Internet Resources: A Guide
There is a great deal of interesting and quality information available on the internet. There is also a lot of garbage. When you use the internet to
research you need to be thinking critically and evaluating the quality of the information you discover. It is easier to do good research once you have a
basic understanding of a subject (because that makes it easier for you to judge the quality of your source).
Source Type & Reputability
Blogs: A series of articles (called posts) shared to share
information/ to have a conversation with other internet users.
Each post and its responses are on a dedicated page.
BECAUSE BLOGS ARE NOT PEER REVIEWED THEY ARE ONLY AS
TRUSTWORTHY AS THEIR AUTHOR. ANY INFORMATION IN A
BLOG SHOULD BE CONFIRMED BY OTHER SOURCES.
Wikis: A collection of articles or other resources written and
edited by multiple people.
THERE ARE NUMEROUS ERRORS ON WIKIPEDIA PAGES;
THEREFORE, THEY SHOULD ONLY BE USED AS A
STEPPINGSTONE TO FIND OTHER SOURCES.
Question and Answer sites: A site where individuals can pose
questions to the public, and anyone from the public can answer
them.
Authorship
The post itself is usually written by a
single, defined author followed by
comments each submitted by an
individual author.
Lifehacker.com
http://www.npr.org/bl
ogs/money/
Individual authorship is not
identifiable. Some wikis (e.g.,
Wikipedia) are open to any
members of the public who want to
participate (even you can edit
Wikipedia.)
Wookieepedia
Each author is identified by a selfselected alias, or online pen name.
wiki.answers.com
WikiTravel
Debateapedia
answers.yahoo.com
Besides the contents of the post itself, which can be highly informative, the
comments that follow it can be useful for:
●
Finding links to other sources
●
Seeing multiple viewpoints (e.g., readers sharing various theories on the
causes of a revolution)
●
GENERALLY SHOULD NOT BE USED AS A MAIN SOURCE OF INFO IN
SCHOLARLY RESEARCH
While searchers may want to confirm facts elsewhere, wikis can be a useful
source for background information but nothing on Wikipedia can be
considered 100% reliable.
While they can be quite helpful to answer some types of questions, they are
not intended to provide information appropriate for scholarly work.
ANSWERS SOURCES ARE OFTEN NOT RELIABLE AND DO NOT PROVIDE MUCH
SUBSTANTIAL CONTENT.
Q & A sites SHOULD NOT BE USED IN SCHOLARLY RESEARCH.
Search engines: These are tools for finding content on the web
based on the words that appear in the source.
Sample Uses
Examples
Generally, there is no content that
actually belongs to these sites, they
are tools used to search for sources
that exist across the web. You
should never say, “This information
comes from Google”; Rather, you
should record the source to which
Google points and where you found
the information.
Google
Bing
To search for web pages/sites with information that is useful to a student’s
need.
Yahoo!
*not a complete list
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***Scholarly works: Formal journal articles and scholarly books
are sources for highly authoritative information for school-work.
They are often written at a high academic level and focus on
very specific topics which makes it hard to use them for
background information.
***News/article sites: News sources are supposed to follow
journalist standards include fact checking and using reliable
sources. Some are much more reliable and unbiased than
others. Reliable news sites are: New York Times, BBC, The
Economist, CNN, Washington Post, SJ Mercury News
Author is clearly identified at the
beginning of the work.
To be published in an academic
journal an article needs to be peer
reviewed. This means that other
people who are experts in the field
have read the article and deemed
that it was a valid academic work. It
is not the job of a scholarly paper to
tell you what all the different
perspectives are, so it is important
to consult multiple sources.
American Historical
Review
Historical Review
Journal of World
History
Reference sources of the first variety are a great place to
start your research.
Information pages: This catch-all category generally
refers to pages that get used in much the same way one
would traditionally use an article or a book.
There are four main categories
1)
**Government affiliated sites (.gov)
2)
Non-profit affiliated sites (.org)
3)
**Educational affiliated sites (.edu)
4)
Personal sites (.com) (.net)
● Learning about scholarly debate around a topic
● Learning the theoretical frameworks through which the topic can be
viewed
● Discovering results from studies on a topic
● Accessing primary sources
Scholar.google.com
http://www.nytimes.c
om/
Depending on the time period of the event you are researching, news articles
can be a great source of information.
http://www.bbc.co.uk
/news/world/
If you are studying an event that occurred a time ago you might be able to use
news articles written at the time of the event to allow you to better
understand how people felt when the event first occurred. The New York
Times has a searchable archive of its articles dating back to 1850 (with some
restrictions if you don’t have a subscription)
Authorship varies and may not
be obvious and might be
created by one person, a group
of volunteers, or a large team at
an organization.
Stanford
Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
Generally, reference works are intended to be efficient ways to
deliver facts on a topic in an easily useable and comprehendible
format.
http://www.britann
ica.com/
They are designed to give background information. You will want to
use other sources for the more challenging part of your research.
Theoretically written by one
person or a single organization,
authorship may or may not be
clear for an informational page.
Be aware that there are very
high quality informational
pages, and also those that are
not acceptable for academic
use.
Government
websites: Library of
Congress http://www.loc.gov
/index.html
 (.gov): many .gov websites from the US have reliable information.
However be aware that the information may have a pro-US bias. The
Library of Congress has some great primary sources.
Generally one identified author per
article.
Some news sites have a strong political bias such as MSNBC or
Fox News.
**Reference sources: A collection of information on a
specific topic, making it easy to look up facts on that
topic.
Scholarly articles can be useful for:
Organizational sites:
PBS
http://www.pbs.org
 (.org) the usefulness of a .org site depends on the reliability of the
organization sponsoring the site. PBS has some great unbiased
historical information.
 (.edu) .edu means that website if associated with an educational
institution.
 Personal Sites- an individual authors a page or a blog spot without
an academic affiliation. In general, DON’T USE THEM FOR ACADEMIC
RESEARCH
*not a complete list
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Research Tips
•Pick out the key words on your topic for a search
•Entering your search as a full sentence question will often not yield the best results.
•read the section in your textbook on your topic to help you pick out key words related to your topic
•And leave out any extra words that might throw off your search
•You can include “-.com” or “-.net” and your search will exclude results from those types of websites
• To search only with in “.edu” type in your search query followed by :.edu
• Use quotes around a search for an exact word or set of words.
•Write your search terms followed by site:pbs.org (or site:url of other reliable history source site) in order to find information that
you are looking for on reliable websites
world cup site:pbs.org
Abraham Lincoln site:gilderlehrman.org
•Follow the links at the bottom of the Wikipedia article to find more reliable sites
*not a complete list
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