We all would like to see research papers go according to plan, but what where would you start? Who would you turn to when the teacher asks you to research your favorite actor, author, book? Would you just Google it and wing the rest? Who can you trust? Who can't you trust?
Well, let's start with Google, there is actually a lot you can do with Google that is relevant to the research project you have been assigned. So let's look at the front page, found at www.google.com
What we are looking for, however, is a way to make Google relevant to our research project. Let's say we are researching the book Beowulf. Simple enough right? Type Beowulf into the search bar and see what comes up. A mess of movie titles, and places to buy the book, but no scholarly articles about what other people say about Beowulf. There are sources which may help us on Google, but we must remember the rule of thumb when using this site, and that is that Google makes revenue based on the commercial properties of the website being published, and therefore, websites which generate a high amount of money will appear first in the query. The first link you will most likely come across is the Wikipedia website for Beowulf.
Wikis are a great resource for research projects, but we need to remember one crucial bit of information, that everyone can edit a wiki. Since everyone can edit a wiki, I will show you how to properly use a Wiki for your research project. Don't navigate away from this page yet, I am not finished. Even if your teacher says "You can't use Wikipedia for this paper or you will get an F", you will find this part useful. So, to go ahead and use wikipedia, we will need to look at the website first. Type Beowulf into the search bar and hit enter. The first site is Wikipedia, as expected.
If you click on the link, you will be taken to this page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf everything from the top to the bottom you should disregard completely, take your mouse and literally go all the way to the bottom of the website. The reason being is because I could go in, delete everything that there is on the website, put down "I saw Angelina Jolie in this movie" and skip along afterwards without many repercussions. The information that we are looking for is at the bottom of the page called "Reference Bibliography". Here, we can see a plethora of links, books, articles, magazines, and other references that wikipedia and the people that made the Beowulf page, have used to compile their information. Remember to always go to the website in order to check its credibility though.
If you click on the first link that shows up in the "Reference Bibliography" section you will be taken to this page http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3202069?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104415865391 which has a book review on the book Beowulf. As we can see, the page looks similar to that of Amazon.com or other websites selling books with teasers from the information. On this website, you can "Check out" books like a digital library, and even buy electronic copies, however, Jstor.org is not a very reliable website, because the information that they hold is not always scholarly. Scholarly information is information which has been reviewed by one or more collegiate level graduates and deemed worthy and accurate at that time.
You can also see that there are other valuable offline resources which you can take to your local library and check out at any time. These automatically count as scholarly, because they have undergone a process which means that at least one more set of eyes had to see it before it saw print (if not more).
As useful as Wikipedia is at finding resources for researching Beowulf and other topics, we must again return to Google to see if we can make use of this product for our research paper. Regular Google does not work, as we just found out, so let's try Google's scholarly engine, Google Scholar.
The domain name for Google Scholar is Scholar.Google.com . You can click on this hyperlink provided and it will take you to the main page. Enter the search term "Beowulf" again, and you will see a page which is oddly reminiscent of Google, the commercial search engine. If your research project has to be scientifically relevant, you have to make sure your sources are up to date, and to make sure of this you have to click on one of the links to the left which tells you when the article was published or edited last, such as "Since 2014". You may also note that you can search by relevance or by date published and that you can search for articles which have patents or citations.
Citations are a great part of any project, but make sure to always double check your work. Citations, as a reminder, must be in alphabetical order, and must be in the format which is most recent. If you are having troubles with telling what is up to date, visit the https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ website and click on your appropriate style (MLA, Chicago, Chicago Turabian, or APA are the most common).
If you would kindly go back to the search page on scholar.google.com with Beowulf, there are some other tools which you can use to narrow your search down to those which are relevant to your research paper. First, on the right hand side of the page, you will note that each link has a description of what type of link, and where that link came from beside it. Here, you can tell if the link came from an HTML, a book, a magazine, or any other source.
If you are have a google account, Google scholar also has a way for you to save your links so that you can reference them at home, or in your office, or wherever you may go in the future without searching for them time and time again. It is called "my library" If you click on the link to the left of the page you are currently on you will get this page
Here you should be able to see how you can search for "Beowulf" in articles. We can search using the exact words "Beowulf dies to a dragon" and google scholar will search for any and all articles with that phrase. We might want to exempt from our searches any mentioning of Grendel, so we put into the search box, Without the words "Grendel" and finally, we want to find an article which was published sometime in the last 10 years, so we will go ahead and put in the bottom of the search terms 2004-2014. These tools can help Narrow down 70,700 results to a little over a hundred.
Review questions for section 1.
What is the domain name for Google Scholar?
Where can you find a good reference using Wikipedia?
What is Jstor.org similar to?
How many items can you check out simultaneously with Jstor.org?
