J7A Essay Process (Fall 2012)
Acceptable secondary sources

Your credibility as an author in terms of the selection and use of secondary sources

Your assignment is to practice writing a "credible and interesting" essay. Credibility turns on many factors. One important factor is the reader's judgment as to whether you have selected worthwhile, academically sound, secondary sources for your essay and whether you are using them intelligently.

About secondary sources: "Secondary sources" are academic articles, books and such on your topic. If, for example, you are going to analyze the Noh play "Kantan" the play itself is a primary source and articles that situate the play in a historical context, analyze its content, etc., are secondary sources.

Overall requirements for your secondary sources

1. For the purposes of this class, I have decided on these overall requirements:

• sources must be in English (this includes all Web sites), and
• the portion of the source that you use is central to the topics and theses of the source itself (you can't use a small segment of a source on, say, Matsuo Basho, for an essay on the Kokinshu except in special ways).

2. Further, no matter how credible the source itself might be, if you have misunderstood it or misused it, the credibility link is now entirely broken.

Description of acceptable (for your essay) secondary sources

NOTE: Newspaper, magazine articles and most web sites are not acceptable. Further, Preview Mode for GoogleBooks and such is not acceptable unless the preview allows enough access (such as most pages of the relevant chapter including the initial pages) to critically evaluate the place of the portion you want to use within the larger context of the work you are drawing that passage from.

Additional note, for your convenience: Since you will be required to give an exact location for each citation in your essay, if you use Web-based material you will be able to do this via a URL whereas if it is an item with a physical presence (such as a book you checked out of the library) you will need to scan the relevant page(s) and submit that/them.

Here are acceptable secondary sources:

1. Books (and so chapters or essays in them) published by academic presses

2. Articles that are in peer-reviewed (refereed) journals

• If the article is accessed via a repository of academic writings such as JSTOR or ProjectMUSE, we will assume that it is peer-reviewed. "Peer reviewed" means that the journal's editor sends a submitted manuscript (with the name of the author removed) to "experts" in the field, asking them to report (their names will not be revealed to the author) on whether the article meets high academic standards for that particular academic field. Depending on those reports, the journal's editor will decide to publish the submission or not. If you want further details, or if you want advice on how to determine whether a journal is peer-reviewed, I did a quick Web search and turned up the below site. There must be many others like it. I am not that particular on this point, as long as your source appears to be of high academic quality when scrutinized by the mentor. Here's the site: How to recognize peer-reviewed (refereed) journals

3. In some cases it will be possible to use Web-only sources (that is, it was written for the Web, rather than being a journal that was digitalized and made accessible via the Internet) if there is a clear author of the content and you can verify INDEPENDENTLY, not using that Web site, that the author can be considered a credible authority on the topic.

4. For simple data (dates, author's names, where someone lived — things that are factual in nature and not subject to controversy) my standard is a bit lower. I will accept English Web sites that would seem to the careful and critical eye to be academically sound, and relevant to the topic at hand. High quality Wiki sites can meet this standard, but not all Wiki sites. I will accept Preview mode for Google Books. Err on the side of finding high quality sites.