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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. o o 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 o o 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)