Academic Integrity - Referencing, Citation & Avoiding Plagiarism: Active reading and note-taking

Active reading involves reading with a purpose in order to grasp definitions and meanings, understand debates, and identify and interpret evidence. It requires you to engage in reading and thinking at one and the same time. 

Active reading is how you

• organise the information you read
• build a picture of the evidence presented
• draw links and differences between the texts/article/books in order to find a way into you research question

For the majority of your time in higher education you will be reading journal articles or academic texts. These takes months or years to produce, therefore reading them will take longer and more effort than is normally the case.

Active note-taking will help you to remember, interpret and apply what you have read for your university work. This means noting your questions and reflections of texts, as you take your notes.

There is no one way to make notes, try out the different methods, and see what suits you and the particular text best. For texts that are your own, this might include highlighting, underlining, writing in the margins questions and summaries, mind maps or writing your notes on paper.

Skim the text before you start reading in detail. This can be done by reading the introduction, the summary or conclusion, and the first line or so of each paragraph. Note down any initial thoughts as you go. 

Ask yourself the questions recommended under tips for Active Reading and those for Critical reading and really try to answer some of them as you read the text.

Referencing and citation - ensure that you have a full reference for each text you are taking notes on. Clearly mark in your notes any direct quotes with the author name and the page you took the quote from.

Reflection - after reading your text, take a break, then look at your notes again. Does anything really hit you about the article or text? Perhaps you can see a theme more clearly now, or even how this text links with other works you have read. Take a note of this, so you can use it in your assignments/research.

Reading Individual Texts: Questioning the Literature

• What sort of text is it? 
• What is the methodology? 
• Is a particular approach or school followed? 
• What are the definitions used? 
• What is the theoretical basis? 
• What is the main thesis of the piece?
• What evidence is used to back up the thesis? 
• What are the conclusions? 

Reading Across the literature: Analyse and Evaluate

• What is your research question and how does this material relate? 
• Are there foundational articles/seminal works which must be included in your research? 
• How is the topic framed in the literature? 
• Are there some works that should not be included? 
• Is there a central debate that should be acknowledged and addressed? 
• Where is research on the topic headed in the future?

When being critical in an academic sense, we question whether there are other ways of interpreting evidence and identify the validity or flaws in a line of argument.

Identify the argument

In order to critically evaluate a piece, you need to identify the argument. What are the statements used to justify a position in the writing? 

If you are writing a piece, outline in draft form a summary of the key statements you plan on using to argue your point, including the conclusion. Think about whether your argument is logical and valid. Ensure the person reading your final piece can easily identify the line of argument.

Evidence

Read your piece again and identify each piece of evidence presented to support the conclusion. Here are some questions to ask of your evidence 

Is it reliable and valid?
If there is research presented, is it recent? 
Were the numbers of people studied large enough to have a broader application? 
Were there comparison groups? 
Were the populations studied biased in any way like using everyone from the same area/age group/gender?
These questions can be applied to the work of others, or our own writing. Depending on your discipline, some questions will have more or less relevance. Read around the topic in your discipline to see how others have approached the area.

Opinion versus Fact

When reading, you need to identify which parts are opinion and which parts are fact. You must spot any assumptions, assertions or statements that might not be correct.

When writing, review your draft and do the same. Identify what is opinion and what is fact, supported by evidence from academic or other reliable sources. Read around your subject at this stage to help identify opinion from fact.

Biases

Look again at the piece you are reading. Who is the author? Is it possible she or he may have a reason for thinking the way they do? Is the author sponsored by a company. Does she or he have some other personal characteristic that may compromise the research?

When writing about something, it can be hard to identify your own biases. Reading widely will help this. Ensure your piece evaluates the evidence for and against your point of view. Does your argument make sense or is there research you are over-looking? If there is an area of uncertainty in the literature, acknowledge this. Ask another person to review your work to help see a different point of view or check for bias.

Conclusion

Consider whether the conclusion follows logically from the premises and evidence outlined. Ask yourself

Does the evidence actually support the conclusion?
Does each piece of evidence logically lead to the conclusion the author has made.
Are they stretching the impact of the evidence?
Are there any alternative conclusions the evidence could point to?
What further impact will this conclusion have on the wider discipline or society?
These questions apply to both the work of others and any work you are creating yourself.
 

Being organised will help you with both revision and writing up assignments. Here are some tips for organising them:

• Write short summaries of each piece of text. 
• For each relevant text, try to write a one paragraph summary similar to an abstract. Make sure the source is fully referenced so that you know what the summary is of. 
• Organise the summaries, again, with them clearly referenced. 
• Try to identify similarities and group the summaries accordingly. At this stage you may see links and themes that you had not seen before.

Note Taking Tools

Software can be used to organise your notes. For example EndNote has a note taking space on each reference, Evernote, Google Keep, OneNote, PDF notes, PowerPoint Notes, or the traditional and very popular, handwritten notes.

One way to organise your research notes is using a spreadsheet with questions and notes for each text. Not all questions would need to be answered for each text, just those of relevance.