6th Form Research and Referencing advice

As the L6 IB students embark on their Extended Essays here’s some advice and information which we hope will be useful for all 6th formers, both A level and IB. How much do you know about the EE requirements? Try this quick Extended Essay quiz devised by Sarah Pavey, the Librarian at Boxhill School.

Research

  • Check the catalogue See what books are available in College.
  • Ask the librarians! We are here to help and can get articles and books from other libraries (e.g. British Library and London Library)
  • Use the e-library We subscribe to a large number of online resources. Try Questia as a starting point for e-books and articles on any subject and including international coverage.
  • NewsBank – For local and national newspaper articles indexed up to yesterday and going back to the 1980’s.
  • Google Scholar Get to the heart of the good stuff on Google. Find scholarly or academic articles, research and reports on Google Scholar. If it doesn’t give you full-text access, it is likely that we can track these down for you.
  • Make a note of the details of the sources you use as you go along, this makes it much easier to compile the Bibliography at the end.
  • More information about other online sources on the e-library here
  • Think about the keywords you are using to search for your subject – make a list of alternative words and synonyms to broaden and narrow your search results.
  • Read this excellent booklet: Using Sources – A Guide for Students: Find it – Check it – Credit it
  • For study tips – note-taking, organising your time etc See the Revision and Research Help page on this blog

More web sources:

Subject Portals Pinakes is a website hosted by Heriot Watt University. It provides a “Subject Launchpad”. Portals bring the best websites and collections of documents together in one place. Particularly useful and famous ones are:

  • Bized (for Business Studies and Economics)
  • Sci Central Gateway to the best Science News sources
  • Sapling  Architecture, Planning and Lanscape information gateway.
  • Physics World – News, views and information for the global physics community from the Institute of Physics
  • Philosophy around the Web Don’t be put off by the amateurish look of this website.The main purpose of this site is to act as a guide and a gateway to philosophy resources on the Internet.
  • PubMed Central PMC is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).

 

Avoiding Plagiarism

My favourite anti-plagiarism video comes from Bergen University Library. It’s based on Charles Dickens ‘Christmas Carol’ and is very funny.

Using images

Be sure to credit images you use. Here’s a useful website ‘5 good places for students to find public domain images‘ (these are images you can use to illustrate your work but you still need to cite the copyright holder)

Wikimedia Commons

This is an excellent initiative by the creators of wikipedia. People have donated their photos to be freely used by others. This is an excellent source of copyright free images.

 

Referencing

  • For more advice and information on Referencing and compiling your Bibliography see the Referencing & Research page of the intranet
  • Always list all your sources in your Bibliography (include people you interviewed, Tweets, Podcasts, TV documentaries, online sources and websites as well as the more obvious books, articles and newspapers)
  • Always state the date you accessed a website
  • To generate bibliographic references very easily try Cite This For Me
  • Be consistent – choose one style of referencing and stick to it. Harvard is a good one to adopt.