The requirement to acknowledge your sources is not limited to printedmaterial such as books or journal articles. You may need to acknowledgeinformation that you’ve found in graphical form, sources that are works ofvisual or musical art, handwritten notes from a lecture or a laboratory, oreven personal conversations. Again, you should find out the disciplinaryprotocols for citing such nonprint sources by consulting a citation stylemanual, such as theMLA HandbookorThe Chicago Manual of Style.

Instant access to global electronic information through computers and theInternet is having a significant impact on the way we conduct research.Information is now readily available through the Web, e-mail, and otherelectronic media. Information and quotations from any of these sources must beproperly acknowledged, including personal e-mail correspondence. The protocolsfor citing electronic sources are still being developed. At a minimum, cite thename and author of the website (if available), the Internet address, and thedate you accessed the site.

Although electronic media present powerful new opportunities for research,they also present new and different dangers that deserve some consideration.Unlike most books and journal articles, which undergo strict editorial reviewbefore publication, much of the information on the Web is self-published. To besure, there are many websites in which you can have confidence: mainstreamnewspapers, refereed electronic journals, and university, library, and governmentcollections of data. But for vast amounts of Web-based information, noimpartial reviewers have evaluated the accuracy or fairness of such materialbefore it’s made instantly available across the globe. As a researcher usingthe Web, you must be extremely careful about the validity of the information that you find. Seldom will theauthor of a website make explicit hisor her own sources of information; there may be no way to trace the accuracyor authenticity of the information. Websites may provide partial, deceptive, orfalse information in order to promote explicit or hidden agendas.

Often Web-based information appears to have no author at all, but isseemingly anonymous, almost disembodied. The unprecedented ease with whichtext, images, and data can be copied and reused can undermine both the idea andthe value of intellectual ownership. The combination of immediate, unlimitedaccess to information, plus the ability to appropriate and alter it with a fewkeystrokes, is both exhilarating and dangerous. The electronic media aretransforming not just the means of communicating and retrieving information,but also our ways of thinking about information: what it is, where it comesfrom, and to whom it belongs. Some of the implications of this transformationare discussed in the next section.