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In the following Voices from Across the Curriculum, a business professor and a psychology professor offer useful tips for searching under more than one heading in order to find more information.

Voices from Across the Curriculum

A critical part of the bibliographic effort is to find a topic on which materials are available. Most topics can be researched. The key is to choose a flexible keyword/phrase and then try out different versions of it. For example, a bibliography on “women in management” might lead you to look up women, females, business (women in), business (females in), gender in the workplace, sexism and the workplace, careers (of men, of women, in business), women and CEOs, women in management, affirmative action and women, women in corporations, female accountants, and so forth. Be imaginative and flexible. A little bit of time with some of the indexes will provide you with a wealth of sources.

Here is a sampling of indexes heavily used in the social sciences, for instance: Social Science Index, SocAbs, Wall Street Journal Index (for WSJ stories), New York Times Index (for NYT stories), Business Source Elite, and the Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS).

—Frederick Norling, Professor of Business

Use quality psychological references, that is, use references that professional psychologists use and regard highly. Psychology Today is not a good reference; Newsweek and Reader’s Digest are worse. APA journals, such as the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, on the other hand, are excellent.

In looking for reference material, be sure to search under several headings. For example, look under depression, affective disorders, and mood disorders. Books (e.g., The Handbook of Affective Disorders) are oft en very helpful, especially for giving a general overview of a topic. Books addressing a professional audience are generally preferable to those addressing a general, popular audience.

Finally, references should be reasonably current. In general, the newer, the better. For example, with rare exceptions (classic articles), articles from before 1970 are outdated and so should not be used.

—Alan Tjeltveit, Professor of Psychology

FINDING QUALITY ON THE WEB

Imagine a megalibrary to which anyone has access any time of day or night and to which anyone can contribute material, to inform, but perhaps more so to sell and to promote, no matter how questionable the cause or idea. So it is with the web. A general caveat to this “library of the Internet” might well be User Beware.

Take as an example the website Martin Luther King: A True Historical Examination (www.martinlutherking.org). This site appears prominently in any web search for information about Martin Luther King, Jr. The site is visually appealing, claiming to include “essays, speeches, sermons, and more.” But who created the site? As it turns out, after a little digging (see Tips #1 and #2 later in the chapter), the site is sponsored by Stormfront, Inc. (http://stormfront.org), an organization out of West Palm Beach, Florida, serving “those courageous men and women fighting to preserve their White Western culture, ideals and freedom of speech.” This author is concealed behind the work, a ghost writer of sorts. While the site is at one’s fingertips, identifying the author is a challenge, more so than in the world of conventional publishing, where protocols are followed such as author and publisher appearing on the same pages as the title. For those websites with no visible author, no publishing house, no recognized journal title, no peer-review process, and no library selection process (the touchstones of scholarship in the print world), seemingly easy Internet research is now more problematic: the user must discern what is—and is not—authoritative information.

Understanding Domain Names

But how is the user to begin evaluating a web document? Fortunately, there are several clues to assist you through the Internet labyrinth. One clue is in the web address itself. For example, the Internet Movie