Preliminary Source Review and Research Question Refinement
Due: Sunday, April 5th at midnight
Length: One page, single-spaced
Format: MLA
Purpose
Your research questions from last week were a starting point, but most of them were too broad or too vague to guide actual research. A question like “How does social media affect society?” gives you nowhere to go. A question like “How did Facebook’s algorithmic shift toward engagement metrics in 2018 change the distribution of local news?” gives you a trail to follow. This assignment asks you to start following a trail and to revise your question based on what you find.
If you submit a meaningfully refined research question here, I will revisit and adjust your grade from last week’s assignment upward.
What to Submit
Three sources, each with a full MLA citation followed by a short paragraph (four to six sentences) explaining what the source covers and what you expect it to contribute to your project. After all three entries, write a revised version of your research question that reflects what your preliminary research has taught you about the actual shape of the topic.
What Counts as a Source
Not everything that appears in a search result qualifies as research. Here is what you should be looking for and where to find it.
Peer-reviewed journal articles are the backbone of academic research. These have been evaluated by other scholars before publication. You can find them through the library databases: JSTOR, Project MUSE, Academic Search Complete, and Google Scholar (though Google Scholar will also surface non-peer-reviewed material, so check what you are looking at). When you find an article through Google Scholar, look for the “cited by” count and the journal name. A piece in Critical Inquiry or New Media and Society has gone through a review process. A PDF on someone’s personal website may not have.
Primary sources are original documents, data, or artifacts rather than someone else’s analysis of them. Depending on your topic, these might include legislative texts, corporate policy documents, SEC filings, patent applications, interview transcripts, historical newspapers, archival materials, or datasets. If you are writing about platform moderation, for instance, a company’s published content policy is a primary source. A journalism professor’s analysis of that policy is a secondary source. Both are useful, but you should know the difference.
Books and book chapters from university presses (Oxford, Cambridge, Duke, Minnesota, and so on) are peer-reviewed and generally reliable. Trade press books by credible authors, like the Silverman and Odell texts we have read in this course, can also serve as sources, but you should be able to articulate why the author is a credible voice on the subject.
Journalism from major outlets can be appropriate, especially for recent events or topics where academic publishing has not yet caught up. A reported feature in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, or The Washington Post is not the same thing as a blog post or opinion column. Use journalism to establish facts and context, not as a substitute for analytical sources.
What does not count: Wikipedia (though its citations can lead you to real sources), undated web pages with no identifiable author, YouTube videos unless they are primary source material (a congressional hearing, a press conference), social media posts (unless, again, they are primary evidence for your argument), and AI-generated summaries of topics.
Two Kinds of Evidence, Two Kinds of Questions
The sources you find will generally fall into two broad research traditions, and it helps to know which one you are working in because they ask different questions and count different things as evidence.
Empirical social science asks questions that can be measured, tested, or quantified. Researchers in this tradition collect data, whether through surveys, experiments, content analysis, or large-scale datasets, and use that data to support or challenge a hypothesis. A study that tracks how algorithmic ranking changes affected click-through rates on news articles, or that surveys 2,000 users about their trust in online information, belongs to this tradition. When you read work like this, pay attention to the methods section: how did the researchers collect their data, how large was their sample, and what are the limitations they acknowledge? The evidence here is statistical, observational, or experimental.
Humanities and cultural analysis asks questions about meaning, power, representation, and interpretation. Researchers in this tradition perform close readings of texts, images, platforms, or cultural practices. They draw on theoretical frameworks (postcolonial theory, media ecology, critical race theory, feminist theory, political economy) to analyze how something works, what it assumes, or whose interests it serves. Silverman’s essay is a good example: he does not run a survey, but he reads the landscape of the contemporary internet through the lens of hostile architecture, schizophrenia as a media-studies metaphor, and the history of broadcasting theory (Brecht, Peters, Foucault). The evidence here is textual, interpretive, and argumentative.
Both approaches are legitimate. Many strong research projects draw on both. But you should know which tradition a given source belongs to, because that affects how you use it. You cite an empirical study for its findings. You cite a humanities source for its argument.
MLA Format: What It Looks Like
Your citations should follow MLA 9th edition format. Here are the basic patterns for the most common source types you will encounter.
Journal article:
Author Last Name, First Name. “Title of Article.” Journal Name, vol. number, no. number, year, pp. page range.
Tufekci, Zeynep. “Algorithmic Harms beyond Facebook and Google: Emergent Challenges of Computational Agency.” Colorado Technology Law Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 2015, pp. 203-218.
Book:
Author Last Name, First Name. Title of Book. Publisher, year.
Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Melville House, 2019.
Chapter in an edited collection:
Author Last Name, First Name. “Chapter Title.” Book Title, edited by Editor First Name Last Name, Publisher, year, pp. page range.
Article from a website or online newspaper:
Author Last Name, First Name. “Title of Article.” Website or Publication Name, date of publication, URL.
Silverman, Jacob. “Welcome to Slop World: How the Hostile Internet Is Driving Us Crazy.” Financial Times, 21 Apr. 2025, www.ft.com/content/5d06bbb4-0034-493b-8b0d-5c0ab74bedef.
A few formatting notes: Titles of longer works (books, journals, newspapers, websites) are italicized. Titles of shorter works (articles, chapters, essays) go in quotation marks. If you accessed a source online, include the URL but drop the “https://” prefix. If there is no author, begin with the title.
Use the Purdue OWL MLA guide if you need to look up a format not covered here: owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style.
A Note on Search Strategy
If your first search in a database returns nothing, your terms are probably too specific or too narrow. Start broad, scan titles and abstracts, and then refine. If your search returns thousands of results, you need better keywords or additional filters (date range, subject area, peer-reviewed only). Librarians are available to help with this, and you should use them.
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