Academic research writing practices and standards

¶ … Academic Research/Writing

Television: Searching for legitimate sources

When I typed in the words 'television' and The Mary Tyler Moore Show into the Google search engine, the first result that popped to the top of the listings was Wikipedia, unsurprisingly. Wikipedia is not considered a valid academic resource because it is a communally-edited document. At best, it is a kind of jumping-off place for what 'conventional wisdom' thinks about a topic; it is not a source of accurate information. However, the Museum of Broadcast Communications website was amongst the top results yielded by Google. Fan websites listing all of the episodes in the order they aired; the complete DVD collection available on Amazon; and the entire rundown of all of the shows on Hulu were listed on the first page of results.

To contrast findings for a more contemporary production with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I typed The Simpsons and 'American popular culture' into Google. As with the older show, Wikipedia was the first suggested source. This was followed by a selection of available episodes for viewing, although in this case the episodes were only available through Amazon for purchase as a complete DVD collection. A greater number of serious and reflective articles were listed on the first page of Google search results, including magazine articles from The New Republic, and news segments from Fox on the Simpson's influence on American popular culture. For an academic paper, these types of sources could not stand alone as references, but could provide insight as to how the Simpsons have been viewed as newsworthy, and more than a silly cartoon.

When I searched an academic database for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the word 'television,' my findings were very different: for example, I discovered a journal article on the politics of the show and how it related to the women's liberation of the 1970s, entitled "Television's new sex education" by F.H. Levinsohn, published in the peer-reviewed journal The School Review of the University of Chicago Press. The article was dated from 1977 and would not have been available to me, had I simply Googled for results on the popular show. Older information is not always available on the World Wide Web, given that many academic articles and articles from history are not open to free access by the general public. This article, if I were to research the impact of the Mary Tyler Moore Show upon feminist and sexual liberation politics would be a useful example both of how the show was seen during the time of its airing, as well as provide scholarly analysis of the show's content. However, not all sources from an academic library are written by scholars: the ESC library contains a number of books on Mary Tyler Moore that are not scholarly, such as the actress' autobiography as well as books published by academic presses such as Heartland TV: Prime time television and the struggle for U.S. identity by Victoria E. Johnson (NYU Press, 2008).