How To Conduct Research Online

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How To Conduct Research Online

Electronic resources abound, and they can be of very high quality. The best way to find peer-reviewed, high-quality journal articles is to access them through your online library, or to purchase the articles through an article provider.

However, there are excellent sources that are both accurate and of high quality on the web, and they are often free and not password protected.

Whether you are looking for journal articles, monographs, factual information, or high-quality publicly available resources, the same principles apply. Narrow your topic, make sure your search terms are relevant and focused, make sure your articles and your topic are in alignment, examine your sources for bias and distortion, and finally, make sure that your research provides sufficient support and background for your argument.

Let's expand the steps and look at them again. It is useful to look at each of the stages individually and to think about how and why you will be engaged in activities.

1. Define Your Topic

Narrow it down, but don't constrain it too much. Develop a solid thesis statement that gives you room to develop an argument. This is a great time to do brainstorming. Clusters, mind maps, concept maps, decision trees, and free-writing are all very effective.

2. Determine What Fields of Study Your Research Question Will Address

Identifying the fields of study will help you determine which journals and subject or field-specific databases to search.

3. Make a List of Items That Interest You About the Topic

For example, you may be required to write an essay on an aspect of Hamlet in your English class. At first, you feel overwhelmed. Later, however, you think about the characters and situations that most interested you and you recall that Ophelia's speech and then her subsequent death were interesting to you. You wondered about the psychological state, and how she was perceived by the others in the play. Does her situation illustrate something essential about the human condition? You don't have any idea, but you'd like to explore it. So, you start by looking into what others have said about Ophelia in Hamlet. You find that her madness and death reflect and reinforce the overall themes of death, madness, murder, and betrayal. How does Ophelia's madness contrast with Hamlet's? You start jotting down ideas and key words. These will help you develop search terms and to focus your search by going to the correct types of journals and publications.

4. Narrow Your Topic

This requires another round of brainstorming, but this time you will be focusing on what others have written. List terms, ideas, and concepts that occur to you, and then focus on the subcategories that you find most interesting.

Then, use the list to narrow your topic. Avoid worn-out subjects and ones that are too narrow or too broad.

Visit UCLA.edu for further help.

5. What Have Others Said?

As you conduct preliminary research in the library, you will find books and articles on your topic. As you read the material, try to form an idea of what the major issues have been in the discussions about your topic.

For example, if your topic is on how stem cells could treat Lou Gehrig's Disease, you will need to have an idea of who the first people who started researching the topic. You will also need to identify the sides of the argument. Who is for it? Who is against it? Why? What are the issues?

Once you have a sense of the main players, you can start to do searches based on author name as well as key words or topics.

Ironically, in some cases, you may even have to be aware that the site may not have the original version of the information you're citing. They may, in actuality, be borrowing from another site. This is particularly the case with websites and services that subscribe to weblogs or where the information is mirrored because they have chosen to pull the entire article in the feed.

6. Evaluate Your Material

How do you determine if a source of information is of high quality? Even if you are obtaining your data from a library database such as Lexis-Nexis, you should be aware that the articles contained in the newspapers they have in their database could be biased.

If it has advertising or links indicating that the owner is a member of an affiliate program on it, does such activity automatically make the site untrustworthy? In the past, it might have been an automatic disqualifier to see links to advertising, sponsors, or affiliate programs that pay the website owner a few cents for referrals. However, one can not make such assumptions now. In fact, the presence of affiliate links may indicate that the website is a labor of love, and that there are no ideological or commercial ties. Further, the lack of commercial ties may actually be a negative factor because it may mean that the enterprise is so profitable, or the ideological motivations are so strong that there are numerous well-endowed backers, or a highly successful business model.

Here are a few considerations as you evaluate your sources.

Refereed journals. This is an academic journal that requires all articles to be reviewed by experts in the field. They require revisions and will reject articles if they do not meet standards.
Books and serial monographs. In this case, it depends on the publisher and whether or not they evaluate, judge, and critique the material to assure that only the most reliable are published.
Series sponsored by an association or reputable group. These are very common in the humanities, particularly in the hosting of content in the public domain.
Wikis and collaborations. Variable quality. They can be extremely good and reliable, but the quality, quantity, depth, and breadth will be variable, as will be the scope of the contributions. There can be bias, distortion, or gaps (lacunae) in information.
Weblogs and personal / corporate websites. Some are absolutely brilliant. Others are dismal. One can use the information, but it must be approached with care and extreme caution.
Term paper repositories. Needless to say, we have not mentioned termpapers.com and other places that will sell you a term paper, or will allow you to share term papers with others. These are not the only unreliable sources of information in the Internet. It goes without saying that you should not use these, unless you're just determined to commit academic misconduct. You could cite them correctly, but they probably aren't the best source, unless your paper is about the traffic in term papers online.
Summaries, overviews, and study guides. I, like everyone else, love Pink Monkey. However, I would think twice before actually citing it in a paper. I think that the best way to use Pink Monkey, Cliff Notes, Wikipedia, etc. is as a point of departure. Use them to gain an appreciation of your subject and to orient yourself. However, the information can be very imprecise and inaccurate, particularly in their plot summaries. They leave out details and discussion points that may be precisely the ones that you need.
Student postings, peer-to-peer downloads of notes, texts, etc. These are excellent if you're interested in seeing how students write papers, and they can serve either as guides or as cautionary tales.
Parody websites. Believe it or not, some students have actually cited information from parody sites as fact! The Onion.com comes to mind. This is a site that masquerades as a legitimate news site, but is, in fact, pure parody. How can you tell if a site is a parody, or so biased that the information it contains is unusable? Compare the information with others. Does it seem outlandish or extremely biased? Look at least three or four sites.

7. Organize Your Sources, Articles, and Notes

After you have found your articles, be sure to organize them so that you have a sense of where they will go in your paper. Keep your primary thesis in mind, and the points you are trying to make and will support with evidence and research findings from your articles.

This is a good time to return to your outline and to start mapping out where you plan to use your sources and citations.

8. Create an Annotated Bibliography

As you download and read your articles, you can keep track of them by creating an "electronic notebook" which would consist of a citation of your sources. Create an entry for each source. Use the appropriate style (MLA, APA, CBE, Chicago, etc.). After you have completed that, be sure to write a one-sentence overview / summary of the article and how it relates to your topic.

If you're unsure how to cite references check out our guide on How To Avoid Plagiarism.

9. Update Your Outline

Re-examine your thesis. Look at your argumentation structure. Does each paragraph and subsection help support your thesis? How does your research fit? Determine where you have gaps, redundancies, or where your sources take you on a tangent.

10. Fill in the Gaps

Make a list of the places in your paper where you need additional support for your argument. Then, after eliminating redundancies, map where you need to fill gaps, and where your argument needs additional support.

Databases for Individual Use
(some require a subscription, others have free content, pay-per-article sales.)

Questia
http://www.questia.com/
Questia's database contains, according to their website, "the world's largest online collection of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences, plus magazine and newspaper articles." I've known quite a few students who swear by the Questia, and use it faithfully for their research. I believe that this is a very good option for undergraduates taking general education courses, who may not have easy access to a robust online library.
Highbeam
http://www.highbeam.com/
Highbeam has some of the same journals and magazines as Questia, but there seems to be somewhat different coverage. There are more magazines and newspapers, and Highbeam seems to have fairly good coverage in education, health and science.
Find Articles
http://www.findarticles.com/
LookSmart's Find Articles is a great database, with quite a few free articles. The journals include business, humanities, social sciences, health, and science.
Pathfinder.com
http://www.pathfinder.com/
This is the portal for Time, Discover, Fortune, Sunset, Parenting, People, TeenPeople, and more. Unfortunately, one must pay for many of the archived articles, but it's a great source, particularly for current events and issues.

Library Databases
These are probably too numerous to list, but I'm going to list ones that are particularly helpful for students who are seeking peer-reviewed articles and statistics.

Proquest
http://www.proquest.com/
With databases of articles tailored to meet the needs of students and faculty at different levels and institutions, Proquest's resources are targeted and easy to use.
EBSCO Information Services
http://www.ebsco.com/
Most online libraries subscribe to at least one of the EBSCO databases. They have excellent coverage of interdisciplinary journals. While the full-text options may be a bit limited, the citations, with key words and publication data can help one obtain the article from other sources.
Ovid
http://www.ovid.com/
Ovid has absolutely a dizzying array of databases and information products. Their medical databases are expensive, but indispensable to many.
LexisNexis
http://www.lexis-nexis.com/
Best-known for its database on legal publications, LexisNexis has extensive holdings in newspapers. It is an excellent source for current information and syndicated content.
Wilson Web Databases
http://www.hwwilson.com/
The old green "Readers' Guides" are now available at one's fingertips, and with full-text versions. The Wilson databases include journals and publishers that are not always easy to find, particularly in business and agriculture.
- Education Full Text
- General Science Full Text
- Humanities Full Text
- Readers' Guide Full Text
- Social Sciences Full Text
- Wilson Business Full Text
JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive
http://www.jstor.org/
JSTOR has an amazing collection of humanities and interdisciplinary journals. Perhaps what is most exciting about this collection is that the older journals are being digitized and included, which means that there is much less reliance on interlibrary loan. An article about JSTOR appears here: Bowen, William G. "The Academic Library in a Digitized, Commercialized Age: Lessons from JSTOR." ALA Midwinter Participants' Meeting (based on Romanes Lecture, delivered at Oxford University, October 17, 2000). January 14, 2001. Online. Available: http://www.jstor.org/about/bowen.html.
Emerald Full-Text
http://www.uwp.edu/departments/library/journals/databases/emerald.htm
This tends to have a business and management orientation. The journals are excellent, and the interface is easy to use.
Project Muse
http://muse.jhu.edu/
Originating at Johns Hopkins university libraries, this is one of my favorite databases. The articles are full-text, and they cover very interesting journals in the humanities.

Courtesy of eLearners.com

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