Choosing sources for academic papers or business proposals or any other professional writing is no different from the examples on the previous page. You need to choose the sources that are most likely to convince your audience or help them understand your ideas. That audience could be your professor, a bank loan officer, a research funding agency, other researchers in your field, or a potential publisher.
But in professional or academic circles, the burden of proof is much higher than it is when discussing movies with friends. No bank is going to loan you thousands of dollars to start a herring-on-a-stick business just because your friends like herring-on-a-stick. Likewise, the National Institutes of Health won't fund your research into poison ivy as a potential cure for cancer because you read about it in an email or blog post.
So, how do we choose the sources to support academic or professional ideas?
Knowing your audience is key to successful academic or business writing. You need to try to think the way they do. What arguments will carry the most weight with your audience? What type of evidence are they most likely to believe or trust?
For example, if you're writing an thesis or dissertation, you will want to present information derived from advanced academic research. These are the types of materials most likely to influence the professors on your thesis review panel. Similarly, writing a research proposal to the National Science Foundation you will want to use academic research papers to support your proposal.
On the other hand, if you're writing a business proposal to win a contract or get a loan to start a business, you'll want to use demographic information, financial data, etc. to show that your ideas are likely to succeed financially. If you're proposing any new technologies, try to find business or news sources that show how these technologies have been applied in other settings. Academic papers will be too theoretical for this audience, but can be used in moderation to demonstrate that any cutting-edge technologies are at least proven in laboratory settings, even if they haven't been adopted in "the real world" yet.
If you use Google or another web search engine to find sources, you will need to review them far more carefully than anything you find using a research database. Using a website like WebMD or even the Mayo Clinic will NEVER carry as much weight as using a paper from the New England Journal of Medicine.
There are only a few things on the Internet that you can just use without any extensive review or evaluation, and that will be trusted even in the most advanced settings, like product specifications published by the manufacturer. Anything else will have to be evaluated in detail as explained elsewhere in this guide.
Using research databases can help you find good, trustworthy sources, like that article in NEJM. See our "Going Beyond Google" guide for more info on how and why to use research databases.
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