ENGLB 1116.101: English for Later Bilinguals (Spring 2009)  Tags: linguistics_language_literature english_language research  

Use web resources like Google and Wikipedia to START your research, but be aware that you may need to do more than simply do a few web searches to find the information that you need.

Use Wikipedia and other web sites academically. Look for bibliographies and other lists of resources and links that add to your research.

Apply information, like keywords, names, or topics, found with your web searches to the Library's catalog and databases to find scholarly resources like books and journal articles.

Likewise, use information found in books and articles to find better web sources.

See Research Help for more ideas on how to make effective and efficient use of your time.

But if you are only using Google and Wikipedia to find your information, you may not be finding all of the information that is available on your topic. Especially if you are being asked to do scholarly research.

Find Websites - A guide to becoming a better web searcher from UC Berkeley. 

Keep in mind that:

• Search Engines only retrieve a portion of the information available on the web. Sometimes only a small portion.

A lot of useful information is not freely available on the web. It is proprietary, meaning someone--an author, a publisher, or institution--owns the information. More about the Invisible Web. 

• Not all digitized information is created equal.

You need to critically analyze and evaluate the information you intend to use.

• Not all information has been digitized.

There are still BOOKS in the Library. And other print and analog resources that do not exist on the Web.