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EDUC 2710: Social and Political Context of American Education (Fall 2015): Google and Beyond

Research Tips

Depending on your subject, web resources like Google, Google Scholar and Wikipedia can be a good place to START your research, just don't finish there. The following tips can help make your web use more efficient:

  1. The web can be especially useful for finding information from governments, associations, think tanks and NGOs, since governments often have a mandate to publish electronically and resources from organizations that don't publish scholarly journal articles may not be indexed in databases.

    TIP: In Google, looking for a keyword and site:.gov, .org or .edu can restrict your search only to government, organizational or educational sites
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  2. Look at the references you get and if you are asked for payment, then use the Library website to access full-text of scholarly resources. If you use Google Scholar, make sure to set your Scholar Preferences so that Cornell is listed as your library links and you get the Get it! Cornell links that will let you access articles off campus. 
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  3. Google Scholar in particular is also good for verifying scholarly citations and for doing interdisciplinary searches.
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  4. Look for portals dedicated to particular subjects, directories, and for bibliographies and other lists of resources to add to your research.
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  5. Use Wikipedia and other web sites to find keywords that can be used to search for books in the Library Catalog or for articles!

    Navigating the Information Universe

    Where do you get your Information?

    Google logo small
    The Web can provide excellent starting places to do your research.

    But if you are only using Google to find your information, you may not be finding all of the information that is available on your topic, especially for scholarly research.

    Three very important facts to remember about information:

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

    Educational Associations

    Useful Scholarly Subject Portals