Working with sources
Sooner rather than later at university, you will be asked to produce written work to demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of the subject areas you are studying. In order to do this effectively, you will relate your own work to the work and ideas of other people – and then make very clear which sources you have made use of to do your own work.
Finding, evaluating and acknowledging the different sources of knowledge that you rely on is so important because it is how everybody’s knowledge develops. It allows us to explore, test and challenge one another’s ideas and pieces of research. For this reason, it is the bread and butter of academic life – something that, with practice, becomes second nature.
The skills explored in the pages of this section are crucial to your academic work and, properly developed, will save you time and effort in the long run – both at university and in your working life. They're divided into sections:
- To get you started, it's important to clarify your information literacy skills; what do you already know, what do you want to know, and how can you find it? And once you've found information, how can you evaluate it?
- It's also critical to reference your sources in an appropriate manner. This is essential for engaging in an academic dialogue, and making it clear where your ideas have come from; this is also important for avoiding plagiarism.
- There's information about compiling a bibliography and quoting and paraphrasing; and about how to do all this without breaking copyright.
The Learning and Research Services Team (LRST) at the University Library, can give you guidance tailored to your subject area and each department has its own subject librarian who you can contact for advice.
See what your Subject Librarian can do for you here
Along with these online resources, for University of Sheffield users, there is also a Library resource list for this section, suggesting useful print resources.