3 - How will I track my sources?

Credit is a part of any ethical research. Not only does providing credit bring the spotlight to those who have spent time to gather data and come to conclusions, but it allows us to point at something and reference generally accepted fact.

For example, I can easily tell you that 42% of adults have obesity. But, maybe I made that up. All you are reading are words on a screen, after all. How different does that number fell when I say, according to the 2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 42.4% of adults have obesity. And, here is the citation.

Fryar CD, Carroll MD, Afful J. Prevalence of overweight, obesity, and severe obesity among children and adolescents aged 2–19 years: United States, 1963–1965 through 2017–2018. NCHS Health E-Stats, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Updated January 29, 2021. Accessed April 22, 2021. www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-child-17-18/overweight-obesity-child-H.pdf

For most people, the cdc is a more trustworthy source than some guy on the internet named Micah, so providing this source helps me share information and eliminate doubt. I still need a way to accumulate sources during my ongoing research, however, and there are many different methods I have considered. I could do it the good old, tried and true, storing them in a list in a word doc, or I could try something new and attempt to improve my "source game."

For now, I will follow in the footsteps of my Professor and try to use Zotero as my program of choice. It is a helpful program that lets you store links all in one place and aids in creating citations.