Essay one

Zhu Ye
Julian Prentice
LIBY1551
July 23, 2009
Essay one
After I watched the Advanced Formats Presentation, I feel really regret that I didn’t watch this video earlier. When I was writing essays for other class, the professor always ask us to use reference in our writing; such as books, school articles and journal to support my idea. And I just search my topic and claims by google, then find something related and linked to my essay. I cannot properly evaluate my searched website and wasted many time. There are many differences between a scholarly journal article and a website. However, I used to think that scholarly journal articles and websites are almost the same, just appear in different places. But now I have a clearly recognize that these two things are different.
As the “Advanced Formats Presentation” says that “Web sites, to some, signify ‘junk’ information.” While the “printed book, journals and newspapers, signify reliable, quality information to them”.
The scholarly journals’ articles are known as peer-reviewed, academic, refereed, or professional journals. The characters of scholarly journal can be separated from different parts. First of all, the author is researcher or scholar in the field and famous; such as professor in Harvard University. Secondly, the audiences are other scholars and professionals or students who familiar with the field, not people with few education. And the purpose for scholarly journals is not for commercial use or trade, but to report original research, experiment, or theories. And it cited its sources clearly in the references list.
In other words, a scholarly journal should have a nice general title and give us detail of content, such as references list; also some specific authors mentioned and affiliations with known reliable sources. We can conclude as clean authorship, a specific date, brief but fairly substantial and useful information for academic writing. Government documents can be used in scholarly journals also. Scholarly journals are some available online and they have their own web sites too. So we cannot say scholarly journals are absolutely inked and printed.
We need reliable information in our academic research, so we don’t need “off limits” web sites which is unsuitable and useless in our research. The website with many ads is not trustworthy for academic research. The purpose for that website is to sell stuff rather than offer you academic knowledge. Uncertain authority and very sloppy references is main characters of an “off limits” website. Blogs is important and widely used today, but we cannot use personal blogs as a college-level research source. These social networks are very easy to recognize, so you don’t want to use people’s diary in Facebook or MySpace as a support sources. But we can still find sources for academic writing in web sites. A website with a .org or .edu may more reliable than others in research. There is a link “about us” tells the information about who created this website and response for the article it posted. By checking these, we can decided if it is “off limits” or suitable for use.