Checklist of Internet Research Tips

1. The Internet is a self-publishing medium. It is not a library of evaluated publications selected by professionals. Rather, the Internet is a bulletin board containing everything from the definitive to the spurious. Everything, everything must be analyzed for its appropriateness for research use. Here are some examples:

   Source

   • Author/producer is identifiable
   • Author/producer has expertise on the subject as indicated on a credentials page. You may need to trace back in the URL (Internet address) to view a page in a higher directory with background information
   • Sponsor/location of the site is appropriate to the material as shown in the URL
     Examples:
     • .edu for educational or research material
     • .gov for government resources
     • .com for commercial products or commercially-sponsored sites
   • ~NAME in URL may mean a personal home page with no official sanction
   • Mail-to link is offered for submission of questions or comments

   Content

   Accuracy

    

   • Don't take the information presented at face value
   • Web sites are rarely refereed or reviewed, as are scholarly journals and books
   • Look for
     • point of view
     • evidence of bias
   • Source of the information should be clearly stated, whether original or borrowed from elsewhere

    

   Comprehensiveness

    

   • Depth of information: determine if content covers a specific time period or aspect of the topic, or strives to be comprehensive
   • Use additional print and electronic sources to complement the information provided

    

   Currency

    

   • Look to see if
     • Site has been updated recently, as reflected in the date on the page
     • Material contained on the page is current

    

   Links

    

   • Links are relevant and appropriate
   • Don't assume that the linked sites are the best available. Be sure to investigate additional sites on the topic

    

   Be sure to try out a handful of sites when researching a topic on the Internet. Do not rely on only one site or one type of site.

    

2. Three major resources for locating Internet materials are the subject directory, the search engine, and databases on the so-called "invisible Web." Be sure you understand the difference:

   SUBJECT DIRECTORY
   Definition: A subject directory is a service that offers a collection of links to Internet resources submitted by site creators or evaluators and organized into subject categories. Directory services use selection criteria for choosing links to include, though the selectivity varies among services. Most directories offer a search engine mechanism to query the service.

   When using subject directories, keep in mind that:

    

   • There are two basic types of directories: academic and professional directories often created and maintained by subject experts to support the needs of researchers, and commercial portals that cater to the general public and are competing for traffic. Be sure you use the directory that appropriately meets your needs.

      

   • Subject directories differ significantly in selectivity. Consider the policies of any directory that you visit. One challenge to this is the fact that not all directory services are willing to disclose either their policies or the names and qualifications of site reviewers. This is especially true of commercial portals.

      

   • Many people don't make enough use of subject directories, but instead go straight to search engines. Keep in mind that academic subject directories contain carefully chosen and annotated lists of quality Internet sites. Don't overlook subject directories when searching for quality on the Internet.

   INFOMINE is a good example of an academic subject directory. Yahoo! is a good example of a commercial portal. A more complete list of both types of directories may be found on the page Internet Subject Directories.

   SEARCH ENGINE
   Definition: A search engine is a searchable database of Internet files collected by a computer program (called a wanderer, crawler, robot, worm, spider). Indexing is created from the collected files, e.g., title, full text, size, URL, etc. There is no selection criteria for the collection of files.

   A search engine might well be called a search engine service or a search service. As such, it consists of three components:

    

   • Spider: Program that traverses the Web from link to link, identifying and reading pages

      

   • Index: Database containing a copy of each Web page gathered by the spider

      

   • Search engine mechanism: Software that enables users to query the index and that usually returns results in relevancy ranked order

   GO.com is a good example of a search engine. A more complete list may be found on the page Internet Search Engines.

   INVISIBLE WEB
   Definition: The so-called "invisible" or "deep" Web consists of information stored in searchable databases mounted on the Web. These databases usually search a targeted topic or aspect of a topic, though entire Web sites may be contained within a database. Search engine spiders cannot or will not index this information.

   When dealing with the invisible Web, keep in mind that:

    

   • A good directory will link to database sites on the Web.

      

   • There are Web sites that specialize in collecting links to databases available on the Web. One such site is actually called The InvisibleWeb and links to 10,000 Web-accessible databases. You may also want to visit other sites that collect links to Web databases.

      

   • Topical coverage on the Invisible Web is extremely varied. This presents a challenge, since it is impossible to anticipate what might turn up in a database. In addition, this coverage will be fluid as databases proliferate on the Web.

      

   • Information that is dynamically changing in content will appear on the Invisible Web. Examples include news, job postings, available airline flights, etc.

    

3. Subject directories can be highly useful when you have a broad topic and wish to view recommended sites relevant to that topic. Search engines are appropriate to use when you are looking for a specific site or have a narrow topic to pursue.

    

4. Yahoo! is one of the most popular sites on the Web. It is one of the Web's largest commercial portals. But it is not a reliable or adequate research tool and should not be used for this purpose. Beware of its drawbacks:

    

   • Yahoo! is merely the passive recipient of sites submitted to it

      

   • Yahoo!'s staff does not carefully evaluate content when choosing to add items to the database; therefore scholarly sites are haphazardly mixed in with everything else

      

   • When you do a search in Yahoo!, you are searching only the title and the short descriptive blurb about the site; by contrast, search engines usually give you access to the full text of the document

      

   • Yahoo! tends to index only the major landing page of a site; therefore, any significant subsidiary pages on a related or different topic may not show up on this site

      

   • The editors at Yahoo! don't have time to review all submitted sites. Many sites are not added to Yahoo! because there simply isn't enough time.

    

5. When you enter more than one word in a Web search engine, the space between the words has a logical meaning that directly affects your results. This is known as the default syntax. For example:

   In AltaVista, Infoseek, and Excite, a search on the words

   birds     migration

   means that you will get back documents that contain either the word birds, the word migration, or both. The space between the words defaults to the Boolean OR. This is probably not what you want for this search.

   In HotBot, Lycos and Northern Light, a search on the words

   birds     migration

   means that you will get back documents that contain both the words birds and migration. The space between the words defaults to the Boolean AND. This is more appropriate.

   Be sure you know the default syntax of the search engine you are using. For an overview of the default syntax of major search engines, see Quick Reference Guide to Search Engine Syntax.

    

6. When using Web search engines, a de facto search language is emerging especially for basic search (i.e., main screen) interfaces. When in doubt, use the following syntax:

    

   • + for mandatory words:  +birds    +migration
   • phrases within double quotations:  "human rights"

    

7. If you are looking to search without the hassle of perfecting a technique, try Ask Jeeves. This search service find answers to questions stated in plain English.

    

8. Search engines offer numerous features that help you hone in on what you want. For a review of these features, and the search engines that support them, see How to Choose a Search Engine or Research Database.

    

9. Search engines return results in a schematic order. Most search engines use various criteria to construct a term relevancy rating of each hit and will present your search results in this order. Criteria can include: search terms in the title, URL, first heading, HTML META tag; number of times search terms appear in the document; search terms appearing early in the document; search terms appearing close together; etc.

    

10. One of the most interesting developments in search engine technology is the organization of search results by concept, site, domain, popularity and linking rather than by relevancy. This type of ranking looks at "off-the-page" information to determine the order of your search results. Search engines that employ this alternative may be thought of as second generation search services. For example:

     

    • Direct Hit ranks according to sites other searchers have chosen from their results to similar queries
    • Google.com! ranks by the number of links from pages ranked high by the service
    • Inference Find ranks by concept and top-level domain
    • Northern Light sorts results into Custom Search Folders representing concepts and/or types of sites

    A more detailed look at second generation search services may be found in the tutorial Second Generation Searching on the Web.

     

11. Don't be impressed--or even necessarily worried-- by a large number of hits in response to a well-formulated search. Often multiple pages are returned from a single site because they all contain your search terms. AltaVista, Infoseek, HotBot, Northern Light and Lycos avoid this by a technique called results grouping, whereby all the results from one site are clustered together into one result. You are then given the opportunity to view all the retrieved pages from that site if you choose. With these engines, you may get a smaller number of results from a search, but each result is coming from a different site.

     

12. If you have too many search results, or results that are not relevant:

     

    • Add concept words
    • Use vocabulary that is specific to your topic, e.g., Honda rather than cars.
    • Link appropriate terms with the Boolean AND ( + ) so that each term is required to appear in the record
    • Use term proximity operators if they are available
    • Narrow your search to individual parts of the Web page such as title, first page level, etc.
    • Use the Boolean NOT to keep out records containing terms you don't want

     

13. If you have too few search results:

     

    • Drop off the least important concept(s) to broaden your subject
    • Use more general vocabulary
    • Add alternate terms or spellings for individual concepts and connect with the Boolean OR
    • Try the option available on some engines to find related documents to one or more of your relevant hits. Excite, HotBot and Infoseek all offer this type of feature.

     

14. Meta search engines simultaneously search multiple search engines. They are also referred to as parallel search engines, multithreaded search engines, or mega search engines. These are useful when:

     

    • you have an obscure topic
    • you are not having luck finding anything when you search
    • your search is not complex
    • you want to retrieve a relatively small number of relevant results

     

    There are two types of meta search engines:

     

    1. One type searches a number of engines and does not collate the results. This means you must look through a separate list of results from each engine that was searched; you will often see the same result more than once. Some engines require you to visit each site to view your results, while others will fetch the results back to their own sites. When results are brought back to the site, a certain limitation is placed on what is allowed to be retrieved (more on this in the next point). With this type of meta search engine, you can retrieve comprehensive, and sometimes overwhelming, results. An example of this type of engine is Dogpile.

        

    2. The other type is more common and returns a single list of results, often with the duplicate hits removed. This type of meta engine always brings the results back to its own site for viewing. In these cases, the engine retrieves a certain maximum number of documents from the individual engines it has searched, cut off after a certain point as the search is processed. Inference Find claims to return the maximum number of results that its targeted search engines will allow. Other meta search engines stop processing a query after a certain amount of time. Still others give the user a certain degree of control over the number of documents returned in a search. All these factors have two implications:

        

       • These meta search engines return only a portion of the documents available to be retrieved from the individual engines they have searched

          

       • Results retrieved by these engines can be highly relevant, since they are usually grabbing the first items from the relevancy-ranked list of hits returned by the individual search engines

     

15. The better meta search engines remove duplicate files and give you some information along with the document title. To see a list of meta search engines, visit Internet Search Engines.

     

16. Keep in mind that search engines do not index all the documents available on the Web. For example, most search engines cannot index files to password-protected sites, behind firewalls, or configured by the host server to be left alone. Still other Web pages may not be picked up if they are not linked to other pages, and are therefore missed by a search engine spider as it crawls from one page to the next. Search engines rarely contain the most recent documents posted to the Internet; do not look for yesterday's news on a search engine.

     

17. Finally, watch for converging content. Many well-known sites now contain information from an array of sources. This can increase the usefulness of search sites, but also create confusion in terms of the information source. For example:

     

    • Spider gathered index: The mechanism for searching a spider-gathered index is the feature people usually associate with a search engine.

       

    • Results from other search services: It is increasingly common for a search engine to return results from other services with which it has partnered. Examples include Ask Jeeves, Direct Hit, RealNames and many others. Each partner service offers an enhancement over the more traditional term ranked results. This represents an interesting combination of first and second generation search technologies appearing on the same site.

       

    • Directory: Many search services offer a directory on their sites. This directory may be a name brand such as LookSmart or the Open Directory Project, or a directory compiled by a site's own editors. Results from the directory may appear automatically with results from the spider-crawled Web, or the directory may be searched or browsed separately.

       

    • Specialty databases: Many search services offer the option to search databases offering specific content. Included may be news, business, shopping, multimedia files, and so on. These databases constitute a small subset of the Invisible Web.

When starting a research paper, first take a few minutes to think through the process. These tips will help you identify the questions you'll need to consider to effectively and thoroughly search for information. Writing down your responses to these tips can often help you formulate your ideas. A librarian can help you with any or all of these steps.

1. Define Your Topic or Problem.

• Clarify your information needs
  • What is your assignment?
  • What are you really being asked to do?
  • State your proposed topic or problem in a sentence or two.
  • Ask yourself the who, what, where, when and why questions.
• Organize your thoughts
  • Break the topic into subtopics or key concepts.
  • Jot down synonyms or other words to convey each concept.
  • Think of broader or narrower terms that might also be appropriate.
• Develop an overview of the topic(s).
  • Browse encyclopedias, handbooks, almanacs, or journal contents to gather some background information.
• Become familiar with the terminology, including synonyms.
  • Browse dictionaries and encyclopedias, thesauri.
  • Precision searching is important when using electronic databases, so spend some time identifying appropriate terms.
• Keep notes/records.

2. Plan a Research Strategy

• What is the scope of the project?
  • Estimate how much information you need.
  • What kinds of materials do you think you will need?
• What is the level of the project?
  • Who is the audience?
  • What is the presentation format?
  • How much do you need to write? 2 pages or 20?
• What is the manageability of the project?
  • How much time do you have to complete the project?
  • What resources are available?
• Keep notes/records.

3. Locate and Retrieve the Information

• What is the type of information needed?
  • Do you need books, journal or newspaper articles, statistics, government hearings or other types of media such as sound recordings, images or videos?
  • Do you need primary or secondary sources, or does it matter?
  • Do you need resources from the scholarly literature (peer-reviewed) or can you use items from the popular press or professional literature?
  • Do you need current or retrospective information or combination of both?
• Identify the likely and unlikely sources or places to find the information.
  • Check Snoopy and other online catalogs.
  • Identify appropriate periodical databases for citations and full-text.
  • Are there Web sites with useful and credible information?
  • Are there special collections in libraries or archives?
  • In addition to libraries, who else might be collecting these types of materials--specialized booksellers, collectors, corporate sources, museums, etc.
• Make sure you have all the information you need.
  • Carefully note the full citation for each item you retrieve, even if you're not sure you'll use it. It can be difficult to reconstruct this information later.
  • Make a note of where you found each citation, just in case you need to track it down again.
  • Keep track of where you've looked and what terms you've used. A search log or notebook can be useful.
• Accessibility
  • Is the information available in this library, through interlibrary loan, the Web, an electronic database or some other source?
  • What is the time frame for getting the information to you? Do you have time to wait? Is there another source that would also work?
• Keep notes/make records.

4. Evaluate the Information

• Establish authority.
  • Who is the author? What are his or her credentials for writing on this topic?
  • Is the author working and writing under the auspices of a particular organization or agency? Is it a credible organization?
  • Is the article or resource peer-reviewed?
• Determine scope of the work.
  • Is the work geared to a particular audience or level of expertise?
  • Is it comprehensive or does it cover a narrow aspect of the topic?
  • Does it use specialized language or is it easily comprehensible?
  • Does it cover a limited region, time period, group of people?
  • Is the primary purpose to provide information? to sell a product? to make a political point?
• Evaluate accuracy and relevance.
  • Can factual information be verified through footnotes or bibliographies to other credible resources?
  • Are charts, tables or data clearly identified and attributed to their source?
  • Are the source, scope and date of any statistics clearly labeled?
  • Is it clear whether or not the information as been excerpted from a larger piece?
  • Is there a way to tell if this is the most recent version of a particular piece?
• Recognize bias and/or point-of-view.
  • Is there a particular bias or perspective? Is the item clear and forthcoming about its view of the subject?
  • If the item contains advertising, are the ads clearly distinguishable from the content? Is the content driven by ad placement?
  • Reject misleading information or poorly documented information.
  • Apply the same criteria standards to all materials - print and electronic.
• Keep notes/make records.

5. Determining if You Have Enough Information

• It is often hard deciding when to stop looking for information sources. Here are a few questions to help you decide if you have enough material.
• How long is your paper?
• What is the focus of your paper?
• Does the information you have leave you with any unanswered questions? Have you answered the who, what, where, when, and whys?
• Do your sources present only one point-of-view?
• Will the inclusion of any other information (charts, graphs, image, one more article, etc.) change your paper from being just OK t being outstanding?

6. Synthesize and Present the Information

• Organize the information.
• Determine the best presentation format.
• Cite your sources completely, in correct format.
• Know when to stop.
• Write an abstract or summary of your project, if needed.

7. Evaluate Your Project

• Evaluate the results.
• Evaluate the process.
• Keep notes/records.

Library Research Tips

• Choose a topic for your term paper. Outline the main ideas/concepts.
• Identify synonyms and related terms.
  Examples -- AIDS: try HIV or acquired immune deficiency syndrome; euthanasia: try assisted suicide or right to die.
• Remember to narrow a broad topic such as drugs or abortion. You may want to add a second term to limit your topic.
  Examples -- drugs and legislation; abortion and ethics.

2. Find Background Information

• Look up your topic in an encyclopedia. Check for citations in the bibliography at the end of each article.
• Consult your textbook or ask a librarian to help you find reference materials for additional background information.

3. Use the Catalog to Find Book, Journal and Video Titles

• Use Pegasus, the online catalog, to find books on your topic.
• Use the online catalog to see if Loyola owns the sources (journal titles) for articles that are not available in full-text online. The catalog will provide library locations and call numbers for Loyola's periodical subscriptions.
• When you've finished searching for books and journal articles, print or e-mail the bibliographic information (the citation and the abstract and/or full-text).

4. Use Indexes to Find Periodical Articles

• Is your topic popular or scholarly in its scope? Be sure to choose the appropriate resource before you begin your research.
• Use periodical indexes to find articles on your topic. Two general databases that provide coverage of many subject areas are Academic Index via InfoTrac and Periodical Abstracts via FirstSearch.
• Remember to put your topic in searchable terms. Use operators such as 'and,' to narrow a topic; 'or,' to broaden a topic. Example: 'cloning and ethics,' not 'ethics of cloning.'
• After you have identified the correct subject heading(s) for your topic, do a subject search to find more relevant material on your topic.

5. Evaluate What You Find

EVALUATE the information you have found on your topic. Think critically and consider the following:

Authority

• Who is the author? Is the page signed?
• Is the author an expert? What are his/her credentials?
• Is there a link to information about the author or sponsor of the information?

• Is the information reliable and error-free?
• Does someone verify the information?
• Remember: anyone can publish anything on the Web

• Is there evidence of bias?
• What are the goals of the author/sponsor.
• Is the information designed to sway your opinion? Does the page contain advertising?

• Is the page dated? When was it last updated?
• How current are the links?

• Is the information in-depth? Does it appear to be complete?
• Does the page provide information not found elsewhere?
• What topics are covered?
• Is the information free or is there a fee to obtain it?
• Remember: Web coverage is often different from print coverage.

6. Cite What You Find

• Cite the information you plan to use for your paper. Format the citations in your bibliography using a standard format such as MLA or APA. A reference librarian can help you find and use these resources. To cite electronic or Internet information, see Citing Electronic Information for MLA and APA examples.

Be sure to check with a librarian when you have questions about research or using library materials. Additional resources can be found at Loyola's Research Databases Web site.