The Un-Tradiional Paper - Essay Example

Now, in the age of internet and technology, different other sources are available for research. All those sources which in the past were only available in print form are now accessed online. The reliability of the data depends upon the reliability of the source which is disseminating that information. Academic credentials of the writer and publisher are very vital in this regard. Academia in general prefers those sources which are written by scholars and are published by renowned publishing institutes.

Internet, though a source of abundant information is usually dubbed as unscholarly and unreliable due to the anonymity of authorship or doubt about the academic credentials of the author. Wikipedia, search engines, websites,forums and blogs are these days higly accessed channels for the information. But usually the teachers regard them as unscholary sources and do not encourage the mention of those as reference in research. The reason is that these articles are written by those persons who use their personal opinion which is sometimes bias.

Another reason for unreliablility of these sources is that they do not give proper references for the material they use as information. Mostly we do not know that the data contained in that piece is writing is authentic or not. In the give research project, I have chosen five articles on “ social media” from some unscholarly sources. I have not selected these article not from any selection, book, scholarly journal or academic website. I have chosen five sources from internet websites, blogs, forums, opinionated editorials and Wikipedia.

After seledtion of the articles, I have tried to point out those aspects of these writings which exclude them from the category of authentic, reliable and scholarly sources. First source: Website article My first selected piece of writing is an article about social media on a website titled “ Social Media Today”. The article is written by David Chang who is CEO of community named “ Share Bloc” and possess a sufficient knowledge about social media and business related to it. In the current article “ Mobile is tweeting the world”, Chang has highlighted the economic prospects of using social media sites like twitter on mobiles.

The article is unreliable and unscholarly as we do ot find information cited or quoted from traditionally accepted academic sources like books, journals or articles, rather the information given seems to be from the author’s own knowledge. The article no doubt is informative but is not research based. It is opinionated and we can not rule out some element of bias from it. The academic credentials of the author have not been given and we even are not sure whether this article has been written by David Chang.

We do not know whether the name is real or somebody is using it as pseudonym. No intextt citation has been used and graph used in the article contain no reference. The author does not disclose his source of information. The method of retention of information on this site is also unknown. We do not know whether the source we are consulting will be available to us on the same location in future. Second source: News paper article on new generations civilized attitude at social media Though the editorial pretends to include the results of an online survey, yet the reliability of the article remains an issue.

The referencing is not proper as usually no in