Beyond "Is It Peer-Reviewed?": Exploring Information Creation in the Sciences

Abstract

Undergraduate students tend to rely on simplistic criteria for choosing sources for their research, such as whether a particular source is peer-reviewed or not. This one-shot instruction session is designed to expand students’ view of scholarly outputs. It prompts students, working in groups, to analyze and uncover for themselves the relationships between different types of scholarly outputs which occur over time from raw data to original research and book chapters. Each student group works with a diverse set of documents about a specific body of research to collectively determine how they relate to each other and their role in the research and scholarly publication process. This lesson was originally designed for upper level plant sciences students, but is readily adaptable by discipline, breadth, and depth.