Bibliography and Resources

How to find and cite resources for both your 5-page paper and your final paper.

Academic sources

Your research is meant to build on the best thought on a topic that you find interesting and compelling.

In your proposal you want to convince the research directors and other participants that you have found a rich vein of high quality academic research on which to base your investigations. By 'quality' we roughly mean results or writings which have been judged to be useful or original by others involved in the academic enterprise. A rough hierarchy of sources by quality runs something like:

• articles in peer-reviewed journals.
• books and articles published with the involvement of an editor.
• articles written by a named, recognized specialist for a collection or encyclopedia.
• preprints or unedited articles by university faculty or published researchers. articles written by journalists for an academic journal (e.g. Science).
• Wikipedia - subject to informal peer review.
• articles written by journalists for general purpose publications whose standards include fact checking.
• Writings, blog entries and web postings by named people that relate to their association with a recognized organization.
• Writings, blog entries, and web postings by named people.
• Writings, blog entries, and web postings by people whose identity cannot be ascertained.
• Comments overheard from other tables at the dining hall.

Of course, you may use *any* of these as starting points of your research. But you should work your way back up the hierarchy of quality and eventually read, cite, and base your research on references at the top of the hierarchy.

It's fine to let a pop-culture reference on the radio pique your interest in something Descartes wrote. You might familiarize yourself with Descartes via Wikipedia or a philosophical encyclopedia, and then follow up references in one of those to the original works of Descartes, or find review articles by professional philosophers on the topic. You would only cite the last two types of works.

If you find that a researcher has posted an article online that appears useful but is not in a journal, can you cite the article by URL? Look up the author and/or title in Google Scholar: It frequently happens that the research has published similar (or at times identical) work in a journal.

Starting points

Some starting points for finding your way in to your topic:

• The reference librarians in the Good Library can be very helpful.
• The physics Reading Room has a growing collection of books on topics related to this course which are not listed in the Good Library catalog. Look here first before resorting to interlibrary loan. [The Physics Department is also interested in increasing the RR holdings in this area. If you find a book you think you need, talk to us. We probably can buy it.]
• ZYGON, the journal on science and religion, is in the RR. Also the CTNS journal Theology and Science is there. These are excellent resources for the thoughts of some of the people involved in the dialog.
• By now there is quite an archive of past speakers at the Goshen Conference. Their works have been fruitful starting points for new directions.
• Articles in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy give context, make connections with related ideas, and frequently have extensive and recent lists of references.

Citing your references

You may use any format you prefer for citations (MLA, APA, etc. See your stylebook). Whichever one you choose, stick with that format and use it consistently.