What I Learned about Scholarly Research

     When we visited the library for the second time, we learned about scholarly research. I learned a lot that day that I will be carrying with me throughout my time in college and even beyond. For starters, I never would have thought that Wikipedia could actually be helpful for research. Wikipedia being capable of anything good revolving around research goes against everything I was taught in middle school and high school. I was also once again not aware of how helpful the library can actually be. 

    Throughout all of middle school and high school, we are taught that Wikipedia is bad and we should not even think about going near it when doing research. I did not realize that it actually had something truly helpful to offer. For the last 4 years or more, the only purpose I have used Wikipedia for is looking up movies, reading about their statistics and performances, and reading their plots. I had no idea it could actually be useful. We were taught in the library that Wikipedia is actually one of the first places you should go to. While it is dangerous that anyone can edit it, it also has all of the sources everyone used. You can go to those sources straight from Wikipedia, so in a way, Wikipedia is a sketchy website that happens to be a gateway to better websites. 

    I also had no idea that the library webpage had so many different ways to search for information. In class, we were taught just two of the many ways that will give us websites specifically flagged because they are exactly what we are looking for. While I love doing my own research, it will save me a ton of time than having to check every source I find to see if it's a true source or if I need to keep looking. 



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