These course materials
are licensed by Lori Ostergaard under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
First Stop: Wikipedia
Wikipedia is an online, user-edited encyclopedia. It is not generally considered to be a credible source in academia, so while you should use Wikipedia as a first step in your research process, you should probably avoid using it as a credible source in academic papers. But the Wiki is edited by experts, and it includes great background information into a topic, links to other resources, and, typically, a bibliograpy. Read up on the topic, follow some of the links, keep notes of things you want to research further, and use this site as your initiation into the topic.
Go ahead, read about the Wikipedia phenomena.
Wiki-wiki is the Hawaiian word for quick.
Next Stop: Google
Here's where your notes from your Wikipedia exploration will come in handy. Use those notes to locate some keywords to use in your search and to narrow your search as much as possible. You can really narrow your search by doing any/all of the following. Put words or phrases into quotation marks: this will pull up only sites with those words in order. If I were to search for the terms Robot Monster, I might get a gazillion hits to sites containing each word at different places in the page. If I use quotation marks, I'll get hits only from sites with the complete phrase "Robot Monster."
Your crazy next door neighbor--the one who'll eat worms for a nickle--could design a Website about Einstein's theory of relativity. Her site, however, might not have the most accurate information about that theory. The way to eliminate (to a certain extent) the random pages from non-experts like your crazy neighbor is to narrow your search to educational (edu), organizational (org), or government (gov) sites. To do this, I enter my search term: Robots. After the term I type in site:edu. This will lead me to only those sites that orginate at universities. Search around the top sites there, then try site:org; then site:gov.
Now let's say I do a search for Robots and I keep getting hits from sites on nanotechnology. I want to eliminate all that nanotech noise, so I tell google I want sites that discuss Robots, but not nanotech. To do this, I put a + (plus symbol) in front of Robots and a - (minus symbol) in front of nanotechnology. My search term looks like this: +Robots -nanotechnology
Google has a site for searching academic papers as well, Google Scholar, and all of the above search tips should work with most search engines.
Misc. Online Directories:
These course materials
are licensed by Lori Ostergaard under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.