Online Research and Documentation

If you have a question, someone has probably put an answer to it somewhere on the Web. The Web provides an instant broadcast system for labs that want to post results from studies, that only reach printed form weeks or months later. You can consult with experts on the other side of your screen who answer questions in an online forum, or canvass large tracts of information to acquaint yourself with a multitude of voices and opinions.

The Web is also a nutrient medium for rumors, prejudice, and propaganda, so beware! You need to check credentials and exercise your judgement just as thoroughly with online sources as you do with printed ones. Don't let inertia fool you into depending on the links given at a single site, since you won't have any way of determining the objectivity of that site's author. Bias and invective often bury the actual news in a newsgroup, so use caution when following a thread that deals with a controversial topic.

The Web also has its own siren song: "Just one more link to check out." The urge to explore will often draw you further and further away from your research target. If you get easily distracted, you may wish to draw up a timetable and give yourself ten- or fifteen-minute breaks to trace those tantalizing tangents.

One way to use the Web is as an online mega-encyclopedia, with access to everything from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations to Zaire's resource profile, offered to you courtesy of the CIA and their unclassified country study files. Online dictionaries abound for almost any language, ancient or modern. View satellite photos, maps, and weather forecasts for Earth or Jupiter; the Web is an atlas, lifting a mass of physical and geographical information towards you, along with historical timelines, biographies, the complete texts of many books, and concordances to some of the best known.

The site that offers you concordances is called a subject directory, and many public libraries have compiled them. Several other general and academic directories are listed below. One caution applies to these sites. Depending on your bandwidth and the time of day you pick to search, you may spend much more time online than you would in the stacks of a library.

Narrow your question enough, make it obscure or current enough, and an encyclopedia will do you no good. Your best bet for finding information will be through a search engine and a keyword search on the Internet. Search engines (listed below) maintain databases of millions of Web sites; each identified by a string of descriptive words. Call up a search engine, enter the word or phrase most likely to describe the question you have in mind, then click on the search start button. Your word will either "hit" a site or a number of sites, or miss entirely. Too many "hits" means you have not framed your question correctly, but most engines let you add qualifying words that successively limit the number of hits.

A miss may indicate a lack of Web sites pertaining to your question, or a mismatch between your phrasing and the description contained within the engine. Vary your search word or phrase until you've exhausted all the reasonable possibilities, then check with a librarian for any alternate phrasing you may have missed. If you can't find a librarian, you may want to call up a multi-search engine that queries a number of different search engines. They are listed below.

When you find a search phrase that works well, keep it in mind as part of your thesis statement. When you find a Web site that you like, print out the opening page, and any pages that have text you wish to cite. If your browser doesn't automatically print the site's Web address, write it legibly on the opening page. Nothing is more frustrating, and frequently more fruitless, than trying to find a lost Web address. Clip all the pages together, and add the address to your browser's "bookmarks," if you can.

Once you've accumulated your material, you'll need to classify your citations according to type (Web site, news posting, e-mail message, file transfer document, or gopher document). Learn which citation style your department favors then check the sites listed above (in Documentation) for guides to proper formatting.

If a long time elapses between your visit to a site and your final draft, you may want to revisit it before your paper leaves your hands to make sure the address you list is still current.

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