Scholarly Sources

This last week in class we discussed how to locate and use scholarly sources for the upcoming research paper. In this week's blog I will discuss some of the steps we learned and apply them to the article at http://www.sciencedirect.com.lib-ezproxy.tamu.edu:2048/science/article/pii/S0747563210001184. In order to find a good scholarly source, a good place to start your search is through the university library's database. I searched through the peer-reviewed academic journals, which indicate that the source is scholarly, to find this article. In the article itself, you can tell it is a scholarly source because the article is broken into sections with each containing its own title. The authors of the article are both professors at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, which make them credible. The article was published by Science Direct which is a collection of scholarly articles. All of these signs indicate that the article is a scholarly source and would make it a good reference for a research paper.

The article discusses an experiment that was done to determine if training could affect people's ability to better decipher information in the presence of information overload. The experiment was done in an office setting and was conducted with a pre and post test with a certain training time in between tests. The results showed that after undergoing training, the employees were able to process information better and the training relieved strain placed on the employees. I feel like the information was presented in a clear manner and very understandable for all viewers. The article effectively presents it's case that information overload is a problem but can be helped through training. The article would be helpful to any office manager because the training could be performed in their office and would benefit all the employees. This training method could become standard protocol for all offices and would effectively relieve some of the stresses of everyday office life.