How the Library Research Class Impacted Me

What is the hardest thing about finding information and doing research on a topic for me personally?

                The hardest thing about finding information and doing research on a topic is finding good sources with a lot of information on the topic I am researching. There are many bad websites that offer false information that look very promising. They may trick you with their professional formatting, and lack of grammar mistakes. However, the information on the websites can be false. Therefore, you have to be careful to find good websites with credible creators. Additionally, there is the struggle to find websites with a lot of useful information on them. There are websites that may just touch over the subject without going into detail about it, so my job as a researcher would be trying to find a website that offers a great deal of information about my subject.

Did the Library Research Class help? How did it help you?

                I felt the Library Research Class helped me because our teacher introduced us to a lot of great databases, where I can find great information. She also went through, step by step, of how to use every single one of the databases. After going through the databases, I found them very helpful. I was able to find a lot of information that was accurate, and went into the subject I was researching very deeply.  Additionally, I learned more about plagiarism than I thought I would. I thought I was a pro at parenthetical citations, and not falling into the traps of plagiarism. However, I found that there were many different times of forms of plagiarism. It really surprised me that some forms of plagiarism such as making a mistake on a parenthetical citation would get a person the same consequences as a person who plagiarized in a worse way. I learned that some of the mistakes that people make while doing parenthetical references were mistakes I made, and it make me more self conscious about my writing. I now know to be more careful with giving credit to the author.