I wouldn’t say that everything I teach students about research is lies, but there is admittedly a lot that I teach them that I don’t necessarily practice myself. In my own course, I’m open with students about that fact. For example, students in my classes know that I, like them, rarely create my own citations from scratch. Not because I don’t understand how to construct a citation, but because a lot of the scholarly articles I write have dozens of citations in them and frankly who has time for that? Instead, I use whatever citation is generated by the database where I found the source and then edit it to match the quirky preferences of the journal I’m hoping to submit to. The rest is the work of diligent copyeditors.
Other supposed sins I commit: I use Wikipedia all the time and generally trust the information I find there. I almost never go past the first page or two of search results on Google. And I rarely do all (or even most) of my research before I start to write something.
Arguably, the difference between me committing these sins and students doing the same thing is that I have the experience and expertise to understand (and hopefully avoid or at least make peace with) the potential pitfalls of what I’m doing. Students are still developing the skills and knowledge necessary to be able to do that.
But really my main message to students is that there’s no one right way to do research. Everyone has their own approach and just because that approach doesn’t match the rigid ideas they learned about from some librarian (like me) or some professor, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
That’s what I do in my own course. When I teach one-shot sessions, things are different in part because I’m constrained by the course instructor’s expectations about what they want students to learn as part of the instruction I’m giving them. Since the instructor is the expert on their students and the assignment they’ll be working on, I tend not to push back too much. Even when I think what they want me to teach is stupid.
Like concept maps. I think concept maps are stupid.