Taking Critical Notes when Reading and Thinking about Sources for Your Thesis or Dissertation

Taking Critical Notes when Reading and Thinking about Sources for Your Thesis or Dissertation

Oct 01, 2024Rene Tetzner

Taking Critical Notes when Reading and Thinking about Sources for Your Thesis or Dissertation

When working on your thesis or dissertation, you will no doubt be consulting scholarly sources such as previous trials and experiments, primary documents and theoretical studies and surveys. Some of these will ultimately be cited, quoted and perhaps discussed in your writing, and most of them will inform your work in one way or another. One of the most productive ways in which such sources can influence a thesis or dissertation is by inspiring critical thinking in relation to their content. Critical thoughts of this kind can affect the way you use not just one but many sources, as well as the ways in which you design your methodology, present and analyse your findings and ultimately construct an academic or scientific argument. It is therefore important to exercise your critical skills and record your thoughts as you take notes on the sources you read.

Critical notes that record your assessment of a source in terms of its potential usefulness for your thesis or dissertation are always vital. It is worth considering and noting, for instance, whether a document is a primary or secondary source for particular information, remembering that it is always good practice to seek out the primary source for anything vital to your research and that some universities and departments will insist on the use of primary sources unless those sources simply cannot be obtained. You may also want to do an online or library catalogue search for the author of the source you are reading to see if he or she is a reputable and reliable researcher or an expert in the subject. Considering whether a study was peer reviewed or not (articles and books produced by most academic and scientific journals and publishers will have been) can also be helpful.

Your thoughts about the reliability, validity and applicability of the studies you read should certainly be recorded. Keep in mind that even a peer-reviewed study in a top-tier journal can present limitations or problems in methodology and argumentation that may render it less useful or applicable, and an informal online blog can provide information, methods and arguments as valid and reliable as an excellent article in a scholarly journal does. Online sources are unpredictable, however, so if you are consulting an online source, you should be extremely cautious by checking for information on who created and maintains the web site and watching for issues that suggest a lack of reliability, such as wild claims, abusive language (directed at other researchers, for instance) and errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar. You should also consult any guidelines provided by your university or department, as there are sometimes restrictions regarding what kind of online sources can be used in a thesis or dissertation.

It is essential when recording your critical thoughts about the sources you read to keep your thoughts separate from any iterative notes that simply record the content of those sources. Remember that you will need to make sense of your notes when you return to them weeks, months or even years later, and you do not want to develop aspects of the argument you present in your thesis or dissertation on the basis of an idea being your own when it was actually the work of another author or attribute a concept to an external source when it was your own thought. In your notes you should therefore clearly mark each of your critical thoughts as your own by whatever method works effectively for you.

Why Our Editing and Proofreading Services?
At Proof-Reading-Service.com we offer the highest quality journal article editing, dissertation proofreading and online proofreading services via our large and extremely dedicated team of academic and scientific professionals. All of our proofreaders are native speakers of English who have earned their own postgraduate degrees, and their areas of specialisation cover such a wide range of disciplines that we are able to help our international clientele with research editing to improve and perfect all kinds of academic manuscripts for successful publication. Many of the carefully trained members of our manuscript editing and proofreading team work predominantly on articles intended for publication in scholarly journals, applying painstaking journal editing standards to ensure that the references and formatting used in each paper are in conformity with the journal’s instructions for authors and to correct any grammar, spelling, punctuation or simple typing errors. In this way, we enable our clients to report their research in the clear and accurate ways required to impress acquisitions proofreaders and achieve publication.

Our scientific proofreading services for the authors of a wide variety of scientific journal papers are especially popular, but we also offer manuscript proofreading services and have the experience and expertise to proofread and edit manuscripts in all scholarly disciplines, as well as beyond them. We have team members who specialise in medical proofreading services, and some of our experts dedicate their time exclusively to dissertation proofreading and manuscript proofreading, offering academics the opportunity to improve their use of formatting and language through the most exacting PhD thesis editing and journal article proofreading practices. Whether you are preparing a conference paper for presentation, polishing a progress report to share with colleagues, or facing the daunting task of editing and perfecting any kind of scholarly document for publication, a qualified member of our professional team can provide invaluable assistance and give you greater confidence in your written work.

If you are in the process of preparing an article for an academic or scientific journal, or planning one for the near future, you may well be interested in a new book, Guide to Journal Publication, which is available on our Tips and Advice on Publishing Research in Journals website.



More articles