Searching for information is part of our everyday life, and sometimes you can just ask a friend or use Google to find answers to your questions. And there is nothing wrong with that, because that way we can find a lot of information that is useful in our everyday lives, like the weather prognosis, the easiest route from one place to the other or the opening hours for a certain restaurant.
Where to search for information depends on what your information need is. For your university studies, the requirements for your information is different than for your everyday needs. That’s why Google won’t do, but you will need scientific information sources instead. The library gives you access to many types of information sources, e.g. books, scientific journals, encyclopedias and statistical databases. Some information sources are printed and available on the library book shelves, while some are electronic and accessible all round the clock, and also on remote from your own computer.
Here we will tell you about the difference between empirical and theoretical sources, the difference between primary and secondary sources, what peer review means and how to search for scientific sources online.
Almost anything can serve as a source, even for a scientific text. But here it is important to make a difference in how you use the source. Of course, we can use blog texts as source material if our intention is, for example, to analyze how vegan blogs address the health aspect of the eating habits they advocate, or instagram if we want to look at how fashion influencers writes about the clothes they wear.
What we need to understand is that these are not theoretical sources and they cannot form a theoretical basis for the article. We need a theoretical basis for our analysis and for this we need scientific texts. We can never trust an unscientific text and assume that it is truthful. We might at best consider them as opinions.
These non-theoretical sources are empirical sources. The word empiric comes from the Greek and means experience. Empiricism is collected data - it can be statistics or, for example, a work of art. Since one cannot interpret and analyze the whole of reality, one makes takes such a section of reality, which becomes one's empirical source.
In the theoretical part of a text, you explain the concepts you intend to use and relate them to each other. You must explain how you intend to use them to understand the empirical data. The theory and concepts will then also be used in the analysis part of the text and you will return to it in the discussion.
Primary and Secondary Information Sources
A primary source is an original source, presenting new research results. These might be doctoral theses, research reports, scientific articles or, for example, books. All information in a book or an article is not primary, so they might also be secondary sources.
Secondary information sources summarize and structure the information in primary sources, and help you find them. These might be course books, in which researchers refer to their own research or that of other researchers, or encyclopedias.
When you write your thesis and refer to an information source, it means your thesis is a secondary source. You should always strive to find the primary source for the information you need. That means, you should not write that “according to Lloyd, Lambert writes, that…”, but find out what Lambert actually wrote instead. Otherwise the information might get distorted when writing reference upon reference.
Secondary sources can be useful as examples of what concepts and theories are used around a particular topic and also provide general information about it, so they are not in themselves to be overlooked during the writing process, even when one would not directly use them as source material.
An example of an encyclopedia that you can use in your studies:
Peer review means that experts in a subject evaluate the quality of a publication and decide whether it meets the scientific requirements for publication. These experts are expected to assess the content of the article impartially.
Scientific articles that have undergone peer review are reliable sources, while articles in popular journals and online may be less reliable. In peer review, the experts have checked that the information in the article is correct and that the sources they use are reliable
Watch the tutorial to learn more about peer review;
Even though there are enormous amounts of information freely available online, there are also a number of information sources on the internet with limited access. Licensed scientific databases in the "deep/hidden web" contain information not available through Google or other search engines. That means that the information that is there cannot be found through Google or other search engines.
Sometimes you can find the title of an article through Google, but when you try to read it, you are required to pay for it. You should, however, not have to pay to read scientific articles, so Arcada Library has obtained licenses for a number of scientific databases, in order for students and staff to use them free of charge.
Scientific databases contain scholarly journals specialized in different fields of study. If you need a scholarly article for your studies, use the scientific databases provided by the library to find your article. Students and staff at Arcada have free-of-charge access to scholarly databases through Arcada Finna or the Arcada Libguides. Scholarly journals are recommended especially when you want to access the most recent publications and research results.
Types of databases:
Note that most databases contain both full text and references. In many databases there are both articles, that you can read as such, and references to articles, that you only get the abstract and publication information for. If you find information about such an article you can always check if it is available in some other database, or if you can find the journal it was published in.
Watch the tutorials to learn more about scientific databases:
Internet is suitable for information retrieval when you are looking for information on current events or phenomena or you quickly need information about an unusual subject. You need to be especially careful when analyzing sources on the open web. A webpage might be unreliable despite professional layout and well-written texts. Anyone can publish texts online and it is easy to spread propaganda and disinformation, "fake news". Remember that a reference list in the end of an article does not make it reliable per se. Even if a site claims to publish news, it does not mean that the news articles are necessarily accurate.
Always be critical when taking part of information found from social media and make sure to verify its accuracy from primary sources. When you read something, ask yourself where the information comes from and if it is actually correct.
Have you noticed that same search words can give different search results, depending on what search engine and which device is used?
Search engines look for occurrences of the search words from a database that has been created automatically by a search robot (also called a spider or web crawler). The search robot studies the open web, evaluates the pages it finds, and gathers its information into a database (an index). Your search is directed to this database, and not to the web itself. Different search engines may give different search results depending on one's traceable digital footprints, i.e. who performs the search and what web pages have been visited before. It is easy to become isolated in one's own filter bubble where one only receives information based on one's past search history and online behavior.
Use a wide variety of different information sources to expand your view point outside your own filter bubble. Algorithms based on your search history, your position, online behavior and online contacts choose what information you find online.
Examples on search engines:
Read more about digital footprints on Arcada's Start page;
Watch this video to learn more about how a Internet search actually works:
More and more research today is published open access. This means that research results are made freely available online, which means that research results are made freely accessible in digital form. This promotes the dissemination of research results both within the scientific community and to the public at large. It is also easier for a larger audience to find open access publications than articles published in subscription-based journals. Research results made freely accessible democratize science, improve scientific communication and smooth out differences between various countries' research institutions.
It is not completely unproblematic yet, due to what is called the digital divide. Globally, there are many places where access to the internet is not as obvious as it is for us. So even though the material becomes more accessible to many, it does not mean that it is so for everyone.