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RESEARCH PAPER
Your research paper will be about one of the following companies, specifically focusing on their Ethics and Compliance program.
You should use the website for the company, BUT do not rely exclusively on the company’s information. This means that you will have to do additional research from other sources. Your paper should not only cover what the company’s current position is, but it should also address development over some time. You should conclude with some discussion of what direction or actions should come in the future. This last portion is opinion, but it should provide reasons for that opinion.
Companies for Research Paper
Northrop Grumman
Newmont
Apple
Volkswagen
Dell
IBM
Kimberly Clark
ExxonMobil
RESEARCH PAPERS – INSTRUCTIONS
JAMES MILLER, INSTRUCTOR
R E A D A N D F O L L O W
A research paper is an extensive report either informative or persuasive in nature. The paper in this class is primarily informative. The subject is thoroughly investigated, organized, outlined, and documented. The student writer will learn to credit sources of information properly.
The Papers should be 8-10 pages, typed, font Times New Roman or Arial, 12 pt., double-spaced, with normal (1 inch) margins on all four sides. Paragraphs should be indented five (5) spaces. All
text pages of the paper should be numbered. (Title page, citation pages, Bibliography, Works cited, or other non-text pages are NOT numbered and are NOT included in the page count.) You
must
submit your paper to Turnitin in the designated Dropbox in D2L.
A
title page is
required
. It is NOT numbered or included in the page count. The title page should include (required): the title of the paper, your name, the name of the course, the name of the school, the name of the instructor and the date. Pages of the text
MUST
be numbered.
You need a Bibliography or Works Cited (ask for a sample if you need one)
as well as
your notes or citations. The Bibliography or Works Cited are NOT numbered or included in the page count.
The paper should reflect the research done by the student by the inclusion of in-text citations, endnotes or footnotes. Your citations should enable the reader to find the source (
including the page) for the fact, thought or conclusion which it supports. If the instructor cannot tell what your source is and from what page in that source, you have
NOT
done your job. You should have multiple sources (
more than three). You should evaluate your sources carefully. Use of Wikipedia will result in a grade of F. They should be quality, reputable sources. Just because information can be found in a book or on the internet does not necessarily mean that it is a quality, reputable source. If you find the same information in more than one source, it greatly increases the likelihood that the information may be good. If your topic is so narrow or so new that only one source is available, please consult with the instructor in advance, BEFORE proceeding.
Your paper
must not be a summary or book report or merely a series of pieces of information cut and pasted from other sources.
“Make sure that you understand the point of your paper. Allow time for research – asking yourself always if the research is relevant to your subject… Allow time to
proof-read the final drafts….Do not let avoidable mechanical errors jeopardize the results of your work and thought.”(Waite, Robert G.L,
Style Manual for Writing Papers and Theses, Williamstown Massachusetts, 1965.)
The paper should show analysis and original thinking. The paper will be graded on the treatment of the topic as well as style, accuracy, grammar, spelling, neatness and
creativity. Your grade will suffer if you have run-on sentences, comma splices, fragments, incorrect subject-verb agreement, or tense shifts.
RESEARCH PAPER INSTRUCTIONS – 2
Do NOT use contractions
, abbreviations, slang, or informal (colloquial) English. Numbers 100 or less should be written out (
e.g. one, two,… ten,…ninety-nine). Generally, abbreviations should not be used in a formal paper. However, some common abbreviations are acceptable (
e.g. US or USA, DNA, FBI). In some instances when proper names are used frequently in your paper and are long, they may be shortened in subsequent places by including the parenthetical phrase “hereafter referred to as…”. This is a formal, scholarly paper not a chat with your classmates. If you do not know what I am talking about, ask! If you wish to ask about writing or grammar questions, or want the instructor to review a draft, just ask for assistance.
It is recommended that you write your paper and then put it down for a day (or more). Then come back and proofread it again. If you can read it aloud to someone else, or have someone else read it, you usually will greatly improve your paper. If the paper does not make sense to that other person, it probably will not make sense to the instructor.
If you have any questions about the paper or topic or format, ask now. (815-236-8794). What you hand in is what will be graded. (Drafts will not be graded.) If your paper is late, you will be downgraded (unless prior arrangements have been made with permission of the instructor.)
You should actually prepare your presentation, and not just stand up and casually talk your way through. The presentation should not only convey the information about the paper, but it should also hold the class’s attention.
TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR TERM PAPERS
I THOU SHALT NOT submit less than the required number of pages.
II THOU SHALT NOT COPY, rephrase nor in any other way plagiarize another’s work.
III THOU SHALT NOT submit thy paper late, lest thy paper be refused, and you suffer for your sins.
IV THOU SHALT adequately research the material using current and diverse subject matter.
V THOU SHALT NOT use encyclopedias, Wikipedia, nor The Reader’s Digest for sources.
VI THOU SHALT submit the paper in typewritten, normal margins, and double-spaced form.
VII THOU SHALT have citations, either in the body, at the end of the page or at the end of the paper so that the reader may be able to find the material and so that thy days may be long, and thy paper accepted.
RESEARCH PAPER INSTRUCTIONS – 3
VIII THOU SHALT use thy own thinking and ideas to supplement thy research so that thy paper may be stronger.
IX THOU SHALT include a complete bibliography of all resources used and consulted in the research for thy paper.
X THOU SHALT honor and obey thy teacher’s requests so that thy days in this class may not be wasted and thy grade may be higher than a “C”.
YOU MAY FIND THESE COMMANDMENTS HUMOROUS, BUT THEY ARE REQUIRED!
GRAMMAR PITFALLS
1. You should write in complete sentences.
2. You should not have comma splices or run-on sentences.
3. Your subject and verb should agree.
4. You should not use contractions, abbreviations, or colloquialisms.
5. You should not use first person (“I” or “we”) and should try to avoid use of second person (“you”).
6. Words which are in a foreign language (Latin, French, German,
et
al.) should be underlined or in
italics.
7. You should not shift the tense of your text.
RESEARCH PAPER INSTRUCTIONS – 4
DOCUMENTATION
Documentation means to give credit where credit is due. Few of us have absolutely original ideas. Most of our ideas are provoked by something we have seen, read, or experienced. We document; we give credit to these “idea sources.” It is important for you to be sure that you are
crediting whenever necessary. If you are not sure, it does not hurt to take time to credit the source. For some subject areas, having a citation to a source several times in one paragraph is not unusual. The Stafford Library page in the portal provides useful information on citations, research, and plagiarism.
Failure to document is considered plagiarism, and it will result in a failure (“F”) on the paper as well as further review by the school regarding your grade in the class and your status as a student.
You
must
document in the following situations:
1. If you copy, word for word, from a source – quote.
2. If you include an author’s opinion, interpretation or conclusion, even if you put it in your own words.
3. If you include a statistic, test result, number or percentage unless you did the experiment.
4. If you give information which is not common knowledge.
5. If you draw a conclusion, make a summary, or base an opinion or argument on anything but totally original thinking.
Citations Within the Paper
For each piece of information (any of the five categories of documentation listed above) as the manner of such documentation you should use one (only one – do not mix methods) of three methods:
1. In text reference.
2. Footnotes.
3. End notes.
For each of these three methods, the citation is at the end (following) the referenced material. Having some phrase such as, “… in Joe Smith’s book,
All the Answers, on page 42, he says: ‘blah, blah, blah.’ is NOT an acceptable citation.
RESEARCH PAPER INSTRUCTIONS – 5
For an in-text reference at the end of the particular section, there should be a period followed by parentheses in which is contained the information about where that particular infor-
mation can be found (
e.g., Author, title, source, publisher, date, page number, and complete URL (if an internet source)) and another period. The first time a citation is given
all
the information about that source should be included. If the same source is cited again in the paper, you may shorten the parenthetical reference to be just the author and page number. If the same author (or other creator) has multiple sources being cited, you must give enough information to distinguish exactly which source is being cited. Each in text citation should be completed with a period as if it were a sentence of its own.
For Footnotes and Endnotes each citation is numbered consecutively (
i.e,. 1, 2, 3 …
etc.). The number should be a superscript at the end of the material being referenced. If the source is repeated it still gets the next consecutive number. The information given in Footnotes and Endnotes must be complete (just as the in-text citations). Also, like the in-text citations, if a source is repeated, the references after the first time can be in a shortened version. Footnotes are physically placed at the bottom of the page on which the number for that note is inserted in the text. Endnotes are placed at the end of the text of the paper before the Bibliography and will be a complete list, consecutively numbered of all the places that documentation is being made. The page or pages of Endnotes are not numbered or included in the page count.
CITATION and BIBLIOGRAPHY FORMAT
Following are some examples that are a “mini” style manual for help in correctly doing your citations. Columbia College requires
APAformat in either your citations in the paper or as a part of your Bibliography in Business (Management) Courses. The most important things to remember are: Can someone pick up your paper, read a section, know its origin, and find that same information (or quote) from the citation that you have given. If your answer is NO, then you have not given a correct citation.
If you use a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) you MUST include a current URL reference as well. Since use of a DOI is a part of APA citation format, I would prefer that you do NOT use that at all.
Please refer to the instructions for citations in the materials from the Columbia Library which can be found online or through the MyPortal.
· DO NOT Cite a database. A database is a useful tool while doing research to assist in finding information or sources. But the database itself is NOT the source. Find the citation for the information that the database refers to and use that for your reference in your paper.
RESEARCH PAPER INSTRUCTIONS – 6
WORKS CITED (also called BIBLIOGRAPHY)
The second way you
must document (in
addition to your in-text references (or footnotes, or end notes), is the
WORKS CITED (or
BIBLIOGRAPHY) page which is placed at the end of the body of your paper. This page lists
ALL
the sources that you used in writing your research paper (even those that are not specifically used to document text). This page will include the Author, title, and publication or internet (URL) information.
Alphabetize the sources according to the author’s last name, (or if no author listed or known by the first word in the title). Do not alphabetize “a”, “an”, and “the”, but include them. This page is not numbered or included in the page count.
Titles of Books, Plays, or Whole Periodicals should be underlined or in italics. The titles of individual articles are placed in quotation marks.
Citation of Internet Sources
The basic component of the reference citation:
Author’s Last Name, First Name, “Title of Article”,
Title of Work, Date of Visit to the site,
AND
complete internet address.
Example:
Burka, Lauren P. “A Hypertext History of Multi-User Dimensions.”
MUD History. http//www.ccs.neu.edu/home/lpb/mud-history.html (5 Dec. 1994)
REMEMBER: The goal of your citation is to
both credit the source of the quote, thought, or idea, AND enable the reader to find that specific source.
Checklist
There is a Research Paper Checklist provided.
RESEARCH PAPER INSTRUCTIONS – 7
RESEARCH PAPER EVALUATION CRITERIA
a. Meets specific criteria (length, format, number of sources) 10 %
b. Meets citation requirements 10%
c. Quality of content 50%
i. Organization – coherent and logical
ii. Content developed and supported
iii. Use of critical thinking -analyzing, applying,
synthesizing, evaluating
d. Quality of sources 10%
e. Standard English writing conventions 20%
i. Grammar
ii. Spelling
iii. Punctuation
iv. Other (Agreement, Tense, Voice,
etc.)
ORAL PRESENTATION REQUIREMENTS AND EVALUATION CRITERIA
a. Presentation meets time requirement (4-10 minutes) – 20%
b. Content (organized, covers the subject) – 50%
c. Communicates (able to inform the class of the content in an understandable manner) – 15%
d. Presentation (manner, appearance, professionalism, response to questions) 15%
____________________
RESEARCH PAPER INSTRUCTIONS – 8
PLAGIARISM
Plagiarism of any sort is not tolerated. Please refer to the syllabus and the Columbia College web site for the consequences. It is
strongly advised that students take the online Columbia College
Plagiarism Tutorial and Quiz. A link is provided in D2L. The Plagiarism Tutorial can also be found through CougarTrack by clicking on Library, then click on Getting Help – Citing Sources, and then at the bottom of that page, or this link:
https://ccis.ucourses.com/d2l/le/content/1003446/viewContent/5354549/View
The following Article on Plagiarism can be found at:
http://pcwlibrary.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/1/5/23151900/a_statement_on_plagiarism
A Statement on Plagiarism
Using someone else’s ideas or phrasing and representing those ideas or phrasing as our own, either on purpose or through carelessness, is a serious offense known as plagiarism. “Ideas or phrasing” includes written or spoken material, of course — from whole papers and paragraphs to sentences, and, indeed, phrases — but it also includes statistics, lab results, art work, etc. “Someone else” can mean a professional source, such as a published writer or critic in a book, magazine, encyclopedia, or journal; an electronic resource such as material we discover on the World Wide Web; another student at our school or anywhere else; a paper-writing “service” (online or otherwise) which offers to sell written papers for a fee.
Let us suppose, for example, that we’re doing a paper for Music Appreciation on the child prodigy years of the composer and pianist Franz Liszt and that we’ve read about the development of the young artist in several sources. In Alan Walker’s book
Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years (Ithaca: 1983), we read that Liszt’s father encouraged him, at age six, to play the piano from memory, to sight-read music and, above all, to improvise. We can report in our paper (and in our own words) that Liszt was probably the most gifted of the child prodigies making their mark in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century — because that is the kind of information we could have gotten from a number of sources; it has become what we call
common knowledge.
RESEARCH PAPER INSTRUCTIONS – 9
However, if we report on the boy’s father’s role in the prodigy’s development, we should give proper credit to Alan Walker. We could write, for instance, the following:
Franz Liszt’s father encouraged him, as early as age six, to practice skills which later served him as an internationally recognized prodigy (Walker 59). Or, we could write something like this:
Alan Walker notes that, under the tutelage of his father, Franz Liszt began work in earnest on his piano playing at the age of six (59). Not to give Walker credit for this important information is plagiarism.
Some More Examples
[The following examples are borrowed from the Center for Academic Development at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, and are used here with CAD’s permission.] Here is our original text from Elaine Tyler May’s “Myths and Realities of the American Family”:
Because women’s wages often continue to reflect the fiction that men earn the family wage, single mothers rarely earn enough to support themselves and their children adequately. And because work is still organized around the assumption that mothers stay home with children, even though few mothers can afford to do so, child-care facilities in the United States remain woefully inadequate.
Here are some possible uses of this text. As you read through each version, try to decide if it is a legitimate use of May’s text or a plagiarism.
Version A:
Since women’s wages often continue to reflect the mistaken notion that men are the main wage earners in the family, single mothers rarely make enough to support themselves and their children very well. Also, because work is still based on the assumption that mothers stay home with children, facilities for child care remain woefully inadequate in the United States.
RESEARCH PAPER INSTRUCTIONS
– 10
Plagiarism: In Version A there is too much direct borrowing of sentence structure and wording. The writer changes some words, drops one phrase, and adds some new language, but the overall text closely resembles May’s. Even with a citation, the writer is still plagiarizing because the lack
of quotation marks indicates that Version A is a paraphrase, and should thus be in the writer’s own language.
Version B:
As Elaine Tyler May points out, “women’s wages often continue to reflect the fiction that men earn the family wage” (588). Thus many single mothers cannot support themselves and their children adequately. Furthermore, since work is based on the assumption that mothers stay home with children, facilities for day care in this country are still “woefully inadequate.” (May 589).
Plagiarism: The writer now cites May, so we’re closer to telling the truth about the relationship of our text to the source, but this text continues to borrow too much language.
Version C:
By and large, our economy still operates on the mistaken notion that men are the main breadwinners in the family. Thus, women continue to earn lower wages than men. This means, in effect, that many single mothers cannot earn a decent living. Furthermore, adequate day care is not available in the United States because of the mistaken assumption that mothers remain at home with their children.
Plagiarism: Version C shows good paraphrasing of wording and sentence structure, but May’s original ideas are not acknowledged. Some of May’s points are common knowledge (women earn less than men, many single mothers live in poverty), but May uses this common knowledge to make a specific and original point and her original conception of this idea is not acknowledged.
Version D:
Women today still earn less than men — so much less that many single mothers and their children live near or below the poverty line. Elaine Tyler May argues that this situation stems in part from “the fiction that men earn the family
RESEARCH PAPER INSTRUCTIONS – 11
wage” (588). May further suggests that the American workplace still operates on the assumption that mothers with children stay home to care for them (589)
This assumption, in my opinion, does not have the force it once did. More and more businesses offer in-house day-care facilities. . . .
No Plagiarism: The writer makes use of the common knowledge in May’s work, but acknowledges May’s original conclusion and does not try to pass it off as his or her own. The quotation is properly cited, as is a later paraphrase of another of May’s ideas.
Penalty for Plagiarism
The penalty for plagiarism is usually determined by the instructor teaching the course involved. In many schools and colleges, it could involve failure for the paper and it could mean failure for the entire course and even expulsion from school. Ignorance of the rules about plagiarism is no excuse, and carelessness is just as bad as purposeful violation. At the very least, however, students who plagiarize have cheated themselves out of the experience of being responsible members of the academic community and have cheated their classmates by pretending to contribute something original which is, in fact, a cheap copy. Within schools and colleges that have a diverse student body, instructors should be aware that some international students from other cultures may have ideas about using outside resources that differ from the institution’s policies regarding plagiarism; opportunities should be provided for
all students to become familiar with institutional policies regarding plagiarism.
Students who do not thoroughly understand the concept of plagiarism and methods of proper documentation should request assistance from their teacher and from librarians.
RESEARCH PAPER INSTRUCTIONS – 12
HELPFUL WEB SITES FOR WRITING
http://owl.english.purdue.edu
EVALUATING WEB SITES
Authority: Who is the author? What is their expertise? Is it fact or opinion?
Objectivity: Is the information biased? Is it objective or subjective? What is the perspective? Could it be meant as humorous, parody, or satire?
Authenticity: What is the source? Is the source primary or secondary? Where does it originate? Are sources documented (cited) and/or is there a bibliography?
Reliability: Is the information accurate? Who or what organization sponsors the information? Can the information be verified (also found in another source)?
Timeliness: Is the information current? Is there more recent information which either confirms or contradicts?
Relevance: Is the information helpful? Do you need this information or is it merely just interesting? Does it contribute to your knowledge of the subject? Do you understand the information?
There is a great amount of information available, especially on the internet. Carefully evaluating the sources can be a necessary step in writing a quality research paper. The time it takes to evaluate a source can more than make up for time that might be wasted using questionable web sites.
Research Paper Instruction 2025 (1)
RESEARCH PAPER
Your research paper will be about
one of the following companies specifically focusing on their Ethics and Compliance program.
You should use the web site for the company, BUT do not rely exclusively on the company’s own information. This means that you will have to do additional research from other sources. Your paper should not only cover what the company’s current position is, but it should also address development over a period of time. You should conclude with some discussion of what direction or actions should come in the future. This last portion is opinion but it should provide reasons for that opinion.
Companies for Research Paper
Northrop Grumman
Newmont
Apple
Volkswagen
Dell
IBM
Kimberly Clark
ExxonMobil
