ENC 0025 - College Prep Writing II - (Brandon): Where to start

College research involves using a variety of resources to find information that is reliable and relevant to the topic. Most college research involves using academic or scholarly resources that are available from your campus library. Many of the resources, including encyclopedias, articles, book chapters, and videos, are available online from the library's website.

It is important to know that there is a difference between doing research using the "free" web and library resources. The video below from the Hartness Library System gives a nice overview of the difference between casual research, such as reading the local paper, and more scholarly research, using library resources.  Popular sources are written for the general public. Scholarly (academic) sources are written by scholars in the discipline and written for other researchers in the same discipline.  Typically, scholarly articles will provide the authors' names and credentials. You will find a list of sources used.