Capture Tough To Find Research Sources
You’ve selected a great topic and you’ve found two fabulous sources. Research is going well, and then suddenly you hit a brick wall. You discover that the resources you’ve found seem to be the only ones available on your topic. You will probably discover that some of the sources used in the books are scholarly articles. Don’t be dismayed! Many articles are available online, and you may be able to find a specific article by doing a detailed Internet search.
Simply type the entire title of the article into a the Knobull search bar and put quotations marks around the title. The search will either lead you to that article or it will direct you to another source (article) that quotes your original article. The other source might be just as helpful. If you find a great article in a bibliography and it’s not available online, you can still get it with a little effort. Just go to your school library a public library and show it to your librarian. If it’s not available on site, the librarian will probably be able to order it from another library.
If you’re working on a paper for science class? The same technique will work. For instance, if your paper concerns a rare South American bug and you discover late in the game that there are only two books in the entire world that discuss this bug, you could devote a few paragraphs to “a bug’s life.”
Seriously! You could identify the predator of the bug and write a few paragraphs about the tactics the bug uses to avoid his predator. Or—you could focus on an environmental factor that affects the bug and write about the struggles the bug faces when he encounters these factors. Then one of your sources could concern the environmental factor (or the predator) and not concern the bug specifically.
Added methods include:
Scholarly, peer-reviewed articles or books -written by researchers for students and researchers. Original research, extensive bibliography. Found in GALILEO's academic databases and Google Scholar. Anatomy of a Scholarly Article.
Trade or professional articles or books - written by practitioners in a field to impart practice-oriented information. Found in GALILEO databases. Some may also be found through Google or other search engine, but may require payment to see the full text. Beware of sources on the internet that look like trade/professional articles, but don't have reliable content. Magazine articles, books and newspaper articles from well-established newspapers - written for a general audience by authors or journalists who have consulted reliable sources and vetted through an editor. These sources may provide some of their articles online for free. Newspapers and magazines often contain both researched news stories and editorial/opinion pieces that express the view of the writer. It is important to be able to distinguish between them! Beware of sources on the internet that look like reputable magazines, and newspapers, but don't have reliable content.
Websites and blogs - can be reliable or unreliable, hoaxes or sincere misinformation. Researchers and other experts often use blogs as a way to share their knowledge with the general public, but anyone with computer access can do so too, to further any agenda they want. It's up to you to evaluate the quality of what you find online. Online news sources are particularly notorious for false information. Open Sources, evaluates a large list of news sources, labeling them according to their level of reliability. Click on the this link for more details: