STAT 1004: Learning From Data: Critical Analysis of Information

As you decide which resources to include in your research, here are some things to think about:

Authority:  Who wrote it?  What sort of expertise do they have in this area?

Coverage:  Is it relevant to your topic?  

Objectivity:  Is there any bias?  If so, how much?

Accuracy:  Is the information correct?  Is it in alignment with other research findings or articles?  

Currency:  When was your resource produced?  Does this matter for your topic?  

For the assignment in this class, you need to be able to both understand how to read citations and create citations.  As read through your articles, books, and other resources, and try to use bibliographies in order to find additional resources, you'll be coming across a lot of different citation styles.  Citation styles, while they may look different, all contain the same basic information:

Use this information to search for the full text of the article.  See the box below for more information about this!

When you have a citation for an article that you're trying to find, there are a couple of different ways you can try to track down the article.

1.  Use Summon.  Summon can link you directly to articles.  Simply type in the full title of the article (such as, W. G. Sebald:  The Pleasure and Pain of Beauty").  If we have access to the article, Summon will link you to it.

2.  Check the journal subscription.  If using Summon to find the article doesn't work, then you'll want to check and see if we subscribe to the journal that the article is from.  In the example above, the journal title is German Life and Letters.  In order to see if we have access to that journal, I will use the journal search on the library website:

3.  Contact your librarian!

Using what you learned in class on Monday, analyze and compare the article from class [1] with any Wikipedia entry on College Student Alcoholism.  Use the 6 basic criteria of reliability to compare the two information sources and write a short paragraph analyzing the sources. Turn in both the comparison and the analysis. 


[1] Iconis, R. (2014). Understanding alcohol abuse among college students: Contributing factors and strategies for intervention. Contemporary Issues in Education Research (Online), 7(3), 243.