Download EPQ, guidance on online research

E-research
How to conduct effective online research
Guidance on online research
Search engines
There are a variety of search engines available. Google is not necessarily the
best for you. Some cover specialist or niche areas.
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Alexa Web Search - analyzes site traffic including ranking, global
users, pages linking to the site, and links to related pages of interest
Cuil - searches a very large index of Web pages and includes
thumbnails of sites in its search results
Exalead - offers concept clustering of results, thumbnail images of
retrieved sites, and customization options such as organization of
results by file type, geography or modification date
Factbites - beta engine that searches for full topic matches and returns
meaningful, full sentence excerpts of sites in its results list
Google - Web's most popular search engine that uses PageRank and
other methods to rank results. Google offers a number of Services
that are worth exploring, including:
o Google Blog Search, for searching blog entries
o Google Book Search, for searching the full text of books from
most publishers in the U.S.
o Google Directory, for searching the Google version of the
Open Directory
o Google Scholar, offers the full text, abstracts, and/or citations
to scholarly materials including books, journal articles,
documents in academic repositories and the free Web. This link
will allow you to access the full text of articles in journals to
which the Libraries subscribe when you are off campus.
o Google U.S. Government Search, a searchable database of
U.S. government Web sites (.gov and .mil) ranked by link
popularity
o Searchmash Google's experimental general search tool
iSEEK Education - offers authoritative resources from university,
government, and established non-commercial providers; organizes
results into concept clusters, and also allows users to recommend and
rate sites
Quintura - displays a type of tag cloud with keywords related to your
search that can be selected to generate new results
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SearchEdu.com - service that limits results to the .edu, domain; also
offers to search well-known dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs,
etc. See also:
Virtual Learning Resources Center - searches several high quality
directories; also offers its own directory
Smart searching
By using key words such as ‘AND’, ‘OR’ and ‘NOT’ you can limit the number
of sites you are directed to. This is known as the Boolean Research system,
named after George Boole, nineteenth century mathematician. You can use
‘+’ or ‘-‘ as an alternative.
‘OR’ option is useful where you are uncertain of precise details or want to
extend your chances of finding the right information, e.g. if you are
researching the use of colour in paiting typing in ‘synthetic color’ OR ‘synthetic
colour’ will expose your search to US as well as UK research material
Limit your search to about 6 key words and try to use nouns which are places,
people or things directly related to your research. Put the most important
words first because some search engines rate searches in this way, e.g. if
looking for a library for research into Russian composers, don’t type in
‘Where can I find a library to research Russian composers?’ (40,400 hits)
But
Russian composers, library, London, research (18,700 hits including
Goldsmiths library (1st hit) specialist research library in Russian music)
Use quotation marks to stick words together rather than separate them, e.g if
you want to research into type Dr Who
“Dr Who” OR “ Doctor Who”
so that the search engine doesn't look for everything to do with doctors and
the question word who, rather than specifically looking for Doctor Who.
Punctuation can matter – use accurate punctuation, e.g. if you are research
Bill Clinton, typing in ‘bill’ may call up references to accounts bills as well as
presidents
Use accurate spelling – typing in ‘goverment of the UK’ instead of
‘government of the UK’ can reduce range of sites by 90%
Truncation symbol* is useful when searching fields, e.g. conducting research
into family names on a family history site, you could type in higg* which will
call up names that begin with ‘Higg’ but have other variations after them, e.g.
Higgins, Higginson, Higginbottom
Wild cards, e.g. car, will call up variations of words or phrases with car in that
you might not have thought of researching e.g. car sharing, car phones, car
parks
Web archive
Frustratingly websites are sometimes taken down for various reasons. If they
are useful to your research and you would like to find a website that has since
been taken down use the Web Archive site to locate the site you are looking
for. You will 150 billion pages of archived web materials, including film and
audio clips.
Checking for authorship
Use sites like Alexa Web and ‘Whois’ Screen to check the authorship of
sites as a way of checking reliability of the sources you are using
Plagiarism
Teachers and examiners can check for plagiarism very easily by placing
“inverted commas” around sections of text they suspect students have copied
and placing these sections into a search engine. The search engine will
immediately find exact or close matches.
Online catalogues and research resources
There are a number of specialist websites which will give you direct acces to
specialist research catalogues. Some like Ingenta Connect are on a
subscription or pay-per-view basis. Increasingly, public collections are putting
their catalogues on line such as the British Library , the London Lending
Library , the Kent County Libraries catalogue, the Canterbury Christ
Church University College catalogue and the University of Kent online
library catalogue
To keep up to date with latest research use the book review sections of
quality press, e.g. the New York Times Book Review
Bookmarking & bibliographies
You will be expected to site URLs and date last accessed for web pages
used. Create a folder in your favourites for your EPQ and save pages into
these regularly. You will be surprised how quickly you build up a bank of
useful links and also by how much time you save instead of trawling the net
for that one site you found especially useful.
When compiling your bibliography note down the date ‘last accessed’ as
some websites, e.g. BBC news website will change regularly with news
updates, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8115358.stm (last accessed
24.06.09)