Scholarship as Conversation

In this module, we’re going to consider the idea that Scholarship is a Conversation. Just a couple of things to clarify—when I say “scholarship” you might think “free money!” and that’s not what we’re talking about this week—sorry! In the sense of this module, scholarship means “academic study or achievement; learning of a high level.” We’re talking about people who are scholars, and the conversations they have.

Believe it or not, you are scholars. Just by being in college, you are now part of scholarly conversations found in books, articles, lectures, and discussions in your classrooms. You are grappling with the same topics that students have encountered for centuries.

Part of being a scholar or a student is treating those ideas with respect. One way that we show respect to other thinkers and students and scholars is by giving credit to them for their ideas.  Your professors will expect you to follow standard academic conventions for acknowledging the ideas of others, and we usually call this standard system academic citations.

Now, I say “citation” and you might think I’m talking about a parking ticket or a fine. Not this week! We’re talking about citations in the sense that when we’re writing or presenting about the work of other people, we acknowledge their ideas by citing them, by giving credit. Your professors will expect you to follow style guides like MLA or APA for your papers and we’ll talk a little bit about that.

Now, while you’re in college, you’ll have lots of conversations with your peers and with your professors and you’ll write short research papers that you share with your classmates. But in the the rest of the world, most scholars live really far apart, so they can’t always have conversations in person or in the classroom. This means that they have to communicate in other ways, and usually this has meant writing & publishing articles in academic journals. For example, a Historian would write an article about a History topic to be published in a History journal for other Historians to read.

As you move forward with your educations and careers, it's important to pay attention to the conversations happening in your discipline (another word for “subject area”). Every field has shifting trends and “big names” who are famous for their ideas. You’ll want to see who is writing and sharing big ideas, who they’re reading & citing, and, in turn, who is citing them.

One helpful way to keep track of scholarly conversations is actually through Google Scholar, and we’ll spend some time this week looking at how that tool can help you track the impact of the articles you choose to use in your own research. We’ll also get some practice writing citations. But learning how to write well, how to incorporate sources and cite them appropriately, takes a long time and a lot of practice—unfortunately, it takes much longer than the week we have left in this course! So I’ll also recommend some resources that you can use in the future, after this class is over.

This module comes from the Canvas Commons Course "INFO 101: Research Essentials" by Zoe Fisher and is licensed under Public Domain Links to an external site..