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One Guide to Rule Them All: Research Station

This guide was created as a way for all students at Ferrum College to get basic 'help' with research, tutorials and quick tip suggestions.

COM 304: Communications Research

The Media and Communication major is for students who are interested in pursuing careers and further education in such areas as radio and television broadcasting, multimedia journalism, public relations, corporate communications, audio reproduction, film-making, and online media creation. The strengths of Ferrum College’s Media and Communication major is the amount of one-on-one instruction students receive from their professors, and our focus on strong writing and message design skills.

APA Citation

While there are quite a few resources out there for citation styles, one website that academics have turned to again and again is the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue. This website provides guidelines for in-text and bibliography citations in MLA, APA, Chicago, and others, as well as additional content about performing research, writing résumés, and writing exercises.


Here are some great websites for finding citation format instructions:

For those of you who may become future journalists, you have extra responsibility to be familiar with citation styles. In addition to being able to find credible information by correctly analyzing MLA, APA, and Chicago reference lists, you'll also frequently need to use the special Associated Press citation style. This is the style we see most frequently under images in news stories:

Cute pup (not mine)

Jim McCluskey/kiltedlibrarian/flickr.com

Purdue's Online Writing Lab (OWL) provides some information about the unique guidelines of AP style, which is most frequently used in news writing. These guidelines reflect the professional standard used in the journalism field.

Major Organizations with Helpful Websites

Very Helpful, Reliable Websites

  • ProCon.org - a great source for evaluating both sides of major social topics. The website is independent, non-profit website that is verified by attorneys and doctors and provides information with hyperlinks to the scholarly articles that are quoted.
  • Online Qualitative Research Resources Homes - compiled by Dr. Susan Hawes of the Clinical Psychology Department at the Antioch University New England, this website provides useful links for finding qualitative research articles and performing your own qualitative research.