Sources

For my hypothetical paper, I chose the subject of Internet addiction, particularly its impact on college and high school age students.  I further restricted my focus to American students.  My search for sources took me straight to the OSU library’s article database.  Why there? 

 

1) Speed.  I can quickly search through lots of articles and abstracts to find the right sources I need.  Also, many of the articles have their full text available online, which allows me to read and take notes on them right away.  Waiting a week or so for the article to arrive via interlibrary loan can be a pain.  Especially if the copy of the needed article is accidentally sent to the OSU campus, not the OSU-Cascades campus, by someone who didn’t read an address correctly.

 

2) Acceptability.  The article database allows me to narrow my search to only peer-reviewed/scholarly journals.  This way, my sources are more acceptable to professors.  (Yes, that article in Reader’s Digest may be riveting reading, but I doubt the professor would accept it as credible information).

 

However, I must admit that there is a drawback…

 

1) Slowness.  Sounds like a contradiction, but it isn’t.  I am a browser by habit—if I enter the library with the solemn vow to only get “1-2” books, I usually leave with 6-8 in my arms.  This problem still hits in article databases.  I see an article or a search term that looks interesting—but not necessarily relevant—and spend 5-15 minutes checking it out.

           

Most of the information I found was relevant and valuable.  However, two of the articles I chose were very short, and thus have less useful information.  Those two focused on internet addiction in students, while the third provided an overview—less helpful for the paper, but more helpful for my understanding of internet addiction.  Because I chose scholarly articles, which were written and reviewed by specialists and thus less likely to have errors.  My only concerns are that the range of these articles is very narrow, a result of not bringing in the expertise and theories of other academic fields, and that they may be too entrenched in the academic orthodoxy, and thus insulated from innovated ideas or research.  In other words, they depend too much on the ideas of other people in their field, and not enough on the ideas of people outside their academic field.  Postman touched on this briefly when he wrote about how technopoly and specialization create “experts”, who limit themselves to one field of study, and thus ignore the complexity of problems, intelligence, and other unquantifiable things that the scientific mindset tries to categorize and measure. 

           

The credibility of the sources is very important to me, as the sources’ credibility usually affects the grades and opinions of the professors for the paper.  First of all, almost every college professor who has assigned research papers to me has stressed an all-important requirement: PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES.  And, to make sure that I and the other students remember that, they repeat it.  PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES.  To judge credibility, I usually choose peer-reviewed articles, but I also look at the publication that the article appears in.  If my paper is looking at the historical side of an issue, and the article I’m looking at comes from a modern psychology journal, it probably isn’t relevant to my paper. 

 

However, some of my professors have become more open to alternative sources, such as internet sites.  In some cases, they’ve limited those sources to news sources, or internet sites that they themselves chose.  In one case, a professor assigned students to read from Wikipedia articles that he himself had written.  As long as professors keep strict guidelines on what is a credible source, I think this approach may work.  However, they have to be careful about pseudo-credible sources creeping in. 

 

But I think this leads to another issue—what exactly constitutes a credible source and how do we know?  A credible source is one where the author knows what he/she is writing about.  In school research, these are usually held to be scholars and groups of scholars, who double-check and corroborate each other’s facts and research.  In the business world, experience is the main mark of credibility.  But with the internet, sometimes it’s hard to tell if the writer of a particular document or website is credible, unless you know of that person’s reputation or are knowledgeable about the document’s subject yourself. 

 

Based on the sources I have (see the following), a professor might judge me as an orthodox and dependable student, but one who dislikes doing anything too innovative or unusual.  My three sources are all academically sound, and make for a run-of-the-mill boring paper.  (Though if professors want to read interesting papers, why don’t they assign interesting topics, or give more latitude to the students to choose topics?) 

 

 

Griffiths, M.; Miller, H.; Gillespie, T.; Sparrow, P. (1999) Internet usage and, ‘internet addiction’

in students and its implications for learning. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning,

15(1). 

 

Hansen, S. (2002) Excessive Internet usage of ‘Internet Addiction’? The implications of

diagnostic categories for student users. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 18(2).

 

Block, Jerald L. (2008).  Issues for DSM-V: Internet Addiction.  American Journal of

Psychiatry, 165(3).  

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~ by skwalker on February 10, 2009.