YOU CONDUCT RESEARCH EVERY DAY AND YOU PROBABLY DON’T EVEN REALIZE IT When you want to know the score of last night’s football game you check on line If you’re wondering how to spell or define supercilious you get out the dictionary And when you’ve forgotten the math assignment you e-mail your friends to ask them Although these research situations are rather informal the skills you use for them are similar to those you need to conduct research for writing After all research is basically just a search a search for sources that contain specific relevant and accurate information about your topic Today many people turn to the Internet for almost all of their informational needs Why It’s quick it’s easy and it’s chock-full of information on nearly every topic imaginable Let’s say you need to research British author J K Rowling for example You type her name into a search engine such as Google or Yahoo and poof millions of results come up in less than a second In addition to the author’s official Web site you can find newspaper and magazine articles ency 4
clopedia entries pages relating to her books and even fan discussions In fact the Internet has so much information that it can be overwhelming to try to extract exactly what you need And it can be difficult to determine whether the information you find is accurate For those reasons you need to learn how to conduct specific logical Internet searches and to evaluate their results carefully When you do the Internet can become a powerful tool for research 5
INFORMATION INTERNET ON THE
WITH SO MUCH INFORMATION AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET you may think it’s the best place to go for every kind of research The truth is that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t If you are looking for information on current issues or breaking news the Internet may indeed be the place to go After all content on a new discovery or event can be posted almost immediately long before it makes it into print in a book or journal and even before it appears on the printed pages of a daily newspaper Or if you need a specific fact or statistic general background information on a subject access to scientific research or polls of public opinion the Internet may have what you are looking for However internet research has its disadvantages Unless you know exactly what you are looking for you may spend a lot of time clicking around on useless or irrelevant sites This can be especially true at the beginning of the research process before you have gained a good understanding of your topic and its key terminology In addition the content of the Internet changes daily This means that a site that was there yesterday may no longer be available today making it hard to go back and check facts you may have THE PLACE TO GO found earlier Among the biggest challenges in doing Internet research is that there is no oversight or overall supervision on the Internet In other words there is no one to ensure that all sites are of high quality and contain accurate information The keys to conducting effective Internet research 7
