Reflection #4: Research Process

          Information Literacy has helped me with the writing process and has taught me a lot. Now I am able to go to the library website and understand the databases that are offered to me here at Shippensburg. The tutorials gave me a baseline of what I would be expected during the week I did my research. Each video went into different details of the certain types of resources provided such as a magazine, book, or an electronic source. At the beginning, I tried looking up broad terms in the search bar until I found something that applied to my topic and I read the source. If it was a good source for my paper I would look into those key-words to find more reliable sources to use for my paper. I would read each source, take out quoted that help reinforces my thesis and eliminate the ones that are not strong quotes.
          To help find better quality sources in the databases I had the ability to filter out sources that would not be scholarly. This filter only allowed scholarly documents to appear in the search and eliminate any references that would come from an author with no credit to his name. The difficulty about finding the sources is the use of good keywords. If your words were too broad of an idea, the database would bring up many documents that would not be related to your topic in any way. That was the hardest part of doing a research paper is finding the right keywords that give you the results you are looking for.
         The strength of my research skills was the ability to identify scholarly sources that were required in my paper and then using those keywords to find more sources related to the reliable one. While reading each article I felt it was easy to find the quotes that would support my argument much easier than trying to find keywords. That is what I will continue to work too, the ability to understand my topic to a more relatable level so I can use my knowledge along with the information I learn about. The social interaction help escalate my paper from being a big grammar mess to a paper with a fluent flow. My tutor and I when through each paragraph breaking them all down to find the best way to use the right word choice and punctuation.