Effective internet research

This presentation covers the following:

•Evaluating websites•Intute & the Virtual Training Suite•Using Google more effectively•RSS & feed readers•Organising your online research

Effective internet research doesn’t just mean searching for websites on Google.

Firstly, Google does not index the entire internet.

Secondly, anyone can post information to the internet. Therefore, how do you know if that information is accurate, written by a reliable author, covers the topic in sufficient depth, is up-to-date, properly sourced, and objective?

Introduction

Evaluating websitesWith this in mind, please take time to go through the Internet Detective online tutorial. Designed for students in higher & further education, this “looks at the critical thinking required when using the Internet for research and offers practical advice on evaluating the quality of web sites”. This should take about an hour to complete.

http://www.vtstutorials.ac.uk/detective/

What can I use instead of Google?

http://www.intute.ac.uk/

“Intute is a free online service that helps you to find web resources for your studies and research.

With millions of resources available on the Internet, it can be difficult to find useful material. We have reviewed and evaluated thousands of resources to help you choose key websites in your subject.”

http://www.vtstutorials.ac.uk/

The Virtual Training Suite is “a set of free Internet tutorials to help you develop Internet research skills for your university course.

All of the tutorials are written and reviewed by a national team of lecturers and librarians from universities across the UK.

These interactive, teach-yourself tutorials take around an hour to complete. Simply work through the material in your own time at your own pace.”

Using Google more effectively

This section looks at:

•Google’s advanced search page•Google alerts•Google Scholar

Google advanced search

http://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search?hl=en

Take greater control of how Google uses your keywords and limit your searches to particular file-types and domains.

Control how Google uses

your keywords

Searching for PDFs only? Select file-type from the pull-down menu

Limit your search to a website or domain?

Type it’s address here

http://www.google.com/alerts

“Monitor the Web for interesting new content

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you'll receive.”

http://scholar.google.co.uk/

“Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.”

Please note, many of the resources listed by Google Scholar are not accessible as they are taken from subscription-based resources. However, Google Book results and many PDFs are available to read for free.

RSS & feed readers

Automatically keep up-to-date with a blog or website’s new content by subscribing to it’s RSS feed using a feed reader.

RSS feeds are often identified by the RSS icon:

Feed readers come in many different forms: web browsers and email clients incorporate their own readers; also available are a wide variety of desktop programmes and online readers.

A comprehensive list of feed readers can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators.

Organising your online researchThere are various free online and desktop programmes that help you organise your internet research.

“Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.” (Firefox only!) http://www.zotero.org/

“Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.” http://www.mendeley.com/

“Keep, share, and discover the best of the Web using Delicious, the world's leading social bookmarking service.”http://www.delicious.com/

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