These course materials
are licensed by Lori Ostergaard under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
What you need to research a topic: background information on your topic; keywords you can use to search for sources; a way to locate credible sources; a way to identify sources that aren't credible; an understanding of how to use your sources when you get them.
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 could use Wikipedia as a first step in your research process, you should probably avoid citing 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.
I remember seeing something about robots in a Newsweek article a year or so back, but I don't want to spend 20 minutes finding that article, especially if I'm wrong about the magazine where I found that article. So I can use the "site" search to help me narrow my search to only Newsweek articles about robots. I get Newsweek's html address and write my google search like this: robots site:http://www.newsweek.com/. Or maybe I read in Wikipedia that the faculty at MIT are leading the way with robot production. I want to see what they're doing without trying to figure out which department is doing this work. So my google search looks like this: robot site: mit.edu.
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.
Try searching the term "robots" in Google Scholar now and see what kinds of hits you get. The sources you get using this search engine are going to be more acceptable & credible with your academic audiences. Always be cautious when citing an internet source: make certain that source is credible first before you associate yourself and your work with it. You are known by the company you keep, so if your sources aren't very authoritative, you will not be considered an authority either.
Archived Pages: Internet Archive
Let's say you are researching a particular online community and you know they've been on the web for 15 years, but you'd like to see what their site looked like, promised, delivered, etc, when they first went virtual. Or you are getting ready to teach your class and one of the external links you usually direct students to read has disappeared, leaving only one of those annoying 404: File Not Found messages in its wake. If you have the web address for the community you're researching or you know the address for the missing page, you can always find that site/page in the WayBack Machine or Internet Archive. Simply copy/paste the address into the site and it will show you a page that lists, by year, the sequence of pages. Sometimes an image may go missing from a page pulled up from the archive, but generally you'll be able to click on a date and see what that page looked like in 2007, 2001, 1998, etc.
Quick Tip:
Let's say you go to a website that promises (according to the search you ran) to have information on robots that you desperately need. But the page is huge, with maybe 5,000 words of text. To navigate the page quickly to see if it has what you need, go to the top of you browser and click on Edit-->Find--> and in the box that opens up, type in the word "robot." Then hit enter and the page will jump to the first use of the word "robot." Hit enter again & it'll jump to the second use of that word. Now you can easily skim the site to see if it is one you should read more closely, to see if it has important links on your topic to other sites, or to see if you should just move on to the next site that came up in your search.
Misc. Online Directories:
OU's Academic Conduct Regulations
These course materials
are licensed by Lori Ostergaard under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.