Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [191]
Exercise #3: Ask the reference librarian about web access in general for your major area of study. What tips can the librarian give you about doing electronic research at your academic institution? Are there any special databases, web search engines/directories, or indexes you should consult in your research?
Exercise #4: Try out some or all of the full-text databases available on your campus. Now try the same searches in a scholarly index. What differences do you see in the quality/scope of the information?
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Eight Tips for Locating and Evaluating Electronic Sources
Tip #1: Backspacing “Backspacing” a URL can be an effective way to evaluate a website. It may reveal authorship or institutional affiliation. To do this, place the cursor at the end of the URL and then backspace to the last slash and press Enter. Continue backspacing to each preceding slash, examining each level as you go.
Tip #2: Using WHOIS WHOIS (www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp) is an Internet service that allows anyone to find out who’s behind a website.
Tip #3: Beware of the in a Web Address Many educational institutions allow the creation of personal home pages by students and faculty. While the domain name remains .edu in these cases, the fact that they are personal means that pretty much anything can be posted and so cannot assure academic quality.
Tip #4: Phrase Searching Not finding relevant information? Try using quotation marks around key phrases in your search string. For example, search in Google for this phrase, enclosed in quotation marks: “whose woods these are I think I know.”
Tip #5: Title Searching Still finding irrelevant information? Limit your search to the titles of web documents. A title search is an option in several search engines, among them Yahoo (advanced search) (http://search.yahoo.com) and Google (advanced search) (www.google.com).
Tip #6: Wikipedia Discussion Tab Use Wikipedia to full advantage by clicking on the discussion tab located at the top of Wikipedia entries. The discussion tabs expose the often intense debates that rage behind the scenes on topics like marijuana, genocide, and Islam. The discussion tab is an excellent source for locating paper topics because it highlights ongoing sources of controversy—those areas worthy of additional writing and research. To find the most controversial topics at any given moment, visit Wikipedia’s Controversial Issues page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_controversial_issues).
Tip #7: Full Text The widest selection of previously published full text (newspapers, magazines, journals, book chapters) is available in subscription databases via the web. Inquire at your library to see if you have access to Academic Search Premier from EBSCO(www.ebscohost.com), Academic ASAP/Onefile from Gale Cengage (www.gale.cengage.com), JSTOR from ITHAKA (www.jstor.org), Project Muse from Johns Hopkins (muse.jhu.edu/), Proquest Central from ProQuest (www.proquest.com), Omnifile from Wilson (www.hwwilson.com), or other full-text databases.
The leading free full-text site for magazines and newspapers is BNET’s FindArticles (http://findarticles.com). This database of “hundreds of thousands of articles from more than 300 magazines and newspapers” can be searched by all magazines, magazines within categories, or specific magazine or newspaper.
For the full text of books, try the Internet Archive Text Archive (hwww.archive.org/details/texts)), pointing to the major digital text archives.
Tip #8: Archives of Older Published Periodicals Full text for newspapers, magazines, and journals published prior to 1990 is difficult to find on the Internet. One subscription site your library may offer is JSTOR (www.jstor.org), an archive of scholarly full-text journal articles dating back in some cases into the late 1800s. LexisNexis Academic (www.lexisnexis.com),