Week 3

                Wow, we are halfway through this class already!  This has gone much faster than I thought it would, but we are still learning a lot in class.  This past week we learned about citations, research ethics, and about plagiarism and copyrights.  Amanda showed us different online tools that we could use to help us create citations for any kind of resource we had to use.  The databases that are accessible through the Penn State library will usually have some kind of citation included with the article that we are reading, but if it doesn’t, there are plenty of online resources that we could use.  We were shown Zotero, and also learned about Mendeley and Endnote.  I am now using Zotero because it is very convenient because of the toolbar that comes with it.  You can install the toolbar in your web browser that allows you to save anything for later and you can create any form of citation through Zotero.  Endnote also looks like a great resource, but it is too expensive for me.  On Thursday, we learned about research ethics and plagiarism.  We learned that you patent an idea, you own a trademark on a company logo, and that you own a copyright on your own original thoughts and words.  Copyrights typically last for the life of the author plus 75 years.  Finally, we learned that not all published research is done correctly.  We also learned that some companies will pay newspaper reporters to publish an article that the companies write.  This can lead a reader to purchase those products because they found out about it from a trusted and supposedly unbiased news source.  We were shown a website, www.churnalism.com, which can be used to find out if an article you read in a newspaper is a real article or if it was paid for by a company.