Hey everyone! As always, hope you’re thriving out there! Please let me know if you need any support at all!

So based on some questions that I got from you all, I realized that I might have gone out of order — or maybe I should have slowed down as we started our initial descent into the “writing” section of this course.

A foundational part of what is course is meant to show you, is that technical writing has different conventions than a persuasive essay or a book report that you might have done earlier in your academic career. Technical writing is a specific genre of writing (genre being a category, a type). So when I asked you to watch those videos and find an article, it was actually not about the content of the article and more about the components of it. I guess like a sample. If someone has a better way of describing this in terms that are familiar to you, please share it with me.

ANYWAY, very long story short, the second part of last week’s module asked you to use a datebase and find an article. I want to go back to that request and discuss research a bit. There are a lot of different ways that we can get information we need to support our writing. A simple google search is always a start, but if you’re going to begin there, I’d really like you to try out Google Scholar because it will give you access to only academic articles. If you’re accessing Google Scholar, or any database that’s not open source, you should do it through the CCNY Library link. Most of the research that you will want to use for papers in other classes will have paywalls and as a student you can use your CCNY login credentials to get articles for free.

Let’s also pause here a moment and think back to Science Under the Scope — how is research dissemination impacted by the use of paywalls? Have you ever considered who has access to research results and who doesn’t?

This is where arxiv, the database I mentioned in the last module, becomes really interesting. Arxiv is a “free distribution service and an open-access archive” that hosts scholarly articles without a paywall. Many of these articles are not peer-reviewed, which means that it’s helpful to dig a bit into the credentials of the authors, but it is still an incredible tool that shows the possibility of collective knowledge sharing not driven by for-profit publishing journals. Another note is that authors of paywalled articles see almost no money for the articles they write.

And how does one use a database? Personally, I like to take my time, I like to search a term, see what comes up first, look at titles, find something that interests me and then see who has cited it (might lead to more current research) and I like to see who they cite (works cited page can give you such rich information).

So for this week, let’s try to enter research from a different angle. Use a database of your choosing, find an article of interest to you, and share with us why you chose the article you chose and how you got to it. The naming of this process will hopefully help you remember in the future how to find articles you might need for different classes. I don’t need a summary of the article, this is really a look at the research process and not the content of the article.

Okay now that I’ve sufficiently confused you all, that’s all I have for this week! As always reach out with questions!