User talk:Brendan McBride

This user is a student editor in Southern_Illinois_University_Edwardsville/ENG_102_Summer_2019_(Summer_2019) .

Welcome!

Hello, Brendan McBride, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:05, 4 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sourcing

Hi, I saw that the two sources you listed as potentially good sources were studies.

Studies should generally be avoided unless they're accompanied with a secondary source that reviews the study or comments upon the specific claim that is being stated. The reason for this is that studies are primary sources for any of the claims and research conducted by their authors. The publishers don't provide any commentary or in-depth verification, as they only check to ensure that the study doesn't have any glaring errors that would invalidate it immediately. Study findings also tend to be only true for the specific people or subjects that were studied. For example, a study of people in Florida may differ from one conducted in California due to differences in culture and lifestyles between the two states. The same could be said for a study conducted of people in the US as opposed to people in Germany. There are a lot of factors that could impact any sort of study, such as income, education, culture, and so on, even if it doesn't seem like it would obviously impact them. Aside from that, there's also the issue of why a specific study should be highlighted over another. For example, someone could ask why one study was chosen as opposed to something that studied a similar topic or had different results.

This is all especially important when it comes to health and psychology related topics. As such, these sources shouldn't be added to the article. We have a training module that goes over how to edit medical topics here, but you can also read over Wikipedia's guidelines on reliable sources for health related articles here. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:04, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The two sources that were studies are this and this. Basically when it comes to sourcing, if the article is about data that they collected personally from a set group of people or from specific tests, then it's most likely going to be a study. At the very least it would definitely be a primary source since it's someone talking about data that they created themselves.

I did see that there were some other sources that you have on the page that I missed. This should be OK since it looks like they're basically discussing other people's research and studies, based on what I saw in the abstract. The same generally goes for this one as well. The main thing here is that they're reviewing other work and talking in the theoretical sense as opposed to their own studies and experiences. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:53, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Response

That's an excellent question to ask - never feel like there are any wrong questions. It's how you learn, after all. :)

In any case, it looks like the link you added is asking me to sign in, so I can't see what it is supposed to be. Can you give me the citation information like the paper's name, who wrote it, and where it was published? I can look it up. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:33, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Brendan - you can answer on here, if you like, but either way is fine with me. Looking at the source, it looks like this is indeed a study. I did some searching of my own and here's what I found:

[1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17]

I'm not sure if all of these will be useful, but I wanted to see what I could find. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:53, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This book could be useful (this is a review of the book). I also found the following:

[18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23],[24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32], [33], [34], [35]

Hope this helps! I may add more in a bit. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:59, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thank You I am definitely looking into those! Brendan McBride (talk) 18:13, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]