Searching the Web:

Searching the web

Organizations, government departments and agencies, interest groups and think tanks are posting a great deal of information (articles, studies, even data) to the web. The web can be very useful, but it also has limitations.

  • Search relevance
    Search engine algorithms are based on a variety of factors that may not always be relevant for scholarly research. Personalization, ad revenue, even "most cited" (or most popular) rankings may in fact hide some of the content you need to find. In addition, search engines do not always reach the "deep web," content in databases and other structures that are invisible to search engines.,
  • Data on the Web
    Many federal organizations and international government organizations are posting statistics to their websites, but that doesn't guarantee that you can discover the statistics you need simply by searching the web. The information may be deep within an online database structure not exposed to search engines. In addition, the historical back files of reports and data you find on the web may fall short of what you need.For more options, see Finding Data.
  • Articles on the Web
    Many articles from academic, peer-reviewed sources are not free. The abstracts may be there, but once you attempt to view the full article, you will be asked to pay for full-text content. Don't do it!  If you find an article online and you can't get access, ask us. We may have a subscription to the online journal. If we don't have it, we can get it for you via Interlibrary Loan (ILL). The Interlibrary Loan office will email the article to you in 1-3 days.

Even better, for comprehensive access to scholarly articles, see Finding Articles (Social Science and Newspaper Databases)

Searching the Web?

If you're using Google Scholar to search for academic, scholarly articles, install Access Anywhere (formerly, Passkey).

Libraries purchase content and make it available to the campus community or, off-campus, via NetID and password. Away from campus, you can sync up Google Scholar with the online content the library purchases by installing Access Anywhere.

See also: Finding Articles (Social Science and Newspaper Databases)

Can I use AI to help find sources?

Note: The following is based on our current understanding of, and experience with, the free versions of the Large Language Model (LLM) AI, ChatGPT.

In your research papers you will need to use verifiable sources generated by human scholarship. Unfortunately, ChatGPT, and other LLM AI systems, will sometimes respond with incorrect information and have a tendency to create fake citations although this problem has been addressed to some extent in later iterations of LLMs. Most of the companies behind the Large Language Model AI systems stress that AI output needs to be carefully fact-checked.

OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, puts it this way: Does ChatGPT tell the truth?

  • Sometimes, ChatGPT sounds convincing, but it might give you incorrect or misleading information (often called a “hallucination” in the literature).
  • It can even make up things like quotes or citations, so don't use it as your only source for research.
  • Sometimes it might say there's only one answer to a question when there's more to it, or misrepresent different sides of an argument, mistakenly giving each side equal weight.

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