Data driven decision making -Milestone 5
Bringing your Sources Together
Now that you've gathered research data and sources, you're ready to begin synthesizing your ideas. Synthesis is a process in which you engage with the ideas and information you've uncovered in the course of your research, and assemble that information within the framework of your own argument and judgement in order to answer your research question.
Review this video for the guidelines on how to effectively synthesize academic research into an essay in which your own voice and analysis is the most prominent component:
Note that there is a distinction between summarizing and synthesizing sources. In a summary you restate the ideas of other scholars, while in synthesis you draw on multiple sources and ideas to reach a conclusion. Review this article from the Purdue Writing Lab for examples and guidelines: Synthesizing Sources
While every scholar has a slightly different approach to navigating the process of moving from a stack of journal articles and data to a synthesized argument, your first step is to become familiar with what your sources are saying. Writing strong notes in your word-processor about emerging sub-topics (with citations!), annotating a bibliography, or taking notes in your citation manager or a note-taking software like Evernote or OneNote are all effective ways to keep track of your intellectual engagement with your sources. Remember that any notes about a source should be clearly labelled; if you make use of an idea later, you don't want to be at risk of accidental plagiarism because you forget to cite it.
Once you've developed a strong understanding of what your sources are saying, revisit your research question, and work to develop a thesis and rough outline for your paper (and the sub-sections of your paper). Consider how you will arrange the information in your paper in order to provide the strongest scaffold for your research. If your assignment has provided sub-sections for your paper, you will still need to consider how you will structure the information in each of those sections.
Quoting, Paraphrasing, Summarizing
The nuts and bolts of connecting sources together within your synthesized writing are summaries, paraphrases, and quotations. However you incorporate sources, you need to ensure that you properly cite those ideas in order to avoid plagiarism.
Read these three guides to effectively incorporating sources into your academic writing in a way that is both effective and avoids plagiarism:
Integrating Sources into your Research Paper
Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing
Paraphrase: Write it in your own words
These guides all provide advice that will let you use sources to support your argument and answer your research question. Remember that your reader wants to see your analysis and understanding of the material; even when you use a direct quotation, that quotation should be framed in a way that is smoothly incorporated to support your own analysis.
Avoiding Plagiarism
However you are incorporating your sources into your paper, they need to be fully documented, both to acknowledge the contributions of other scholars and to allow your reader to locate your work in the context of other scholarship. Properly citing adds authority to your essay while being an essential element of academic honesty.
The UMPI student handbook contains a substantial section on academic honesty: https://www.umpi.edu/static/neasc/Standard%206/Student%20Handbook.pdf. After you review it you'll note that none of the listed offenses require that you intend to take another person's words or ideas; it is completely possible to commit plagiarism by neglecting to cite an idea or forgetting to add quotation marks to a direct quote. You must proactively use robust note-taking and record keeping and strong citation practices to prevent yourself from committing accidental plagiarism. If you're unsure about whether or not you need to cite a source, review this APA guide article on appropriate level of citation. If you're still unsure...err on the side of citing your source.
The reason academic institutions take plagiarism so seriously is that ideas are the currency of academia; theft of ideas, even accidental, is still theft. Proper attribution of ideas gives credit to the people who did research you're using to build your own work. People who are reading your paper can track back the sources that influenced you and read them for themselves, which gives additional reach to those ideas.
Read these sources for additional information about the risks of plagiarism and ways to avoid it:
APA Style: Plagiarism
Avoiding Plagiarism
Plagiarism & Intellectual Challenges in American Academic Writing
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Citing your Sources
Now that you understand how important it is to cite your sources, we can discuss approaches to doing so. Different academic disciplines and contexts will ask you to use different citation styles. In this course we're going to use APA 7, one of the most widely used style guides for academic writing and citation.
If you're using a citation manager like Zotero or Mendeley, the program will create properly formatted citations and bibliographies for you as long as it contains complete information about the sources and you've correctly told it to use APA 7 as the style template.
If you're going to manually create your citations, there are several excellent guides on the internet, including:
APA Style Guide Online
Purdue OWL Writing Lab: APA Style
