Chapter Sixteen

Personal Reaction: After reading chapter sixteen, one thing that stuck out to me was the section about doing a keyword search on the Web. I was unaware that to narrow down your topic, you have to put the word “and” in all capitals for the search engine to comprehend. Under the same topic, I was surprised to find that you could look for key phrases and/or words by putting parenthesis around your search. I also enjoyed the side by side comparison of the internet versus the library databases. This really helped to open my eyes to the advantages of databases over internet sites. Nothing in this chapter was really new to me, other than what I stated above. Finding and evaluating reliable sources has been drilled into my head since day one of freshman year in high school.

Professional Reaction: Chapter sixteen provides information about how to find and evaluate sources. One way to find information is in your college library, which contains both print and electronic resources. The electronic resources consist of online catalogs, databases, reference works and sources for facts and statistics. Another way to find information is through the Web. When looking on the Web for information, there are three different methods for running a search: entering a website’s URL, doing a keyword search or doing a subject search both in a search engine. There are many advantages to using the college library over the Web that can be found on the chart on page 714. Chapter sixteen also dives into what it takes to evaluate a source.  First, make sure that the source is authoritative, then make sure that it is accurate, then make sure that it is objective, then make sure that the source is current and last make sure that the source is comprehensive. If all of these things check out, the source is most likely going to be reliable and ready for use. Most colleges find that Wikipedia is not a credible source of information and should not be used in your writing.

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