I also have a few non-peer-reviewed sources. These include government sources, current articles on the political situation, and studies that are out for distribution to the scholarly community before being published. According to the highlighting troll, they all must go. Yep. The highlighting troll even highlighted my government sources. Since my study focuses on the U.S. government's proposed Gainful Employment rule, it will be pretty hard to write this paper without mentioning the U.S. government! I sent my chairperson a question to that effect, and received a prompt response: government and seminal sources are ok! Whew. I'm fairly certain she is not the troll. I suspect my former chairperson, the adjunct faculty member who was demoted from chair to rank and file committee member.
It's Friday. I haven't opened a door or a window except to get my mail (my ballot arrived in my mailbox, yay, I love Oregon's vote by mail.) I spent the day researching new sources to update my old ones, stewing in my own cold sweat. I'm a wreck. The only breaks I've taken are to pee and to eat dinner. And talk to my mother on the phone. I'm feeling the strain. I don't have a lot of hope that I will finish by the end of the course next week.
Replacing so many old sources is a lot of work. On Wednesday I culled through my 1,000+ sources and eliminated the ones that were 2008 and older. I also eliminated the ones that weren't peer-reviewed. This brought my total to less than 400 sources. Then I opened up my concept paper, saved a new version, and performed a search-and-replace on all the sources that were 2008 or older. I formatted the results in red. Then I searched for all the sources that weren't peer-reviewed (based on the troll's highlighting) and formatted them in red as well. So now my paper is splotched with red. It looks like I took an axe to my throat and aimed the spray toward the computer monitor.
Today I started at the top. I have to go line by line. I can't just do a search and replace—search for Joe Blow, 2007, and replace it with Jane Blow, 2010. I'd like to think it would be that easy, but I fear a search and destroy blitz approach will backfire big time. I'll end up with something that makes no sense. Well, less sense than it does now. Like it was written by a robot. And so I've been dredging through the electronic stacks of EBSCOhost, searching on terms like for-profit, student as customer, stakeholders, academic quality, TQM, accreditation... I feel like I went swimming in a very deep, very murky muddy pit. I gamely caught a few pdfs and saved them to my folder. And in case you were wondering, no, I don't use EndNote, or Mendeley, or any other fancy software to organize my files. I have a simple coding system that works with Windows 7 Explorer search feature. Year, peer-reviewed, empirical study, method, higher ed or no, country, topic, and last name of the first author. As long as I have my list of topics at hand, I can search pretty fast for anything that meets my criteria. Crude, but it works.
I won't have much time to continue this editing nightmare tomorrow. Tomorrow morning is our career college's graduation. Again. Seems like we were just there, seems like only last month I was writing about the massive church, the crowded foyer, the huge auditorium filled with shrieking adults and whining children. I must dig into the back of the musty closet for my cap and gown, the polyester costume that will be around long after I am gone, stiffly waiting out eternity in some steaming landfill. And tomorrow it will be pouring rain, of course. It's fall in Oregon, after all.
Argh, where's that axe?
