How are electronic medical records changing health care?

Deadline: Saturday, May 16th. Submit your work through the “Library Research Report”
submission link on Blackboard’s Week 2 page.
Length: Total 600–900 words; about 150 words each for 4–6 research sources.
Purpose/Goals of the Assignment
• Develop your ability to conduct scholarly research and relate the results of this
research to a specific inquiry.
• Develop your ability to translate specialist information into non-specialist language.
• Draft building blocks for the final report.
• Practice APA citation and reference style.
Assignment Overview
Answering a research question involves seeking out and processing information that helps you
answer that question. This is true whether you are researching insurance plans or conducting
academic research. In developing the Library Research Report, you will seek out scholarly
articles relevant to your research question, extracting ideas from them that you will later
synthesize into a final report (i.e., the Week 4 version of your project) and an answer—
however tentative—to your research question.
On its face, analyzing sources for the library research report may seem to resemble making
what is sometimes called an “annotated bibliography.” Please note, however, that your goal in
developing this report is not simply to summarize sources. As you analyze your sources, you
will produce “building blocks” for Week 3’s rough draft of your Research Project. This means
that you should include only content that directly answers your research question. Your writing
should also be clear and accessible to non-specialist readers.
A carefully constructed Library Research Report will significantly lighten your workload when
you reach Week 3, since you’ll be able to construct your draft from writing you’ve already
completed rather than producing an entirely new document.
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Assignment Requirements: Your finished Library Research Report should include:
• Your name, at the top of the document. Please don’t include a separate title page.
• Your research question, at the top of the document, like a title.
• 4–6 paragraphs (see page 3), with one paragraph per each of 4–6 scholarly, peer-reviewed
journal articles.
• Approximately 150 words in each paragraph to answer these 6 questions:
1. WHO? Who stands behind the information? Your entry should identify (quickly and
concisely) the background/credentials that connect the article’s author/s to the topic.
(See the Week 2 reading on identifying scholarly sources for guidance and examples:
https://info260.hcommons.org/identifying-sources-ii/)
2. WHAT? Identify information discussed in the article that helps answer your research
question. (Remember, your task is not to summarize the entire article, but to summarize
the article content that helps answer your research question. In some cases, of course, the
entire article may be directly relevant to your project.)
3. HOW? How is the claim supported? How do the authors back up the claim? (Don’t go
nuts here by summarizing every detail of the methodology. Instead, strive for the sort of
concise, general summary that you might find in a news story about recent research
findings.)
4. SO WHAT? What is the relevance of the claim for your inquiry? (Remember that your
answer to the “so what?” question should mention your own research inquiry.)
5. SAY WHAT? What words or sentences do you think you might quote when you write
your Project Rough Draft? Quote them, in quotation marks. Quotations are good for
providing examples of differing points of view on a topic, to express ideas that resist
paraphrasing, or to distance you from a source so that readers know the quoted words are
not your own.
6. WHERE? Where would your professor find this source if they wanted to research the
same topic? Include the page number of your quoted words or sentences, as well as a full
APA Style reference.
Sometimes you’ll be able to answer more than one question at the same time, in which case
you shouldn’t try to artificially separate them. Just make sure that your paragraph addresses all
6 categories—WHO, WHAT, HOW, SO WHAT, SAY WHAT, and WHERE.)
Tip! If you’re having trouble getting started, tackle each of the above questions—
Who/What/How/So What?—one at a time for all your sources. For example, answer the Who?
question for each of your sources, then answer the What? question for each source, and so on.
Before you know it, you’ll have written—or at least sketched out—the first paragraphs of your
project.
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Use Your Own Words: Quote only when you need to call attention to provide a unique point of
view on a topic or theme, to express ideas that resist paraphrasing, or to distance you from a source
so that readers will know that the ideas are not your own. Remember to cite the page or paragraph
number for the quotation’s location in your source.
Source-Selection Checklist: This assignment requires you to engage with specialist sources—
specifically, with peer-reviewed journal articles. If a source you’ve found is a peer-reviewed
journal article, you should be able to answer “yes” to these 4 questions:
• CONTENT: Does the source read like a scholarly article? (If it sounds more like a news
article or a book review, it’s probably not a scholarly article.)
• CITATIONS/REFERENCES: Does the article include in-text citations and end
references? Is the Reference List substantial (i.e., more than just a handful of citations)?
• CREDENTIALS: Is the author’s institutional affiliation noted? (For example, does a
university or government email address accompany the byline? Or is there a bio that
explains the author’s area of expertise?)
• PEER-REVIEWED: Is the journal listed on Ulrichsweb as peer-reviewed? (For a review of
how to use Ulrichsweb, see the Journal Databases Activity. Remember that you search
Ulrichsweb by journal title, not by article title.)