Introduction to Synthesis

A synthesis is a written discussion that draws on one or more sources. It follows that your ability to write syntheses depends on your ability to infer relationships among sources - essays, articles, fiction, and also no written sources, such as lectures, interviews, observations. This process is nothing new for you, since you infer relationships all the time - say, between something you've read in the newspaper and something you've seen for yourself, or between the teaching styles of your favorite and least favorite instructors. In fact, if you've written research papers, you've already written syntheses. In an academic synthesis, you make explicit the relationships that you have inferred among separate sources.

A synthesis is based on two or more sources, you will need to be selective when choosing information from each. It would be neither possible nor desirable, for instance, to discuss in a ten-page paper on the battle of Wounded Knee every point that the authors of two books make about their subject. What you as a writer must do is select the ideas and information from each source that best allow you to achieve your purpose.

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Information Analysis

This week we were taught about the evaluation of Sources, why we must evaluate and the criteria for the evaluation. Since the Internet is ever-growing and countless numbers of information are being put up by many people. Therefore Information  may not be reliable. The evaluation of the sources is becoming more important due to this.

There are 7 criteria that needs to be considered for evaluating the Internet sources. They are:

1. Purpose-  We should be aware of the source's objective. It should make it's purpose obvious at first.   A good source will be use to understand and use which will not make the users confused.

2. Scope-  What subject does the Source cover? We should know the breadth, depth, time and format of the source. It is necessary that it should have detail description of the concerned topic.

3. Authority- The person who holds the power to do whatever he wants with the work. It is necessary to identify the authority and their expertise.

4. Audience- It is necessary to know who the intended users are. It helps in determining the level of the material.

5. Information Content- The content is based on accuracy, currency and uniqueness.

6. Design and Layout- It should be well organized and logically presented for understanding the information easily. The information contained should be well divided for easy use and navigability. The color, style, multimedia and functionality should also be taken into consideration.

7. Access/ Work ability- How easy and user friendly is the source? the following aspects are taken into consideration when judging its accessibility, ease of use, search-ability, brows-ability, software reliability, connectivity, cost policy, censorship, language, user support.

These are summaries of useful criteria for evaluating resources.

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Paraphrasing, Summarizing and Quoting

We learnt about the integration of sources. There are basically three ways in which we use our sources to provide evidence for our arguments. They are Quotations, Paraphrases and Summaries. We learnt that it is important to integrate sources for various reasons such as expanding the depth of the writing, giving examples on several points of view on a subject, etc.

Choosing text to integrate:  noting key ideas and main points, summarizing the main idea, paraphrasing important supporting points and directly quoting the main points.

During summarizing, the main points should be in our own words. It is shorter and takes a broad overview of the source.

Paraphrasing involves putting a passage from a material into our own words. It could be shorter or the same length as the original one and it is usually done for the most significant part.

During Quoting the author's word should be put in the same way as it was. It should be identical and must match the source document. The actual words are important here and cannot be replaced.

Single Phrases and In-Text Citation

Single phrases show someone's work. It shows that the words and ideas belong to someone other than the author.

In-Text Citation are the parenthetical pieces of information that appear usually at the end of a quote, paraphrase or summary.

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Citation Documenting Information Sources

Bibliography/Reference

Bibliography is a list of books and other materials which have some relationship to each other,

The listed materials contain the following components:

-Author

-Title

-Place of publication

-Publisher

-Year of publication

For e.g.,

Drucker, P.F.(2000).Innovation and entrepreneurship:Practice and Principle.London:Heinemann

Plagiarism: 

Plagiarism is using others' ideas and words without acknowledging the source and sometimes claiming as their own. Giving the credit to others' work you are using is necessary. The failure to do so may lead to some legal actions or charges whether intentional or unintentional. Many institutions do not allow plagiarism.

APA Style: The Basics

APA(American Psychological Association). The APA style was made in 1928 by Social Science professionals. This style provides guidelines for publication in Social Science Journals. It also lends consistency and makes texts more readable by those who assess or publish them.

This style is used for Term papers, Research reports, Empirical studies etc.

The style for Title, Author, and Documentation have rules which were taught in the class. There were different formats which were from the APA style. The following are some which use APA style, Books( may be one or more authors, have more than one editions), Journal, Journal article via internet etc.

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Search Strategies Basics ( Transactions and Wildcard & Phrase Searching)

Transactions and Wildcard

This week was spent on learning the usage of truncation and wildcard. These two help to broaden our search capabilities by allowing us to retrieve multiple spellings of a root word, such as singular and plural forms.

Truncation: Using a wildcard at the end of a word to search for multiple results.  It expands the search to locate all words beginning with the same root. Example: Teen* will give teen, teens, teenage, teenager, etc.

Wildcard:  A wildcard is a special character, such as an asterisk (*), question mark (?), or pound sign (#), that replaces one or more letters in a word. It usually represents a single character. Example: wom?n will give woman, women, etc.

Phrase Searching

This type of search is used with a string of words(instead of a single word) to search with. It will yield fewer results. When looking for information on Information Literacy the result of the search will yield many irrelevant documents since each of the words has its own meaning. But it has whole different meaning when put together so to be precise we either use "  " or (  ). Example: (Information Literacy).

It's use has proven very effective and time-saving. This subject is certainly a must for the people of the information age. 

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Search Strategies Basics

When to use keywords, subject headings, phrases, single words?

This week's lesson was on the topic of how to search for information using basic strategies, like which terms to be used in order to get the broader result. Usually keywords are widely used when searching or brainstorming on some concerned topic. There is also the Subject headings which uses a standardized vocabulary, usually giving you more specific resources on your topic. Some examples are Library Subject headings, Science subject headings, Thesaurus of psychological index terms, etc.

Boolean Searching

Boolean operator or keywords

This searching allows you to group words together in an database or environment such as the World Wide Web to receive a number of different results. The results widely varies depending upon the grouping of the words. It is a common search strategy.
Boolean operators are words that connect a search that may add or subtract a concept to your search. It allows OR to expand or AND to limit our search. Most of the search engines allow the use of some Boolean searching.
Boolean queries- AND
It allows grouping of words for variety of results. For example, The query 'Beach AND California' produces results containing both words.

Boolean queries- OR
Using OR will broaden the search. The query 'Beach OR California' will yield results containing either the word beach or California. 

Boolean queries- NOT
NOT helps exclude words from the search. If a result has the word that you would like to search but it also contains another word you want to exclude, then it will not show that result.

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Search Tools

This week in class we were taught about the tools we can use to seek out information.
The main search tools are the INTERNET, Databases and Library catalogs.

A Library Catalog is a file cabinet containing individual cards with bibliographic information about specific items in the Library. There is OPAC, an online catalog through which we can search for the items required. It provides details about the book, audio-visuals and other materials found in the Library. The use of OPAC is very effective making all our tasks very easy and less time consuming.

The INTERNET is also a very effective source of information in fact it is the widest source of information available in this world. Therefore it is also called the information superhighway This week's class taught us to use it effectively, introducing us to the weakness and strengths of the internet. It is designed to search for information on the world wide web. The tools we use in internet are search engines, meta-search engines, information gateways, subject directories and specialized database. Information are searched through a limited number of websites. It cannot directly access other computers.
Search engines are designed to use world wide web to search for information. For e.g. http://www.google.com/ , etc.
 Meta-search engines is multiple-data source. It searches from multiple search engines in one single search page. For e.g. metacrawler(http://www.metacrawler.com)
Information gateways provides a central access point to internet for many internet sites that cover popular news and information resources. It includes internet catalogs, subject directories, virtual libraries and gateways. It specializes in resources on a particular field. Example: ELDIS: The gateway to development information http://www.eldis.org/
Subject directories is a collection of links to a larger number of internet resources organized by topic area. Example: Infomine(http://infomine.ucr.edu/). There is also the specialized databases that are also known as the invisible web. It includes statistics, schedules, maps, figures. but now we can find it on most of search engines. It provides a reliable and up-to-date information. Some examples are the bibliographic database, google scholar, commercial database, etc.

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