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Question everything! Don’t believe it because you found it somewhere.
What can I reference in my paper?
When you do academic work like writing a project paper, doing research, or writing an article for a journal, you must always look for the most reliable resources. Then, when you reference those resources, you will need to follow the citation style that your target audience asked for.
Are all sources reliable?
No, they are not. Not only that, a large part of the published materials on more reputable, academic journals also might end up being unreliable for various reason. Read the following article to get a sense of what I mean:
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Why does Science News Suck So Much?
(See the transcript of the video here and a discussion on the video here.)
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But all is not lost. If you can avoid predatory journals and most no-name articles found on the Internet, you will be able to find some reliable sources. Watch the following lists to stay away from some of the better-known predatory publishers, journals, and retracted articles.
- Common Signs of Predatory Publishers (archived here)
- Scimago Journal & Country Rank (Freely available portal that includes journals and country scientific indicators developed from Scopus)
The following articles and web sites will help you understand what predatory publishing is:
- Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences (Full Report in English) (PDF is archived here. Same report in other languages here)
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Examples of unacceptable references
Some resources are reliable and some are not. Here are a few examples of unacceptable resources that you cannot use inside your paper:
- Wikipedia
- Personal blog posts (e.g. *.blogspot.com, *.wordpress.org, etc.)
- Chegg, CourseHero, and similar cheating websites
- Google search as a source. It is telling the reader: my source is: “The Library!”
- Most no-name articles
Examples of good references
These are a few examples of acceptable resources. Note that an article or a book in the following lists is not necessarily true or error-free. Watch for retractions for articles and and rebuttals for published books.
- Britannica
- Encarta
- DK Encyclopedias
- Citizendium.org citable articles (there are 154 of them so far) (14K+ articles)
- Encyclopedia.com (300K+ reference entries, all citable)
- Most results through Google Scholar
- ProQuest results through the home page of our college’s LMS
- Journals listed in the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association
- Journals currently indexed in the catalogue of National Library of Medicine
- All books on Project Gutenberg (70K+ books)
- Most published books
- All paper dictionaries and encyclopedias
- All books at O’Reilly
- All peer-reviewed papers in academic journals
- Articles from DOAJ here
- Articles from ACS Publications
- Articles from JSTOR
- Articles from SAGE Journals
- Articles from NCBI
Reputable news websites
- Ars Technica
- BBC
- CNN
- CBC
- Vancouver Sun
- Accosiated Press
- The New York Times
- The Guardian
- engadget
- The Verge
- PBS
- NASA
- phys.org
- Reuters
- The Washington Post
- Globe and Mail
- etc.
Reputable journals
- Nature
- Economist
- Harvard Business Review
- International Journal of Information Systems and Supply Chain Management (IJISSCM)
Reputable organizations
