As we have covered in the first section on academic reading often when you are given essays by your lecturers they will provide you with a reading list: a list of references or a collection of files that will point you in the direction of relevant academic literature. Towards the beginning of your time at university, this reading list will probably be focused enough that you can simply work your way through the assigned texts and materials to understand the topic and complete your work. However, in other cases, this might not happen. Some lecturers provide far less focused reading lists. This has positives and negatives. It does allow you to explore a topic for yourself, but it will leave you to fend for yourself far more. In some cases, lecturers will go as far as to offer no reading list at all! In these situations, you will need the ability to select sources for yourself. Successful source selection will save you time, allow you to access relevant information, as well enabling you stay abreast of developing trends and themes within your discipline. It is for this reason that that it is essential you learn to master source selection.

Some things to look out for when you are selecting your sources

Who – Who wrote the source? Are they an academic, a journalist or someone else? Are they an expert in this topic who has something to offer? Consider also who the work is written for. If it’s a book for the general reader then it may not be as academically rigorous as is needed for academic assignments. For example, the popular book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is widely rejected as inaccurate by social scientists despite its popularity.

When – When was your source written? The date your source was published can be very important. Academic disciplines are iterative; that is, they build on past discoveries to produce new ideas. If a piece of work is older it might be outdated and no longer relevant. For example, if you are studying a subject like sociology and read an article from 1940, then the work is probably outdated as it’s been over 50 years since the author was in the community you want to understand.

Where – The place where a piece of work is published is also very valuable information. As we noted in Part I of the academic reading section, different journals have different interests which affect what they publish. Equally, if your article is in a textbook, it might be less argumentative than if it was written in a book or a journal. The place where writing appears does inform its usefulness. Moreover, you need to consider the country in which research was conducted; for example, medical practice can differ greatly in different countries, so does a study you read which was carried out in China bear relevance to practice in the NHS?

What – Think about what the source is focusing on specifically. It might be about the general topic you are interested in, but does it help you answer the question you are interested in? For example, a journal article might be about treatments for sprained ankles in the general population, but does it apply to professional athletes? A book chapter might give you a general overview of the history of the fabric trade between the UK and India in the 18th century, but does it give you specific details about whether raw fabric or finished items were imported?

Why – Researchers devote significant time to their research. A good question can be to ask why, and who pays for it? If the paper is arguing that a certain government policy is a success, perhaps it might be worth seeing who funded or commissioned the research. Might these motivations affect the quality of the evidence? If the paper is written by an expert in a discipline that focuses on solving a problem based on their perspectives as experts in that discipline, might there be answers they're not aware of or interested in from other disciplines?

Image: geralt on Pixabay