Academic Research

Academic research at university is a skill that incoming students are assumed to already have and almost universally don’t. The school habit of opening Wikipedia and following the first three results stops working when an essay needs ten sources, five of which must be peer-reviewed, and every claim needs a citation that survives a marker checking it. The course starts with where sources actually live — Google Scholar for breadth, JSTOR and discipline-specific databases (PubMed for life sciences, Web of Science for STEM, MLA for literature) for depth — and how to use each effectively, including the search operators that turn 50,000 hits into 200 relevant ones. It then covers source evaluation: the practical difference between a peer-reviewed journal article, a working paper, a conference paper, a book chapter, a government report, and a high-quality magazine piece, and the position to take on each in academic writing. Citation manager setup gets practical attention — Zotero is the recommended default and the course walks through browser integration, deduplication, and bibliography generation in the major citation styles (Harvard, MLA, Chicago, APA). The honest framing throughout: a source is “good enough” relative to the alternatives and the standard of the work. A weekly newspaper opinion column is not a citation; a peer-reviewed empirical paper from a top-five journal in the field is. Knowing the distance between those is the actual skill.

Recommended YouTube videos

• Search YouTube: “Google Scholar advanced search university research”
• Search YouTube: “Zotero tutorial for students reference manager”
• Search YouTube: “how to evaluate academic sources peer review”
• Search YouTube: “library database search strategy university”
• Search YouTube: “literature review search and selection tutorial”