Research Report

Due date: Tuesday, February 2

Here's what you do for this assignment:

Go to the library and with the assistance of a reference librarian, compile a list of 8-10 print reference works that would be particularly helpful to a person in your field. What is a reference work? It's a handbook or standardized compilation of information that professionals often keep handy and refer to often during the course of their day-to-day work.
Using an Internet search engine, locate and compile a set of 8-10 Internet resources that would be useful for somone studying a particular topic in your field.
Write up a brief, two-sentence annotation of each source (complete with URLs for web resources). Use the citation system most often used by professionals in your chosen field or a field in which you are thinking about majoring (see examples below).

Citation Systems

If you do not know the citation system used by your profession, ask a professor for guidance on where to find information about this (we'll talk more about this in class). Because each of the disciplines has a preferred method for citing references in published work, there is no way to predict which major uses which system. Nonetheless, here are a few of the more popular systems, with links to pages explaining their use.

American Chemical Society - used by chemistry journals.
American Psychological Association - used by most social science disciplines.
Chicago Manual of Style - used by a number of humantities disciplines, as well as some engineering disciplines.
Council of Science Editors - used by biology and most life sciences.
IEEE - used by a number of engineering disciplines.
Modern Language Association - used by most language disciplines within the humanities.

Formatting

When writing up your results for each of the two types of references, please use the following format, which involves what's called a "hanging indent" for setting off each entry, as shown in this example for the MLA style:

Kennedy, George A. "Attitudes toward Authority in the Teaching of Rhetoric before 1050." Rhetoric and Pedagogy: Its History and Practice. Ed. Winifred Bryan Horner. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. 65-71.

This book chapter shows in some detail how authority in the teaching of rhetoric changed considerably after 1100. Kennedy shows how Quintilian, Cicero, and other Roman exemplars held some sway over rhetorical education in the Middle Ages, but also demonostrates how this changed as European nations evolved over time.

Notice how the first line of the text extends to the furthest left margin, but how each successive line is indented five spaces to set the text off from other entries in your list of references.

How do you achieve this in Microsoft Word? Just follow these directions for Word 2007, and you'll have no problem, as long as you use a soft return (Shift + Return) between each entry and its annotation.