Here’s a blog post I wrote for a now non-existent site. It’s aimed at students, rather than most of my contributions, which are aimed more at staff or general audiences. But I thought it may be useful enough for some people to put online.
Research Papers
If you’re a college student, or you’re studying at a university, you’re probably been called upon to write research papers. These will involve collecting together information from verifiable sources and documenting them in some form of academic writing.
The sources that are best for research are not always the same ones that you would use in a standard Internet search. For instance, just going to Google and merely typing in a search term will not always give you academic results, and your professors and lecturers will be looking for information which has gone through a verifiable academic process to be used as a source in your research.
The good news is that there are some standard alternatives to use which are highly useful and can be check quickly, rather than having to hunt through many results from Google which may not be appropriate for your particular area for your essay.
Wikipedia
The first place you should go to, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Wikipedia. Wikipedia provides a lot of peer-reviewed information on different sources and in different areas. And by going straight to Wikipedia you can get a very quick generic overview about a topic. This can be useful if you’re trying to write a research paper which otherwise can take a bit of time to get to grips with what may be in your academic area for you.
However, you need to be aware that just going straight to Wikipedia and using it is not always well-considered by professors when they come to assess your work. Instead, take advantage of a little known part of Wikipedia, which is a source list at the bottom of the article. This gives the sources that the authors of Wikipedia article used to complete their work. When you’re looking for an academic subject, many of these sources on Wikipedia will be academic in nature. And when you look through this source list you can quickly go back to the original information, rather than looking at Wikipedia’s summarized version for it.
Because Wikipedia has likely already presented the information in language easy for you to understand, this will save you a lot of time when you read the original paper. And if you make sure to reference this one in your work, rather than Wikipedia, then you’ve got a good head start on other students in the class.
Internal Databases
The second thing you should do is use any internal databases that are available for you within your college or university. In older days, a lot of information would be published in physical journals. These took up many shelf-miles in university and college libraries and could be very difficult to access. You’d have to find a large file full of search information; or perhaps look on a computer system, find out a shelf mark, and then hunt through the shelves until you found the journal or research paper of interest.
The good news now is that most of this information, although still published in physical journals, has also been placed online. This has ended up inside research databases. These tend to be commercial in nature, so they’re not available for free on the Internet. But your college or university will almost certainly have made arrangements for you to have access to them via a password-protected information entrance. So you need to find out, directly from your college, what the procedure is for accessing the information.
Once you get in, you’ll be able to very quickly find the papers you want from the comfort of your own desk and to print out or read online any of them which are appropriate for you. By using the college research databases, you can drastically save the time you would otherwise have to spend inside the library.
Google Scholar
The final place you should look is one part of Google, and this is known as Google Scholar. Google Scholar is a specialized part of Google search empire, because it only searches academic sources. These might include journal papers, conference papers, or physical printed books. Many of these papers can be found online, and when you search Google Scholar you’ll be given a direct link to them. This can be useful if you don’t have direct access through a college research database. Indeed, even when a paper started off in a database, it’s often the case that somebody’s taken a local copy of it and stored that online for their own students or their own use. And so you can access these directly through Google Scholar. But even if this isn’t possible, you should find a link to the original paper source.
And you can then go back into the college research database and download that, if that is a good alternative for you. So by using Google Scholar you open up a whole range of additional sources. And by using the “Advanced” features of Google Scholar, such as looking at the papers that link to a particular paper through the citation network, you should be able to save yourself a lot of search time in the long run.
Using The Web
There’s no reason why you need to turn away from the web when you’re looking to research your college paper or term paper through a whole host of good sites you can look at without having to set foot in a library. First of all, start off at Wikipedia and find a generic overview of the topic you’re looking for. Make sure you use their sources to support your own argument for your paper. Secondly, find how to access specialized research databases that your college provides for you. By doing so you’ll have access to a huge amount of papers that would only otherwise be available in physical form. And finally, use a specialized Google Scholar search to look for the most appropriate research papers according to Google’s algorithm. This will often rank the ones that are very best at the top.
By doing so, you’ll have no shortage of good sources for your research paper, and you should be well on your way to getting a decent mark for your work.