The guide
How to find good sources for your claims
Most writing that needs citations gets stuck on the same question: who said this first, and where? You know the claim is right, you half remember the paper, and the search box gives you two pages of results that almost fit.
Searching outside the document breaks the flow. You copy the sentence into a search engine, open papers in new tabs, then come back and try to remember which one you meant to cite.
What counts as a scholarly source
A scholarly source is written by researchers for researchers and checked before publication: peer-reviewed journal articles, academic books and conference papers. Preprints are research shared before peer review, so they can be useful and recent, but they deserve a note of caution.
For every claim that is not common knowledge, your reader should be able to follow a citation to evidence. The goal is not more citations but the right one: the source that actually supports the sentence it sits in.
Three ways to search
Good searches combine all three.
- Keyword searchKey terms and their synonyms. Fast, but it only finds papers that use your words.
- Backward chasingRead the reference list of a strong paper to find what it built on.
- Forward chasingSee who cited a strong paper since, to find newer work and replies.
Step by step
- Claim
- Keywords
- Search
- Judge
- Cite
Write the claim first, in one sentence. Pick out the two or three terms that carry its meaning and try synonyms for each. Search, then skim titles and abstracts for papers that test your claim rather than mention it in passing.
Judge each candidate: where it was published, whether it was peer reviewed, whether it has been retracted, and whether its findings really match your sentence. Then cite it in the sentence it supports, not in a pile at the end of the paragraph.
Common mistakes
Avoid: Citing a paper from its abstract alone
Do: Read the part that supports your claim
Avoid: Ignoring retractions and preprints
Do: Check the status before you cite
Avoid: One weak source for a big claim
Do: Back strong claims with strong, independent evidence
A worked example
Claim: students who sleep less remember less of what they studied the day before. Three candidates come back: a peer-reviewed study that measured recall directly, a preprint with a small sample, and a review that mentions the link in one sentence.