiple large-scale administrative systems are designed for research, including birth and death records from the National Vital Statistics System, school test scores from the National Center for Education Statistics, and use of health care services from the Veterans Health Administration. Some of these data are publicly available, while sensitive information has restricted access and specific protocols for researchers to follow.

Leah Richmond-Rakerd, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and a 2024 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award recipient, first became interested in the power of administrative data while working with epidemiologic survey data during her graduate research.

“That really helped to introduce me to the benefits of things like representative sampling and being able to work with large data sources to study associations across population subgroups or over time,” Richmond-Rakerd said in an interview with the Observer .

Learn more about the 2024 Spence award recipients.

Richmond-Rakerd and her colleagues recently had a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science that describes a few distinct, and largely untapped, benefits of using population-level administrative data for psychological research.

First, data collection is expensive, especially when done over large scales or over an extended period. And for longitudinal studies , it can be difficult to ensure the sample stays consistent.

“If we’re conducting research on people over time, they may drop out of studies over time, and we may lose access to them and their information,” she said.

Conversely, administrative data can often be accessed at no cost to the researcher. And because administrative data have detailed information about the timing of specific events—the time a new medication is prescribed, for example—they can pinpoint what factors led to a specific outcome.

These data also offer the opportunity to study conditions that are rare in the population, such as schizophrenia or suicide mortality.

“Often times, when researchers are interested in those kinds of things, they have to turn to more selected samples to obtain sufficient numbers of people,” Richmond-Rakerd said. “But in population-level administrative data, researchers can study those kinds of lower prevalence conditions while still working within a representative data source.”

Another unique opportunity for researchers using administrative data is to link that information to other datasets, such as those that contain residential information or large-scale environmental characteristics. For example, Richmond-Rakerd worked with colleagues at the University of Virginia, Duke University, the University of Auckland, and the University of Otago to study the link between risk for dementia and the characteristics of the neighborhoods in which individuals lived.

“We don’t yet, in the United States, have the ability to link information about people’s interactions with different types of systems at the individual level nationwide,” Richmond-Rakerd said. “Those kinds of population-level administrative data sources do, however, exist in other countries, such as the ones that my team has worked with in New Zealand and Denmark, and in other countries such as Sweden.”

Large-scale datasets come with challenges. For example, some information, including about social identities, may not be systematically or precisely measured.

“Administrative data traditionally are not collected specifically for research,” she clarified. “These data are recorded as part of the carrying out or delivery of various public services.”

GPS data can provide new insights on movement behavior

Location-based data have also been included in the recent wave of new data sources used for psychological research. Researchers have begun to experiment with ways to incorporate GPS data into research on behavior, tracking patterns of movement and locations visited.

Interdisciplinary Work Leads to Innovative Thinking

Sharon Koppman, a sociologist and associate professor at the University of California, Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business, has seen the influence of interdisciplinary environments on innovation: In her research, she has found that the presence of inroads into other disciplines often allows for novel approaches to slip in.

Koppman and her colleague Erin Leahey, a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona, looked to their own field of sociology to investigate the factors that lead scientists to adopt unconventional methods—such as accessing data from atypical sources—in their research. In a study focused on individuals with sociology PhDs, the researchers found that participants with higher status in their careers were more likely to try unconventional methods than those with lower status. In this case, these higher-status participants were primarily men who were affiliated with top-tier universities.

“They’re more likely to innovate and also fail,” Koppman said in an interview with the Observer . “But they’ve already kind of made it, and so their failures are not really going to affect them very much.”

Koppman said researchers from some fields are more likely to try new approaches than others, which can often be influenced by how a field defines itself. If a field is beholden to a particular method, such as the ethnographic approach of anthropology, trying a new approach can feel like changing the definition of what it means to work in that field. By creating departments that include perspectives from multiple disciplines, Koppman believes institutions can help facilitate a more consistent exchange among scientists as they become familiar with new methods, data sources, and approaches to research.

GPS data can be integrated with other types of data, such as heart rate or life satisfaction, and can be analyzed with familiar statistical methods like correlations and regressions. But researchers require a specific skillset to use these data effectively.

In a 2022 tutorial paper, Sandrine Müller and colleagues describe how to manage challenges associated with these data, such as privacy considerations and how to interpret the psychological implications of movement patterns ( Müller et al., 2022 ).

Like market-research panels, GPS data require a specific data quality process before they can be analyzed. Researchers must identify and remove inaccurate GPS records, which are not uncommon because of frequent technical issues such as lapses in satellite connectivity.

To ensure ethical use of GPS data, researchers must give special consideration to how the data are secured and disconnected from any participant identifiers. This includes removing the coordinates of the home and work locations of participants and assigning labels to obscure exact locations.

Richmond-Rakerd also emphasized the unique ethical considerations of relying on administrative data. She stressed the importance of using responsible research practices when using these data, such as developing research questions and hypotheses before engaging with datasets.

“It’s important to keep in mind with administrative data that you’re often working with very, very large-scale data resources, and so most associations will be statistically significant,” she said, adding that it can be helpful to focus more on effect size than significance.

As researchers continue to learn how to most effectively use unconventional data sources, they share lessons learned with those in their own fields, and also with collaborating researchers from other fields. Richmond-Rakerd anticipates that use of administrative datasets will become more common as psychologists collaborate with researchers in fields like economics and health, where they are more commonly used, as well as those outside of the United States.

“More interdisciplinary collaboration isn’t just beneficial for bringing in new theoretical or methodological perspectives, but also opens up opportunities for psychologists to gain more experience and training in working with these kinds of data resources,” Richmond-Rakerd said.

Feedback on this article? Email [email protected] or login to comment.

Koppman, S. & Leahey, E. (2019). Who moves to the methodological edge? Factors that encourage scientists to use unconventional methods. Research Policy , 48 (9), Article 103807. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2019.103807

Moss, A. J., Hauser, D. J., Rosenzweig, C., Jaffe, S., Robinson, J., & Litman, L. (2023). Using market-research panels for behavioral science: An overview and tutorial. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science , 6 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459221140388

Müller, S. R., Bayer, J. B., Ross, M. Q., Mount, J., Stachl, C., Harari, G. M., Yung-Ju, C., & Huyen, H. T. (2022). Analyzing GPS data for psychological research: a tutorial. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science , 5 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459221082680

Richmond-Rakerd, L. S., Dent, K. R., Andersen, S. H., D’Souza, S., & Milne, B. J. (2024). Population-level administrative data: A resource to advance psychological science. Current Directions in Psychological Science . https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214241275570

APS regularly opens certain online articles for discussion on our website. Effective February 2021, you must be a logged-in APS member to post comments. By posting a comment, you agree to our Community Guidelines and the display of your profile information, including your name and affiliation. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations present in article comments are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of APS or the article’s author. For more information, please see our Community Guidelines .

Please login with your APS account to comment.

How Wearable Device Data Can Fuel Digital Interventions

Researchers are using data from wearable devices to deliver digital interventions when people need them most.

Creating a Global ‘BRIDGE’ for Brain Research Data

The Brain Research International Data Governance & Exchange (BRIDGE) project aims to create a responsible and sustainable governance system for data sharing. Learn how the group is advancing open practices, reproducibility, and psychological science as a whole.

Practical Protections

In the era of open science, researchers encounter the challenges of preserving participant privacy when sharing data from qualitative interviews. Learn how you can balance transparency and confidentiality.

Privacy Overview

Cookie	Duration	Description
__cf_bm	30 minutes	This cookie, set by Cloudflare, is used to support Cloudflare Bot Management.

Cookie	Duration	Description
AWSELBCORS	5 minutes	This cookie is used by Elastic Load Balancing from Amazon Web Services to effectively balance load on the servers.

Cookie	Duration	Description
at-rand	never	AddThis sets this cookie to track page visits, sources of traffic and share counts.
CONSENT	2 years	YouTube sets this cookie via embedded youtube-videos and registers anonymous statistical data.
uvc	1 year 27 days	Set by addthis.com to determine the usage of addthis.com service.
_ga	2 years	The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookie stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to recognize unique visitors.
_gat_gtag_UA_3507334_1	1 minute	Set by Google to distinguish users.
_gid	1 day	Installed by Google Analytics, _gid cookie stores information on how visitors use a website, while also creating an analytics report of the website's performance. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.

Cookie	Duration	Description
loc	1 year 27 days	AddThis sets this geolocation cookie to help understand the location of users who share the information.
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE	5 months 27 days	A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface.
YSC	session	YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages.
yt-remote-connected-devices	never	YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video.
yt-remote-device-id	never	YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video.
yt.innertube::nextId	never	This cookie, set by YouTube, registers a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen.
yt.innertube::requests	never	This cookie, set by YouTube, registers a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen.

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

Publications
Our Methods
Short Reads
Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

What the data says about immigrants in the U.S.

About 200 people wave American flags after being sworn in at a naturalization ceremony in Boston on April 17, 2024. (Danielle Parhizkaran/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

The United States has long had more immigrants than any other country. In fact, the U.S. is home to one-fifth of the world’s international migrants . These immigrants come from just about every country in the world.

Pew Research Center regularly publishes research on U.S. immigrants . Based on this research, here are answers to some key questions about the U.S. immigrant population.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to answer common questions about immigration to the United States and the U.S. immigrant population.

Data for 2023 comes from Census Bureau tabulations of the 2023 American Community Survey . The remaining data in this analysis comes mainly from Center tabulations of Census Bureau microdata the American Community Surveys ( IPUMS ) and historical data from decennial censuses.

This analysis also features estimates of the size of the U.S. unauthorized immigrant population . The estimates presented in this research for 2022 are the Center’s latest. Estimates of annual changes in the foreign-born population are from the Current Population Survey for 1994-2023 and the American Community Surveys for 2001-2022 (IPUMS), with adjustments for changes in the bureau’s survey methodology over time.

How many people in the U.S. are immigrants?

The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 47.8 million in 2023, an increase of 1.6 million from the previous year. This is the largest annual increase in more than 20 years , since 2000.

In 1970, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. was about a fifth of what it is today. Growth of this population accelerated after Congress made changes to U.S. immigration laws in 1965.

Immigrants today account for 14.3% of the U.S. population, a roughly threefold increase from 4.7% in 1970. The immigrant share of the population today is the highest since 1910 but remains below the record 14.8% in 1890.

(Because only limited data from the 2023 American Community Survey has been released as of mid-September 2024, the rest of this post focuses on data from 2022.)

Where are U.S. immigrants from?

A bar chart showing that Mexico, China and India are among top birthplaces for U.S. immigrants.

Mexico is the top country of birth for U.S. immigrants. In 2022, roughly 10.6 million immigrants living in the U.S. were born there, making up 23% of all U.S. immigrants. The next largest origin groups were those from India (6%), China (5%), the Philippines (4%) and El Salvador (3%).

By region of birth, immigrants from Asia accounted for 28% of all immigrants. Other regions make up smaller shares:

Latin America (27%), excluding Mexico but including the Caribbean (10%), Central America (9%) and South America (9%)
Europe, Canada and other North America (12%)
Sub-Saharan Africa (5%)
Middle East and North Africa (4%)

How have immigrants’ origin countries changed in recent decades?

Before 1965, U.S. immigration law favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe and mostly barred immigration from Asia. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act opened up immigration from Asia and Latin America. The Immigration Act of 1990 further increased legal immigration and allowed immigrants from more countries to enter the U.S. legally.

Since 1965, about 72 million immigrants have come to the United States from different and more countries than their predecessors:

From 1840 to 1889, about 90% of U.S. immigrants came from Europe, including about 70% from Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom.
Almost 90% of the immigrants who arrived from 1890 to 1919 came from Europe. Nearly 60% came from Italy, Austria-Hungary and Russia-Poland.
Since 1965, about half of U.S. immigrants have come from Latin America, with about a quarter from Mexico alone. About another quarter have come from Asia. Large numbers have come from China, India, the Philippines, Central America and the Caribbean.

The newest wave of immigrants has dramatically changed states’ immigrant populations . In 1980, German immigrants were the largest group in 19 states, Canadian immigrants were the largest in 11 states and Mexicans were the largest in 10 states. By 2000, Mexicans were the largest group in 31 states.

Today, Mexico remains the largest origin country for U.S. immigrants. However, immigration from Mexico has slowed since 2007 and the Mexican-born population in the U.S. has dropped. The Mexican share of the U.S. immigrant population dropped from 29% in 2010 to 23% in 2022.

Where are recent immigrants coming from?

A line chart showing that, among new immigrant arrivals, Asians outnumbered Hispanics during the 2010s.

In 2022, Mexico was the top country of birth for immigrants who arrived in the last year, with about 150,000 people. India (about 145,000) and China (about 90,000) were the next largest sources of immigrants. Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil and Canada each had about 50,000 to 60,000 new immigrant arrivals.

The main sources of immigrants have shifted twice in the 21st century. The first was caused by the Great Recession (2007-2009). Until 2007, more Hispanics than Asians arrived in the U.S. each year. From 2009 to 2018, the opposite was true.

Since 2019, immigration from Latin America – much of it unauthorized – has reversed the pattern again. More Hispanics than Asians have come each year.

What is the legal status of immigrants in the U.S.?

A pie chart showing that unauthorized immigrants are almost a quarter of U.S. foreign-born population.

Most immigrants (77%) are in the country legally. As of 2022:

49% were naturalized U.S. citizens.
24% were lawful permanent residents.
4% were legal temporary residents.
23% were unauthorized immigrants .

From 1990 to 2007, the unauthorized immigrant population more than tripled in size, from 3.5 million to a record high of 12.2 million. From there, the number slowly declined to about 10.2 million in 2019.

In 2022, the number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. showed sustained growth for the first time since 2007, to 11.o million.

As of 2022, about 4 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. are Mexican. This is the largest number of any origin country, representing more than one-third of all unauthorized immigrants. However, the Mexican unauthorized immigrant population is down from a peak of almost 7 million in 2007, when Mexicans accounted for 57% of all unauthorized immigrants.

The drop in the number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico has been partly offset by growth from other parts of the world, especially Asia and other parts of Latin America.

The 2022 estimates of the unauthorized immigrant population are our latest comprehensive estimates. Other partial data sources suggest continued growth in 2023 and 2024 .

Who are unauthorized immigrants?

Virtually all unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. entered the country without legal permission or arrived on a nonpermanent visa and stayed after it expired.

A growing number of unauthorized immigrants have permission to live and work in the U.S. and are temporarily protected from deportation. In 2022, about 3 million unauthorized immigrants had these temporary legal protections. These immigrants fall into several groups:

Temporary Protected Status (TPS): About 650,000 immigrants have TPS as of July 2022. TPS is offered to individuals who cannot safely return to their home country because of civil unrest, violence, natural disaster or other extraordinary and temporary conditions.
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA): Almost 600,000 immigrants are beneficiaries of DACA. This program allows individuals brought to the U.S. as children before 2007 to remain in the U.S.
Asylum applicants: About 1.6 million immigrants have pending applications for asylum in the U.S. as of mid-2022 because of dangers faced in their home country. These immigrants can stay in the U.S. legally while they wait for a decision on their case.
Other protections: Several hundred thousand individuals have applied for special visas to become lawful immigrants. These types of visas are offered to victims of trafficking and certain other criminal activities.

In addition, about 500,000 immigrants arrived in the U.S. by the end of 2023 under programs created for Ukrainians (U4U or Uniting for Ukraine ) and people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela ( CHNV parole ). These immigrants mainly arrived too late to be counted in the 2022 estimates but may be included in future estimates.

Do all lawful immigrants choose to become U.S. citizens?

Immigrants who are lawful permanent residents can apply to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements. In fiscal year 2022, almost 1 million lawful immigrants became U.S. citizens through naturalization . This is only slightly below record highs in 1996 and 2008.

Most immigrants eligible for naturalization apply for citizenship, but not all do. Top reasons for not applying include language and personal barriers, lack of interest and not being able to afford it, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey .

Where do most U.S. immigrants live?

In 2022, most of the nation’s 46.1 million immigrants lived in four states: California (10.4 million or 23% of the national total), Texas (5.2 million or 11%), Florida (4.8 million or 10%) and New York (4.5 million or 10%).

Most immigrants lived in the South (35%) and West (33%). Another 21% lived in the Northeast and 11% were in the Midwest.

In 2022, more than 29 million immigrants – 63% of the nation’s foreign-born population – lived in just 20 major metropolitan areas. The largest populations were in the New York, Los Angeles and Miami metro areas. Most of the nation’s unauthorized immigrant population (60%) lived in these metro areas as well.

A map of the U.S. showing the 20 metropolitan areas with the largest number of immigrants in 2022.

How many immigrants are working in the U.S.?

A table showing that, from 2007 to 2022, the U.S. labor force grew but the unauthorized immigrant workforce did not.

In 2022, over 30 million immigrants were in the U.S. workforce. Lawful immigrants made up the majority of the immigrant workforce, at 22.2 million. An additional 8.3 million immigrant workers are unauthorized. This is a notable increase over 2019 but about the same as in 2007 .

The share of workers who are immigrants increased slightly from 17% in 2007 to 18% in 2022. By contrast, the share of immigrant workers who are unauthorized declined from a peak of 5.4% in 2007 to 4.8% in 2022. Immigrants and their children are projected to add about 18 million people of working age between 2015 and 2035. This would offset an expected decline in the working-age population from retiring Baby Boomers.

How educated are immigrants compared with the U.S. population overall?

On average, U.S. immigrants have lower levels of education than the U.S.-born population. In 2022, immigrants ages 25 and older were about three times as likely as the U.S. born to have not completed high school (25% vs. 7%). However, immigrants were as likely as the U.S. born to have a bachelor’s degree or more (35% vs. 36%).

Immigrant educational attainment varies by origin. About half of immigrants from Mexico (51%) had not completed high school, and the same was true for 46% of those from Central America and 21% from the Caribbean. Immigrants from these three regions were also less likely than the U.S. born to have a bachelor’s degree or more.

On the other hand, immigrants from all other regions were about as likely as or more likely than the U.S. born to have at least a bachelor’s degree. Immigrants from South Asia (72%) were the most likely to have a bachelor’s degree or more.

How well do immigrants speak English?

About half of immigrants ages 5 and older (54%) are proficient English speakers – they either speak English very well (37%) or speak only English at home (17%).

Immigrants from Canada (97%), Oceania (82%), sub-Saharan Africa (76%), Europe (75%) and South Asia (73%) have the highest rates of English proficiency.

Immigrants from Mexico (36%) and Central America (35%) have the lowest proficiency rates.

Immigrants who have lived in the U.S. longer are somewhat more likely to be English proficient. Some 45% of immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for five years or less are proficient, compared with 56% of immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for 20 years or more.

Spanish is the most commonly spoken language among U.S. immigrants. About four-in-ten immigrants (41%) speak Spanish at home. Besides Spanish, the top languages immigrants speak at home are English only (17%), Chinese (6%), Filipino/Tagalog (4%), French or Haitian Creole (3%), and Vietnamese (2%).

Note: This is an update of a post originally published May 3, 2017.

Immigrant Populations
Immigration & Migration
Unauthorized Immigration

Mohamad Moslimani is a former research analyst focusing on race and ethnicity at Pew Research Center .

Jeffrey S. Passel is a senior demographer at Pew Research Center .

What we know about unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S.

Cultural issues and the 2024 election, latinos’ views on the migrant situation at the u.s.-mexico border, u.s. christians more likely than ‘nones’ to say situation at the border is a crisis, how americans view the situation at the u.s.-mexico border, its causes and consequences, most popular.

901 E St. NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC 20004 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 | Media Inquiries

Research Topics

Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It does not take policy positions. The Center conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, computational social science research and other data-driven research. Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts , its primary funder.

Election 2024
Entertainment
Newsletters
Photography
AP Investigations
AP Buyline Personal Finance
AP Buyline Shopping
Press Releases
Israel-Hamas War
Russia-Ukraine War
Global Elections
Asia Pacific
Latin America
Middle East
Election results
Advance vote
Google trends
AP & Elections
Global elections
U.S. Supreme Court
Auto Racing
Movie Reviews
What to Stream
Book Reviews
Celebrity Interviews
Financial Markets
Financial Wellness
The Ancient World
Photo Essays
Climate Questions
Climate Migration
India Focus
Artificial Intelligence
Social Media
Back to school
Food & Recipes

EPA data make it hard to know the extent of the contamination from last year’s Ohio derailment

FILE - Cleanup continues, Feb. 24, 2023, at the site of a Norfolk Southern freight train derailment that happened on Feb. 3, in East Palestine, Ohio. (AP Photo/Matt Freed, File)

FILE - Environmental Protection Agency workers work in Leslie Run in East Palestine, Ohio, June 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

FILE - In this photo taken with a drone, portions of a Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed the previous night in East Palestine, Ohio, remain on fire at mid-day, Feb. 4, 2023. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

Copy Link copied

The way the Environmental Protection Agency has reported its test results since a Norfolk Southern train derailed and officials released and burned chemicals that spewed a toxic cloud over East Palestine, Ohio, makes it hard for residents to know the full extent of contamination and potential risks to their health .

Data analyzed by The Associated Press show the EPA doesn’t provide a specific measurement for chemicals that fall below a reporting limit, making it harder to know how much is there.

The EPA has said that residents shouldn’t worry about contamination from chemicals that are below the human health screening level that indicates danger and is usually higher than that reporting limit. But some health experts say that when mixed together, as they are in East Palestine, even levels of chemicals below that standard could raise the risk for cancer or other serious health problems. Extended exposure to low levels of chemicals might also cause problems.

The agency’s lack of transparency, combined with independent tests that appear to show lingering problem areas from the February 2023 derailment, are making it hard for some residents to trust the EPA’s assurances that they will be safe.

“I used to feel like those were agencies to protect people, but I don’t feel like that anymore,” said Krissy Ferguson, who still isn’t living in her home because of her concerns. “They need to come forth and do the right thing. They know these chemicals just don’t go away.”

What’s going on with the numbers?

The test results the government reports are often labeled undetectable because the EPA says there isn’t enough of a chemical present to reliably determine how much is there. The agency doesn’t report exact numbers when the results are below a conservative reporting limit identified by the lab.

But results from the railroad’s contractors and independent testers working in East Palestine include more details. Those spreadsheets include actual results even when they are below the reporting limits.

That’s because there is a lower threshold called a method detection limit that spells out what a test is capable of finding. Testing experts say they generally report results above that lower limit because the numbers are considered reliable.

The EPA hasn’t explained why it hasn’t disclosed detailed data on low levels of chemicals but has said its work in East Palestine is focused on levels high enough to pose an immediate threat to human health. When asked about testing of creeks near the site of the derailment, the agency said in a statement that “none of the data that we’ve reviewed shows chemicals in the sediments far exceeding the long-term human health screening levels. Put simply, short term exposure to the sediments will not have meaningful increase in risk to human health.”

The EPA data and independent tests done this year do show the level of chemicals in the creeks improving after the cleanup efforts, even though some potentially dangerous substances linger at low levels. The agency also says that some of the contamination was likely present before the derailment because of industries that operated in East Palestine decades ago.

The latest spreadsheet EPA posted on its East Palestine website last month shows 8,758 soil and sediment test results produced since the derailment. Some 6,400 of those entries declare there wasn’t enough of an individual chemical found to report it accurately under a conservative reporting limit. But new data from Norfolk Southern’s contractors, who have done most of the testing, reveal that 25,442 of 26,874 test results from last year — nearly 95% — had detectable levels of chemicals, according to the detailed information the lab provides.

Carnegie Mellon professor Neil Donahue, director of that university’s Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research, said it’s customary to report any data that’s over the method detection limit because the numbers are considered reliable. Other experts agreed the EPA should just report the data it has and explain it.

“Why don’t they just straight tell people what the truth is? Do they not think we can handle it?” said resident Christina Siceloff.

What are the health implications?

Even though it’s hard to know exactly how much of a health threat exists, medical researchers say there are real concerns in East Palestine because some residents have reported unexplained health problems since the derailment, including respiratory issues, rashes, hair loss, nosebleeds, asthma and at least one case of male breast cancer that prompted a double mastectomy.

The human health screening levels that EPA is relying on are based on short-term exposure. It’s less clear what it means to be exposed to these chemicals over a longer period of time.

Researchers like Dr. Beatrice Golomb say that prolonged exposure to low levels of chemicals can be a problem. And even when there is a standard for exposure to a single chemical, there is no good research establishing what it would mean to be exposed to a mixture of chemicals, said Golomb, who is based at the University of California San Diego.

It’s not clear exactly what combinations of chemicals were created after several tank cars filled with hazardous chemicals spilled their contents and caught fire. Three days after the derailment, officials unnecessarily blew open five tank cars of vinyl chloride and burned that plastic ingredient because they feared those cars would explode. New substances were created when all those chemicals burned.

How does this affect a pending $600 million settlement?

A federal judge will hear arguments Wednesday about whether a $600 million class action settlement the railroad is offering to residents who live within 20 miles (32 kilometers) of the derailment should be approved.

Some residents say the deal shouldn’t be approved because they don’t have enough information to evaluate whether they are getting enough compensation. People who live within 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) of the derailment can get up to $70,000 per household for property damage and up to $25,000 per person for any health problems, though the amounts offered drop off for those living farther away.

The lawyers involved in the settlement say they believe it is fair based on what they know. But they haven’t shared details of their investigation with residents.

Stephen Petty, a forensic engineering expert hired by class-action attorneys to evaluate the contamination before residents agreed to the settlement, said that when the EPA reports it couldn’t detect any results, “they’re implying that they’re small or not useful. But that’s not true.” He said EPA is “misrepresenting what the actual data likely is.”

Petty can’t disclose his own test results unless a judge orders him to — like residents have asked — because of the settlement agreement, but he said the EPA shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the testing other independent testers have done.

The lack of detail in EPA data could influence whether the judge approves the settlement. Lawyer Dan Abraham, who represents 35 people who objected to the deal, said it shouldn’t be approved yet because the attorneys who negotiated it haven’t released results of Petty’s tests or other details they’ve learned.

The lawyers who negotiated the deal say that most people who live within the area covered support it and that roughly 55,000 claims were filed. Only 370 households and 47 businesses opted out.

Money blog: Why are so many major companies withdrawing vegan products?

As many companies withdraw products due to lack of demand, we dive into the data and ask if the vegan bubble has really burst - or whether there is something else going on. Leave a comment with your thoughts below and we'll be back with live Money updates on Monday.

Saturday 28 September 2024 21:35, UK

Essential reads

Why are so many companies withdrawing vegan products?
Veganism in decline? No, but we're turning away from meat alternatives | Readers have their say
Four things you need to know from Money this week
The two women trying to transform supermarket shelves and how menopause is perceived

Tips and advice

Why you should submit a meter reading this weekend
Savings Guide : 'Now is the time to lock away your cash'
Your takeaway order is wrong - what can you do?
All benefits and entitlements available to pensioners

Ask a question or make a comment

Our in-depth look at why so many vegan products are being withdrawn (see previous post) has prompted hundreds of comments - and one theme has dominated our inbox.

Many vegan readers wrote in to suggest that rather than signifying a decline in interest in veganism, the withdrawals are instead a symptom of people becoming more aware of ultra-processed food - which, as the nutritionist in the article pointed out, are prevalent in meat alternatives.

As the article made clear, there's no simple narrative here - with the data contradicting itself: the number of vegans is seemingly up, but search interest in veganism has fallen off a cliff in the last couple of years.

Here are some of your comments...

Vegans don't want to eat the ultra processed 'lookalikes' that the mass producers think we want to eat. Supermarkets try to lead the trend with alternative copies, when actually eating a vegan diet is about embracing real food. James

The reason why people no longer buy vegan food products is due to them being high in fat and salt. Everyone is more savvy now and cook their own healthier vegan dishes - that's much cheaper. Riversong

To be vegan you really need to use whole foods and not packaged ultra processed food - which will often include sugars and chemicals that take away all the benefit. It's a myth that you cannot get all nutrients including proteins from veg and fruit. CaptainFog

The article erroneously claims that a vegan diet is expensive, which may be true if you eat an exclusively unhealthy ultra processed diet of fake meats etc, but as the nutritionist points out, a diet of legumes, veg, fruit, nuts, seeds, whole grains etc is very healthy, and cheaper. Karlos (part one)

The focus on meat alternatives being withdrawn is flawed, since these processed products are only a stepping stone to a vegan diet, and most vegans like myself (9+years) rarely or never eat them after the transition finished. Companies overestimated the market initially. Karlos (part two)

With the rise of awareness of ultra processed foods, the surprise discovery that most plant based vegan foods fall into that highly undesirable category is, I suggest, a major reason why there has been a decline in buying these products. It was mine. Jancandy

Attributing a decline in vegan search down to price or reduction in veganism is too simplistic. We want to be healthier vegans. Many of us previously excited about the latest product have evolved and make our own without harmful preservatives. We are avoiding ultra processed food S123

I went vegan 8 months ago and it's been a great success. I don't know anyone who goes vegan because it's cheaper. Primarily we do it for health and to object to the use and slaughter of animals. If you batch cook, buy in bulk and learn some new cooking techniques, you'll be fine. Aidan

Vegans are growing in numbers and always will be. It's just that many of us are switching to more whole foods. I'm vegan 7 years and used vegan meat to help me transition to real foods like nuts, seeds, fruit and vegetables. Veganism is humanity's last hope for sustainability. Trevor

People not giving up on veganism. Just the fake meat is not great, and unhealthy. Why do you want to eat a packed with chemicals burger if there are so many good recipes with plants only. Bea

By Katie Williams , Money team

The rise of the vegan diet seems to have been unstoppable in recent years, with more and more people making the lifestyle switch due to animal welfare, environmental and health concerns.

The "Veganuary" campaign – which started in 2014 and sees participants commit to being vegan for the entire month of January - has helped raise awareness of a plant-based diet and is credited with prompting many people to make a permanent switch.

Around 707,000 people signed up to the challenge last year, while research by comparison site Finder suggests there were an estimated 2.5 million vegans in the UK in 2024 (4.7% of the population), with the number increasing by roughly 1.1 million since 2023.

Products withdrawn - and search interest in decline

Despite this apparent increase in people adopting a vegan diet, other data poses significant questions for the market.

Figures from consumer intelligence company NIQ show that in the year to June, sales of chilled and frozen meat alternatives dropped by around 21% compared with the same period two years earlier. There was a slight rebound in dairy-free milk sales, which increased by 0.8% on average compared with 2022.

Heinz disappointed some customers this year by revealing it had discontinued its vegan salad cream to meet "changing culinary trends and tastes". Greggs axed its vegan steak bake in May, Quorn removed its chilled bacon slices from shelves, while other brands such as Heck, Oatly and Nestle have all reduced their vegan product offerings in the past couple of years.

Innocent scrapped its dairy-free milk range in March 2023, joking that only five people had bought the products.

The evidence of a decline doesn't stop with product withdrawals. Google data shows searches for "veganism", "vegan diet" and "vegan recipes" appeared to peak in late 2019 and early 2020 before dropping away gradually in the years after.

'I couldn't believe how much cheaper the non-vegan food was'

Two former vegans told us about their reasons for going exclusively vegan initially – and their reasons for stopping.

Megan d'Ardenne, 26, from London, said she was vegetarian on and off throughout her teenage and younger adult years, before deciding to try Veganuary in her final year of university.

After enjoying spending the month finding new recipes and testing out a new diet, Megan decided to carry on being vegan and started a food blog ( @comedinewithmegs ) showcasing her creations during the first lockdown.

But after restrictions were lifted, and restaurants opened up again, finding places with a good selection of vegan options became challenging, Megan said.

"At the time, a lot of places were offering limited menus post-COVID which made it more difficult. I remember being at a wine bar with my friends in central London and they didn't have any vegan options available so I shared a cheese board with them," she said.

"It was delicious and reminded me of my love for cheese. After that, I went back to a vegetarian diet which I followed for around six months before I started to reintroduce meat again."

Megan noticed she was able to save some money after she stopped being vegan.

"I couldn't believe how much cheaper the non-vegan food was, especially dairy. My milk, yoghurts and cheese were under half what I was spending before," she said.

Though she's returned to a diet that includes meat, Megan says she still chooses to eat vegetarian some of the time and points out that one of her favourite dishes is a Caesar salad using tofu – which she'll stock up on when it's on offer.

'I didn't want to spend my holiday hunting for vegan alternatives'

Sophie Jones, 30, from Bristol, went vegan in 2017 due to "health and ethical reasons" having already been on a vegetarian diet for three years.

But she decided to stop being exclusively vegan on a trip to Paris in 2022. She said she didn't want to spend her holiday hunting for vegan pastries and cheese "in a city that's already expensive".

Sophie said she'd also found meat substitutes were more expensive than the real thing for less product.

There was a lack of originality in the vegan options being offered by restaurants, she added: "Unless you're going somewhere where the entire menu was vegan, it was usually a burger or pasta dish."

Convenience was Sophie's main reason for introducing more fish and meat back into her diet.

Meat-free alternatives are more expensive - but it's not that simple

We looked at the price of meat/animal products versus their animal-free alternatives at the UK's biggest three supermarkets to see how much more shoppers could be paying at the tills for similar items.

We compared supermarket own-brand items with their own-brand meat-free alternatives. Offers and loyalty scheme discounts were excluded.

A quick look at three different products - sausages, burgers and milk - revealed that the equivalent vegan/vegetarian alternatives were around a third more expensive on average, when quantity was taken into account.

The above could explain why some brands have withdrawn meat-alternative options - the price point is putting people off, Megan being one.

But author and nutritionist Rhiannon Lambert says a vegan diet can be made affordable.

"Meat alternatives can be expensive," she said. "[But] canned vegetables, such as legumes and pulses, are an excellent example of cost-effective vegan choices. They are both full of fibre and a great source of protein."

She added: "When it comes to dairy milk alternatives, unsweetened soya milk is a cheaper choice and also has similar protein and fat content to semi-skimmed cow's milk."

Ultra-processed concerns

While cost and convenience are clearly putting some people off, the data is contradictory: products are being withdrawn and search interest has fallen off a cliff, but the number of vegans appears to still be rising.

Rhiannon's comments for this article hint at another reason meat-alternatives are being withdrawn.

"Meat alternatives can be processed and so are not always the best choice of protein for those following vegan diets," she said.

As awareness of UPFs has risen, perhaps it is that vegans are just being more concerned about the products they buy.

What are the benefits of a vegan diet v meat?

Rhiannon said research shows a vegan diet can bring "numerous health benefits" including a decreased risk of heart disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer.

"Vegan diets also have a lower environmental footprint compared with diets which are rich in animal products as they require fewer natural resources and produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to sustainability and conservation," she said.

"This being said, it's easy for a vegan diet to lack essential nutrients resulting in vitamin deficiencies, and therefore it requires meticulous planning and it is often best to seek advice from a registered nutritionist or dietician on how best to follow this diet," Rhiannon added.

"Animal products such as meat, dairy and eggs are rich sources of essential nutrients like high-quality protein, vitamin B12, heme-iron, and calcium which are vital for overall health."

Those wanting to make more environmentally conscious choices can eat less red meat, plan meals ahead to avoid waste and shop locally and seasonally, she added.

By Jimmy Rice , Money blog editor

We're signing out for the week as far as live updates are concerned - though do check out our long read on whether the vegan bubble has burst tomorrow morning.

Until then, here are the four major takeaways from Money this week...

The good news for holidaymakers continued with the pound showing strength against both the euro and dollar.

Political stability here in the UK, as well as better than expected economic growth, have boosted the pound in recent weeks.

The dollar, meanwhile, has suffered due to forecasts of faster US interest rate cuts, with the Fed wanting to loosen monetary policy to stimulate a floundering jobs market.

In Europe, the currency has been spooked by fears Germany is also facing a recession.

All this means Britons can get more holiday money for a pound: around $1.34 and €1.20.

Notably, Goldman Sachs thinks the pound could reach $1.40 within a year.

The value of the pound also makes importing fuel cheaper - which, combined with lower oil prices, is being reflected at the pumps.

Earlier this week, petrol and diesel prices sank to a three-year low - with the RAC putting the average price of a litre of petrol at 135.7p, almost 60p cheaper than the record high hit two years ago.

Young people were urged this week to check whether they have unclaimed cash sitting in Child Trust Funds (CTFs).

HMRC says more than 670,000 18-22 year olds are yet to cash in on their stash from the government savings pots.

It says each account is worth £2,212 on average.

Child Trust Funds are long-term tax-free savings accounts set up under the previous Labour government for children born between 1 September 2002 and 2 January 2011.

Youngsters can take control of their account at 16 and withdraw funds when they turn 18 and the account matures.

Investment platform AJ Bell says more than a quarter of CTF accounts were set up by the government, rather than parents, meaning many people may be unaware they have one.

It's crucial people look into it if they think they may have a CTF - before fees eat up all their money.

Finally, rail workers voted to accept pay offers from train companies and Network Rail - putting an end to strikes that have impacted passengers for years.

Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) backed a one-year rise of 4.5% at Network Rail (NR) and increases at train operators of 4.75% for the last year and 4.5% for 2024-25.

Here are a few other Money posts you may wish to check out from the week...

We'll be back with live updates on Monday morning - and don't forget our Saturday long read from 8am tomorrow.

If Married At First Sight has taught us anything, it's that there is no such thing as a free wedding.

As eight more couples head down the aisle in the Channel 4 show, casino site Bonusetu looked at the venues where they tied the knot on their first meeting.

The Elvetham Hotel

The Elvetham Hotel in Hook, Hampshire, hosted the weddings of Kristina and Kieran, Eve and Charlie, Sacha and Ross, and Richelle and Orson.

Their wedding packages range from £3,000 to £8,000, the venue can accommodate up to 160 guests for receptions and 120 for dining. The stately home counts King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I as former guests.

The hotel has a 4.5 star rating on Google, from more than a thousand reviews.

Venue hire includes access to elegant rooms, a wedding breakfast, an evening reception, formal gardens, and a dramatic red-carpet arrival.

Farnham Castle

Farnham Castle, a historic Surrey venue, was the backdrop for Emma and Caspar, Lacey and Nathan, Polly and Adam, and Holly and Alex's wedding days.

With prices starting at £4,000, the price of packages at the castle can reach as much as £25,000.

This Grade I and Grade II-listed castle accommodates up to 350 guests for receptions and 238 for seated dinners. The venue offers a grand ballroom and the services of an in-house wedding coordinator. It also averages a 4.5 star rating on Google, from more than 600 reviews.

A spokesperson at Bonusetu.com said: "While we cringe, laugh, and hope for successful couples, those planning a wedding can find incredible inspiration for their own big day. You may be watching for love but end up falling for a venue instead."

Two pensioners are seeking to take the Scottish and UK governments to court over the cut to the winter fuel payment.

Peter and Florence Fanning, of Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire, have raised proceedings with the help of the Govan Law Centre against the Scottish government and the UK work and pensions secretary over the policy.

It comes after the Scottish government announced its once universal benefit will now be means-tested, replicating a UK government decision.

The introduction of a replacement Scottish benefit was also delayed.

The judicial review - which has been raised at the Court of Session - now requires a judge's approval to move to a hearing on the merits, with Govan Law Centre seeking to expedite both the case and its application for legal aid to ensure a decision can be handed down before the winter.

The case asks the court to rule on whether the decision was unlawful, which would then allow the petitioners to ask the court to, in effect, set aside the policy and restore the winter fuel payment to all.

"We are hoping to be successful, given the manifest injustice involved, however, my work as a trade unionist and shop steward has taught me that some battles are worth fighting regardless of the outcome - I believe this is one such battle," said Mr Fanning.

Read the full report here:

The Co-op is now using artificial intelligence to detect shoplifters after theft costs rose by 19% (up to £39.5m) in the first half of the year.

The technology will also be able to detect assaults on staff.

The member-owned business, which returned to profit despite the growing toll of shoplifting, has spent £18m so far this year on measures to protect staff, including rolling out body-worn cameras and fortified kiosks.

While the supermarket said it did not use facial recognition, it is participating separately in Project Pegasus. This is where CCTV images are shared with retailers and the police and then run through databases to identify serial thieves and dangerous individuals.

The Association of Convenience Stores said its members were reporting "high volume" and "very brazen and direct" incidents of shoplifting - with meat, cheese and alcohol typically being targeted.

The most recent figures for the outcomes of recorded crimes show that, of 436,171 cases of shoplifting, 71,741 led to a criminal charge that year.

Retailers have warned that some smaller shops are buying stolen goods from professional shoplifters who steal to order for criminal gangs to feed their addiction problems.

On Tuesday 1 October, energy prices will rise for most households - so to avoid being charged more than you should, it's a good idea to do a meter reading this weekend.

If (like around 85% of households) you are on a standard variable tariff then your energy bill is set to rise by around 10% from next month, due to the latest price cap change.

But by giving a meter reading before then, it stops your supplier from estimating your usage and potentially assuming you may have used more than you did, and at a higher rate than you currently have.

This weekend is the perfect time to do it - if you wait until the deadline, you may find yourself in a rush that sees suppliers' websites and phone lines crash (this happened in March 2022 at the height of the energy crisis). By sorting it this weekend, any discrepancy will be minimal.

Some firms do let you backdate your reading, but you have to have taken the reading on the actual day and just be submitting it a few days later - by that point, you will have done most of the work so might as well just get it done.

If you want to check if suppliers will backdate your readings (and some will as late as 11 October), MoneySavingExpert have a handy guide here .

If you have a working smart meter, you don't need to do this - it is done automatically.

It's the day before your friend's birthday and you've completely forgotten to get them a gift.

Usually, at this point, your only choices are to leave the house and go to an actual shop, or put more money in the pocket of Jeff Bezos and hope an Amazon Prime delivery turns up on time.

But now, online marketplace Not On The High Street and Deliveroo have teamed up to give customers access to on-demand delivery of more than a thousand gifts and personalised products in as little as 25 minutes.

From this week, at least 15 small brands across London will be available to order via the delivery app, under the umbrella of Not On The High Street. More independent brands will be added to the platform as it expands.

It's not the first time a delivery brand has expanded beyond food - yesterday we told you that Just Eat has hooked up with Lovehoney to get vibrators and lingerie sent to their doorstep in minutes.

Just Eat said the products will be delivered inside sealed, unbranded paper bags, with receipts inside to ensure "discretion". The brand has already made deals with Lush cosmetics and Boots.

Deliveroo penned a similar deal with Ann Summers earlier this year.

Every Friday we take an overview of the mortgage market, hearing from industry voices and getting a round-up of the best rates courtesy of the independent experts at Moneyfactscompare.co.uk .

Mortgage rates have continued their trickle down this week - a process that's been under way since the summer as the path towards lower interest rates now seems set (even if the Bank of England appears keen to walk down the path very slowly).

This is how average rates are looking - though it's important to stress that many borrowers will now be able to get deals much nearer, or even below, the 4% mark...

First-time buyers

There was a significant boost for those looking to get on the housing ladder this week as Nationwide announced it would start lending up to six times someone's salary.

David Hollingworth, a director at L&C Mortgages , told Money that this could help combat two serious challenges facing these buyers - house prices remaining "extremely resilient" despite some falls over recent years, and building a deposit during a cost of living crisis.

"The need for the longer fix is to give stability of payment and remove the chance of interest rate fluctuation pushing payments up and also enables them to apply more flexible stress rates," he said.

Mr Hollingworth pointed out that Halifax has also extended its first-time buyer limit to 5.5 times a salary.

"Of course, lenders will still apply their affordability tests," he said.

There is often a minimum household income expected. For example, Nationwide expects a minimum income of £50,000 or £30,000 in the case of a single applicant.

Moneyfacts finance expert Rachel Springall says those looking for buy-to-let mortgages can be "encouraged" by lenders such as Santander, NatWest and Leeds Building Society lowering rates this week.

This is offset, however, by "concern about a potential hike in capital gains tax in the budget next month".

She said: "Landlords have had to review their portfolios over the years due to changing taxation rules and some may plan to buy through a limited company, according to new research."

One benefit here is paying the lower corporation tax rather than income tax.

Landlords who utilise limited company structures have incorporated an increasing proportion of their portfolios over the past four years, a study has found.

And the research, carried out by Pegasus Insight, suggests 67% of landlords who intend to buy in the next 12 months plan to do so through a limited company.

Louisa Sedgwick, managing director for mortgages at Paragon Bank (which commissioned the study), said: "Landlords have increasingly used limited companies to mitigate the impact of tax changes phased in from 2016.

"While incorporation isn't necessarily the best option in every situation, and landlords should seek advice from a professional financial or tax adviser, this highlights the opportunity for those that place this type of business."

Moneyfacts has looked at the best rates on offer for landlords now...

Moneyfacts also rounds up what it calls "best buys", which look beyond the lowest rates and takes in incentives and fees...

Baked beans are a staple of British cuisine, with a reported two million tins eaten every day - but which should you reach for to get the best taste?

In what might come as a surprise to some, Aldi's own-label baked beans have come out top in a blind taste test by Which? experts - beating pricier brands such as Heinz and Branston.

The consumer champion asked 66 baked bean lovers to test and rate 10 different options from big-name UK supermarkets, as well as branded products.

Aldi's Bramwells Baked Beans (41p for a 410g can) was the highest rated with an overall score of 76% - also bagging a Which? Best Buy and Great Value endorsement.

The panel said the beans looked good and had an "appealing aroma", while three-quarters enjoyed the strength of the flavour.

Branston (£1 for a 410g can) came closely behind with a score of 75%, followed by Co-op's own-brand offering (49p for 400g can) which received a score of 74%.

And while Heinz Beanz reign supreme for many, the panel rated the product just fifth out of 10 with a score of 72%.

Natalie Hitchins, Which? head of home products and services, said the results show customers "don't have to pay a premium for the best taste".

"Choosing supermarket own-label groceries is not only a great way to save money, but our tests prove that you can end up with a better tasting product and can save over £100 a year by making the switch."

Be the first to get Breaking News

Install the Sky News app for free

IMAGES

Source of Data in Research
Types Of Research Methodology With Examples
(PDF) SOURCES OF DATA AND THEIR EVALUATION METHODOLOGY
Sources of Data
Finding Sources
Metodi di raccolta dati: Fonti ed esempi

VIDEO

Long Term DATA Archive {5D Optical Storage} in HINDI
What are the most Common Data Sources?
HOW TO COLLECT INTERPRET AND REPORT DATA IN RESEARCH
Data Sources Explained: Types and Examples
How to Find Reliable Sources for Your PaperWith the right strategies#academicwriting #researchproces
Data Collection Methods in Quantitative Reasoning Part 02

COMMENTS

Sources of Data For Research: Types & Examples
Primary data sources refer to original data collected firsthand by researchers specifically for their research purposes. These sources provide fresh and relevant information tailored to the study's objectives. Examples of primary data sources include surveys and questionnaires, direct observations, experiments, interviews, and focus groups.
3.5: Data as Sources
Data as Sources. Using data as sources can help with all of your research project's information needs: Learn more background information. Answer your research question. (The evidence that data provide can help you decide on the best answer for your question.) Convince your audience that your answer is correct.
Data Sources in Research: Ultimate Guide
A data source is any location where you can find facts, figures, or other relevant information to support your research. You may create your own data source through experimentation, surveys, or observations, or you may choose to use data produced by other researchers. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages, depending on your research ...
9. Data as Sources
9. Data as Sources. Using data as sources can help with all of your research project's information needs: Learn more background information. Answer your research question. (The evidence that data provide can help you decide on the best answer for your question.) Convince your audience that your answer is correct.
Research Data
Research data refers to any information or evidence gathered through systematic investigation or experimentation to support or refute a hypothesis or answer a research question. It includes both primary and secondary data, and can be in various formats such as numerical, textual, audiovisual, or visual. Research data plays a critical role in ...
Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research
Choosing & Using Sources presents a process for academic research and writing, from formulating your research question to selecting good information and using it effectively in your research assignments. Additional chapters cover understanding types of sources, searching for information, and avoiding plagiarism. Each chapter includes self-quizzes and activities to reinforce core concepts and ...
Data Collection
Data Collection | Definition, Methods & Examples. Published on June 5, 2020 by Pritha Bhandari.Revised on June 21, 2023. Data collection is a systematic process of gathering observations or measurements. Whether you are performing research for business, governmental or academic purposes, data collection allows you to gain first-hand knowledge and original insights into your research problem.
Data as Sources
Data observed, collected, or created for research purposes can be numbers, text, images, audio clips, and video clips. But in this section on using data as sources, we're going to concentrate on numerical data. More women than men voted in the last presidential election in a majority of states. A certain drug shows promising results in the ...
Eleven quick tips for finding research data
Tip 1: Think about the data you need and why you need them. Tip 2: Select the most appropriate resource. Tip 3: Construct your query strategically. Tip 4: Make the repository work for you. Tip 5: Refine your search. Tip 6: Assess data relevance and fitness -for -use. Tip 7: Save your search and data- source details.
15 Steps to Good Research
Select the most appropriate investigative methods (surveys, interviews, experiments) and research tools (periodical indexes, databases, websites). Plan the research project. Retrieve information using a variety of methods (draw on a repertoire of skills). Refine the search strategy as necessary.
PDF Data Sources for Scholarly Research: Towards a Guide for Novice Researchers
The role of the research-worthy problem and literature in research have been explored previously (Ellis & Levy, 2008; Levy & Ellis, 2006). This paper explores the third piece, data, as a vital component of scholarly enquiry. The target audience for this paper is the novice researcher, such as doctoral students or junior faculty members.
Sources of Data: What They Are, Types & Examples
A data source is a pool of statistical facts and non-statistical facts that a researcher or analyst can use to do more work on their research. Data analytics and data analysis are closely related processes that involve extracting insights from data to make informed decisions. LEARN ABOUT: Level of Analysis.
Data Collection in Research: Examples, Steps, and FAQs
Data collection is the process of gathering information from various sources via different research methods and consolidating it into a single database or repository so researchers can use it for further analysis. Data collection aims to provide information that individuals, businesses, and organizations can use to solve problems, track progress, and make decisions.
Primary vs. Secondary Sources
When you do research, you have to gather information and evidence from a variety of sources. Primary sources provide raw information and first-hand evidence. Examples include interview transcripts, statistical data, and works of art. Primary research gives you direct access to the subject of your research. Secondary sources provide second-hand ...
Evaluating Sources
When you write for an academic audience, you are responsible for making sure that any information you provide and any ideas you cite come from sources that are both reliable and appropriate for your assignment. The most reliable sources are those that have been vetted by scholars in the field—articles published in peer-reviewed journals and ...
Data as Sources
Using data as sources can help with all of your research project's information needs: Learn more background information. Answer your research question. (The evidence that data provide can help you decide on the best answer for your question.) Convince your audience that your answer is correct. (Data often give you ecidence that your answer ...
Research Methods
Research methods are specific procedures for collecting and analyzing data. Developing your research methods is an integral part of your research design. When planning your methods, there are two key decisions you will make. First, decide how you will collect data. Your methods depend on what type of data you need to answer your research question:
Primary Data
The purpose of primary data is to gather information directly from the source, without relying on secondary sources or pre-existing data. This data is collected through research methods such as surveys, interviews, experiments, and observations. Primary data is valuable because it is tailored to the specific research question or problem at hand ...
Data Collection
Data collection is the process of gathering and collecting information from various sources to analyze and make informed decisions based on the data collected. This can involve various methods, such as surveys, interviews, experiments, and observation. In order for data collection to be effective, it is important to have a clear understanding ...
Research Guides: Data Sources: How to Cite Data & Statistics
A data citation includes the typical components of other citations: Author or creator: the entity/entities responsible for creating the data. Date of publication: the date the data was published or otherwise released to the public. Title: the title of the dataset or a brief description of it if it's missing a title.
Eleven quick tips for finding research data
Tip 1: Think about the data you need and why you need them. Tip 2: Select the most appropriate resource. Tip 3: Construct your query strategically. Tip 4: Make the repository work for you. Tip 5: Refine your search. Tip 6: Assess data relevance and fitness -for -use. Tip 7: Save your search and data- source details.
How to use open-source data and materials in your research
Finding relevant sources. Before using open-source data and materials, one must, of course, find sources that are relevant to your research topic and methods. To facilitate the sharing of such data, researchers have developed many platforms and repositories that host open-source information for many disciplines. Some examples are:
Unconventional Data Sources Fuel Research Innovations
Researchers are finding new benefits and reserves of participants by accessing data from unconventional sources, such as market-research panels, administrative systems, and GPS data. These sources can provide much larger and more diverse information than many traditional data sources, but they also come with caveats and ethical standards to be used effectively.
2.10: Data as Sources
Data observed, collected, or cerated for research purposes can be numbers, text, images, audio clips, and video clips. But in this section on using data as sources, we're going to concentrate on numerical data. TIP: From the Latin. Data is the plural of datum. (It's similar to how media is the plural of medium.)
Comprehensive Guide to Desk Research: Methods, Sources ...
Secondary data might be old and not relevant anymore. In addition, secondary sources might not keep the data up to date with the present. Next, dependent on primary research. Secondary research depends generally on good primary research data. Therefore, the research carried out by primary sources has good impact on how the secondary research is.
Key findings about U.S. immigrants
ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It does not take policy positions. The Center conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, computational social science research and other data-driven research.
EPA data make it hard to know the extent of the contamination from last
The way the Environmental Protection Agency has reported its test results since a Norfolk Southern train derailed and officials released and burned chemicals that spewed a toxic cloud over East Palestine, Ohio, makes it hard for residents to know the full extent of contamination and potential risks to their health.. Data analyzed by The Associated Press show the EPA doesn't provide a ...
Money blog: Why are so many major companies withdrawing ...
Around 707,000 people signed up to the challenge last year, while research by comparison site Finder suggests there were an estimated 2.5 million vegans in the UK in 2024 (4.7% of the population ...