NAU 435 - Marine Transportation: People, Planet, and the Profession

This research guide provides access to resources that may be useful for the MT capstone course.

If you have any questions during your research, please ask the MT liaison librarian over there on the left! You can email, schedule an appointment, or stop by the library and take your chances on whether the librarian's available.

"Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean" by RHo (WMF) is licensed under CC BY-SA

This research guide gathers some places you can easily find reputable information for your assignments in NAU 435.

• If you need information on a company or industry to support your memo assignment, check the Company & Industry Summaries page.
• To locate information on your topic affecting the company, try the "Dig Deeper" page.
• The five sources in your memo should all be cited in APA format. Our Citation guide has information on citation styles including APA, in-text citations as well as the longer citations collected in a bibliography.
• You also need to investigate your sources to determine if they're good enough for your memo. Use the SIFT method below to check.
• Finally, there's a link to a book chapter on writing effective memos at the bottom of this page.

SIFT is an updated approach to understanding online information, with actions you can take to reveal the difference between misinformation and the real thing. 

STOP: We all take in information on auto-pilot. Stopping to think about the information you come across is the necessary first step in being able to SIFT what you find.

INVESTIGATE the source: Look into the people and organizations responsible for information, using user profiles and Wikipedia.

FIND better coverage: Do a general news search for your topic, so you can look at the conversation as a whole and figure out if what you’re seeing is an outlier.

TRACE to the source:First check the date, then identify if your information comes from an original source that’s different from where you found it. Does the description match what the original actually says?

To walk through the process, visit Mike Caulfield's Infodemic blog.

Here are a couple of techniques you can use to get better Google search results.

• Quotes "" to make Google look for an exact word or multiple words together as an exact phrase. Examples: "mariner" to avoid similar words like marine; or "marine transportation" to find those exact words together.
• Site: to search a site domain or specific website. Examples: site:.gov to search U.S. government websites, site:csum.edu to search the Cal Maritime website.