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Research Tips

Examples

Domains: .edu, .gov, .org, .mil, .net, .com -- domain names may suggest the nature of the site
 

  1. https://www.stormfront.org/

  2. Donald Trump is a good president

  3. Climate change, hoax or imminent catastrophe?

  4. Refuting Claims made by climate alarmists

  5. Wikipedia: Scientific consensus on climate change

  6. Nearly 15% of American don’t believe climate change is real

  7. Scientists agree

  8. What evidence exists that Earth is warming and that humans are the main cause?



CRITERIA FOR EVALUATION (Cornell University)

  1. Date (currency)

  2. Author (credentials, credibility); contact info?

  3. Purpose–inform, persuade, entertain, sell?

  4. Quality of Writing

  5. Truncate to main website

  6. About Us or Mission Statement

  7. Works Cited, references

  8. Info corroborated in other sources, on other sites?

  9. Ads?
Scholarly/Academic/Peer-Reviewed Journals


Peer review is a scholarly form of review used by journals only for journal articles. After an article is sent to an academic journal, the editor sends it to several peer reviewers—typically scholars in the field—for evaluation.

These peer reviewers examine the paper's methodology, literature review, and conclusions. They note the existence of bias or other flaws. The peer reviewers may accept the article, require rewrites from the authors, or reject the article.

If you are asked to find articles that are peer-reviewed, what you are really looking for are articles from a peer-reviewed journal.

Peer review can also be called: 

  • blind peer review
  • scholarly peer review
  • refereeing or refereed
    •

    WHAT IS KEYWORD SEARCHING?

    Keywords, also commonly called search terms, are the words that you enter into the database search boxes. They represent the main concepts of your research topic. Without the right keywords, you may have difficulty finding the articles that you need.  More technically, a computer program indexes "significant" words used within the title, summary (abstract), subject headings, or text of an article. All of these words are “searchable.” When you type in one or more of these significant words into a search box, this is called Keyword Searching.  

    Selecting keywords is a multi-step process that involves:

    • identifying the main concepts of your topic
    • brainstorming synonyms that could also be used to describe your topic
    • Avoid Word Vomit:
      Example 1: "I'm interested in searching about video games about war and if watching or playing violent video games can affect someone's behavior."
      What keywords can this sentence be reduced to? 

    •  Example 2: "I want to seach about the effects of sun tanning at Daytona Beach, FL, on the skin and whether or not sun tanning can increase the chance of getting cancer and how to prevent it."
      Keywords:

    • Example 3: "I'm considering becoming a vegetarian even though I really like Burger King and I want to know if a vegetarian diet is as healthy as eating meat because I don't like the idea of slaughtering animals for my food."
      Keywords:

     

    It is rare that your first search will return perfect results. It usually takes trial & error to determine which keywords work best for your topic. Be prepared to run multiple searches in your quest for the keywords that will help you find the materials you need. And remember, learn as you search!  And mine multiple databases!

    STOP WORDS: the, a, of, at, by, this, that, etc. In other words, articles, prepositions and other small words are ignored by search engines and databases. 

    (Google may reward word vomit because it's so BIG. Databases are not so big and may penalize word vomit.) 

    Wikipedia: Can be good place to start research. Follow the Citation Trail! 

    Using Boolean Logic