how do you research a topic on the internet

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How to research a topic online.

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Replace those worn-out headphone ear pads, i would wear a galaxy ring, but samsung said no, quick links, organize your information early on, start broad and collect a lot of information, decide what's important, and narrow things down, optimize your google search, go further than google, double-check your research, what if you find conflicting information.

Online research is a crucial skill, whether you're working on an academic paper, writing a blog post, or just trying to learn something new about your houseplants. But it's not always easy when you're tackling a complicated or niche topic.

Organizing your information can help you save time, and it can save you from forgetting or misremembering anything that you've learned from your research. You should keep a link to every webpage that you visit from the start to the very end of your research. It's best to write down a little bit of information for each link so that you remember why you saved them and what kind of information that you could take from them. You should also save any PDF's or images related to your research because you can use them as valuable primary sources.

If you need to organize a lot of data across multiple devices, consider using a note-taking app like  Evernote , OneNote , or Google Keep . They're all great for keeping track of web pages, PDF's, photos, and whatever else you need for your big project.

If you're just trying to knock out a short essay or learn something about DIY woodworking, then you probably don't need to grab a dedicated note-taking app unless you already use one. You might find it easier to cut and paste web pages into a Word or Google Doc file and save any PDFs or images to your local or cloud storage drive. Just make sure that you keep your files organized  and take notes for all of your sources.

In the end, you'll probably only use a handful of the links that you save. But if you're publishing a blog post or writing an essay, you need to be able to double-check and cite all of your sources. Otherwise, you might end up creating a lot of extra work for yourself later.

When researching, it's tempting to dive straight into the first exciting thing that you find. But you should try to start as broad as possible. Otherwise, you might miss out on some fascinating pieces of information and end up with a poor understanding of your topic.

That's why you should try to find a lot of information on your topic, more than you think that you'll need. A good way to start broad is to search Google for general terms related to your topic. If you're researching the difference between sunflowers and tulips, then you should learn a bit of information about each flower before going deeper.

Of course, Wikipedia is also a fantastic place to begin your research. You can use Wikipedia to find a lot of general information on your topic, and you can use it to find related topics or primary sources that may be useful as you go deeper into your research.

Once you've collected a broad swath of data, you need to review everything and decide on what to focus. Don't just go for the first thing that sounds interesting to you. Try to find any new relationships between the different pieces of information that you've gathered.

Let's say that you're researching an author, like Mark Twain. You found in your broad research that he was in the Civil War and that some of his stories take place in the antebellum south. On their own, those two pieces of information are boring and hard to care about. But when you put them together, it's clear that there may be a tantalizing relationship that's worth some in-depth research.

It's okay to research a relationship that seems obvious or well-known, especially if you're writing a blog, doing personal research, or doing a rudimentary history paper. But if you want to find something unique, then you need to think about how to narrow your research.

Okay, you're ready to do some more in-depth research. Now what? If you're looking into something that's kind of unique, then you may have trouble finding some good search results on Google.

That's why you need to use some  Google Search Operators  to get the most out of your Google searches. There are a lot of search operators that you can use, and they're all pretty straightforward. But there are a few that are especially useful for doing online research.

If you need to look up exact phrases or names on Google, then you can put them in quotation marks. For example, if you search the phrase "mole people" on Google, then you'll only find pages that contain the word "mole" followed by the word "people."

"Mole people"

The idea of starting broad and then narrowing your search applies to searching the web, too.

For example, if your search for "mole people" include too many results related to New York, then you could use a minus sign to exclude those results. This is what it would look like:

"Mole people" -"New York"

Note that we also used quotation marks around "New York" in that search because we want the whole phrase excluded.

If you hit a point in your research where you can't find any new websites to visit, then you should try to switch up your Google search. Try using variations on the same search terms, and change which Search Operators you're using. Sometimes the slightest change in your search will give you wildly different results.

Sometimes Google's expertise won't be enough for you. If you're working on a full academic paper or writing a deep-dive blog post, then you may need to look through some magazines, academic papers, or old books. You know, "primary sources."

Some websites, like  Project Muse and JSTOR , are an excellent resource for periodicals, academic papers, and other primary sources. You can usually access them through your University or public library. There's also some free alternatives to these websites, like Google Scholar  and SSRN .

But if you're writing a deep-dive on dairy advertisements, then you're going to need to find some old catalogs, magazines, periodicals, and posters.  Google Books  is an excellent resource for this kind of material.

You can also use Wikipedia to find some primary sources. At the end of every Wikipedia article, there's a "References" table. This table tells you the sources for all of the information in the article. If you come across a juicy bit of information while reading a Wikipedia article, then there's usually a small number that links to the reference table.

It's good to look into all of these resources because they usually come up with different results for the same search. They also tend to have built-in advanced search functions, which are useful for topics that are unique or niche.

Once you've completed your research, you need to make sure that all of your information is accurate. You can save yourself a lot of heartbreak by double-checking all of your research before doing any writing.

Go and reread all of your sources, because there's a chance that you misinterpreted what they're saying. Of course, you're not the only person that can misread a source, so it's good to check any citations that you find on a website.

You should also consider how you used Google to research your topic. If you included any bias in your search terms, then there's a chance that the information that you gathered will reflect that bias. Try searching Google with a variety of search terms and  Google Search Operators .

There are also fact-checking websites that you can use to make sure that your information is accurate. Websites like  Factcheck.org  or Snopes  are pretty fantastic; just don't use them as your only fact-checking resource.

Sometimes you'll spend a lot of time double-checking all of your research, and you'll realize that things don't seem to line up. In this situation, it's tempting to stand behind some information that may not be entirely factual. After all, it's a lot easier to go along with inaccurate information than to redo your entire research process.

But you should never write or publish any information unless you're confident that it's accurate. If you run into conflicting information while researching a topic, go back to the drawing board or try to spin the pieces of contradictory information in your favor.

For example, if you find a lot of conflicting eyewitness accounts while researching the Titanic, then you can quickly turn those conflicting accounts into an exciting piece of information. You could even go back and do some in-depth research into who made those eyewitness accounts, and how they shaped the public's opinion on the sinking of the Titanic. Hey, that could be a book.

Image Credits: 13_Phunkod /Shutterstock, fizkes /Shutterstock

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Conduct High Quality Online Research: Process, Types, Tools, Tips & More

If there’s one constant in modern life it’s this: research. No matter the topic, it’s imperative that most of us conduct thorough research for a variety of purposes online.

We research products and options when we want to buy something. We research markets and competitors when we want to sell something. We research topics and exes when we want to know or learn something.

We do research on the internet for so many different reasons, it can be hard to think about “online research” as one task—but if you add it all up, many of us spend a lot of time doing research on the internet. So there’s some serious value in understanding how to do that research more thoroughly, accurately, and quickly.

In this article we will cover:

• PROCESS:  The online research process
• METHODS:  Research methods and strategies
• TYPES:  Some of the most common types of research you can do online
• TIPS:  7 tips for better online research
• TOOLS:  Research tools and companies to improve and expedite the research process
• RESOURCES:  35 great internet research resources
• DELEGATING:  How you can delegate your research to a virtual assistant (VA)

The Online Research Process in 6 Steps

Broadly speaking, the typical online research project goes through 6 key steps. While you probably don’t tick off all these steps every time you research something online, following them can help ensure your research is complete, accurate, and useful.

Let’s talk about what those steps are and why each one is worthwhile for just about any online research you do.

1. Choose and define your topic of interest

This first step is where you’ll get specific about just what it is you’re looking for. What’s your end-goal? Why are you conducting this research? What are you hoping to learn or achieve?

For market research, this might be developing a full understanding of the competitors in the space and their positioning. For product research, you might be trying to arrive at the best option for you to buy.

The key is to make a comprehensive list of the research questions you want to answer and the individual items that interest you. This list will help inform where and how you do your research and ensure you don’t wind up with a bunch of information that doesn’t help or interest you.

2. Determine which fields of study you’ll need to look into

This step will help you define and narrow down the type of journals, databases, websites, etc. that you’ll look to for information.

For example, if you’re doing product research and you want to know how valuable existing customers find a given product, you may turn to prominent third-party review websites. If you’re doing medical research, you may look into the relevant medical journals for your topic.

3. See what research has been done and conclusions have been drawn

Step 3 is likely the part of the process you most often associate with “research.” Now’s the time to dig into your research sources, read up on the topic, and look to see how other people have answered the questions you laid out for your research.

The important part of this step is to stay organized and on-task. It’s easy to get lost in all the information, so it’s best to have a clear process and to keep your sources and learnings organized.

4. Evaluate your sources and information

In today’s digital world, this step is even more important than the rest. No matter the topic of your research, you need to take the time to understand and evaluate your sources . Who’s writing about the topic? Why are they interested or invested in it? Do they have anything to gain from what they’re saying?

This step is when you can identify any biases you or your sources have. Think of these biases as gaps in your research—and fill them in with opposing viewpoints and additional information. ‍

5. Determine additional research data collection methods needed and conduct

Whether as a result of biases or something else, it’s not uncommon to find gaps in the research that’s already been done. When that happens, you may consider conducting your own primary research to help fill in those holes in your information.

For example, if you’re missing qualitative market research, you may choose to conduct an online focus group of consumers in that market. For medical research, filling in the gaps might mean conducting an extensive clinical trial. For research into your own customers, on the other hand, it might be as simple as sending out a brief online survey asking for feedback. You can also use online survey platforms to reach a broader base.

6. Organize your full body of research and draw conclusions

Once steps 1 through 5 are finished, you’re ready to start digging into your body of research and drawing your conclusions. This is where you’ll make a final decision on which product to buy or identify where in the market to position your own business, for example.

Online Research Methods & Strategies

When you think about “online research,” what sort of research method do you imagine? Many of us likely think about Googling and reading articles—and that is one method for doing research online. But it isn’t the only one—far from it.

Below are some of the other common online resources for research methods and strategies you can draw on during your research.

Content analysis and social media or social network analysis

Content analysis is the typical web search and read method of conducting research. In this case, you’re consuming secondary research that’s already been conducted and learning from that.

Focus groups

A focus group is when you bring together a group of people to take part in a guided discussion—often this discussion is about their experience with a particular product, brand, political campaign, ad, or TV series/movie. You might picture these happening in-person, but they can also be conducted online using video chat or conferencing software.

Interviews are similar to focus groups—you’re asking real people for very specific information. The difference is that interviews are more often done one-on-one versus in a group. Interviews can also follow a less conversational and more transactional question-answer approach.

Questionnaires and surveys

Questionnaires and surveys share the question-and-answer approach of an interview, but they aren’t typically done live or in real-time. Surveys can be emailed or mailed out to respondents or shared on social media. The respondent completes the questionnaire on their own time and returns it to the researcher when finished.

Web-based experiments

Web-based experiments follow a more regimented and traditional set of processes designed to yield scientifically significant results. There are three main types of experiments:

• Controlled experiments
• Natural experiments
• Field experiments

While the topic varies, many of these experiments can be adapted to take place online.

Clinical trials

Clinical trials are a type of experiment most often done in medical and psychological research. In a clinical trial, the experiment is designed to answer a very specific set of questions. The classic example of a clinical trial is a drug or pharmaceutical trial—designed to answer whether a particular drug affects a given disease or injury.

Online ethnography 

In an ethnographic study, the researcher essentially lives among their research subjects and observes their behavior, social structures, and more. Ethnography is most commonly used in behavioral research like sociological and anthropological studies. Online ethnography simply refers to the method by which the researcher interacts with subjects—online.

Common Types of Online Research

Online research comes in all shapes and forms, but talking about “research” in the abstract can feel a little nebulous. To help you wrap your head around the kinds of online research we’re referring to for our purposes, here are some of the most common types of online research.

Basic Research

Basic research refers to broad studies and experiments done, not to answer a specific question or prove a hypothesis, but to create a foundation for additional studies or experiments.

For example, a study of how caffeine affects the brain would be considered basic research. Its results would increase general knowledge on the topic and likely inspire more specific experimentation.

Here’s another example of what basic research looks like—and how it can often blend into applied research:

• EXAMPLE: via Verywell Mind
• RESEARCH: To start, “researchers might conduct basic research on how stress levels impact students academically, emotionally, and socially.” That might involve content analysis of existing research on the topic, empirical research around students’ moods and performance, and interviews or surveys completed by the students themselves.
• FINDINGS: At the end of the basic research process, researchers have a better understanding of how stress impacts students—but they don’t know why stress has those effects or how to change or solve the effect.
• CONCLUSIONS: Because of that, “the results of these theoretical explorations might lead to further studies designed to solve specific problems. Researchers might initially observe that students with high stress levels are more prone to dropping out of college before graduating. As a result, scientists might then design research to determine what interventions might best lower these stress levels. Such studies would be examples of applied research.”

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research involves studying something using statistical or mathematical techniques and it’s used to understand how often a particular phenomenon occurs. The “quantitative” part of this type of research refers simply to numbers.

Here’s a common example of what quantitative research looks like in action:

• EXAMPLE: via QuestionPro
• RESEARCH: “If any organization would like to conduct a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey, a customer satisfaction survey template can be used. Data can be collected by asking a net promoter score (NPS) question, matrix table questions, etc.”
• FINDINGS: The survey method above provides “data in the form of numbers that can be analyzed and worked upon.”
• CONCLUSIONS: “Through this survey, an organization can collect quantitative data and metrics on the goodwill of the brand or organization in the mind of the customer based on multiple parameters such as product quality, pricing, customer experience, etc.”

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research , on the flipside, focuses more on observations and non-numerical qualities. It’s used to answer questions about how and why phenomena occur, versus how often.

Here’s an example of what a typical qualitative research study looks like:

• RESEARCH: “A bookstore owner who is looking for ways to improve their sales and customer outreach. An online community of members who were loyal patrons of the bookstore were interviewed and related questions were asked and the questions were answered by them.” 
• FINDINGS: “At the end of the interview, it was realized that most of the books in the stores were suitable for adults and there were not enough options for children or teenagers.”
• CONCLUSIONS: “By conducting this qualitative research the bookstore owner realized the shortcomings and the feelings of readers. Through this research now the bookstore owner can keep books for different age categories and can improve his sales and customer outreach.”

Market Research and Competitive Research

Market research and competitive research refer to gathering information about a particular industry and the companies currently doing business in it. It often involves mapping out the positioning of competing companies or products and is usually done by the companies in the market (or those hoping to be).

Here’s what a typical market research study looks like:

• EXAMPLE: A software company is looking to launch a new product into an unfamiliar market.
• RESEARCH: They conduct research to figure out the features their product will need, what price will be competitive, and where in the market there’s an opportunity to serve an underserved segment of consumers. Research includes basic informational research about competitors, their products, and pricing, content analysis of industry publications, and focus groups with potential customers.
• FINDINGS: The company finds that a small but dedicated segment of consumers in the market have a particular need that isn’t being met by any of the current competitors in the space.
• CONCLUSIONS: They design their product to solve that specific issue and create marketing and advertising campaigns targeted toward only that small niche market.

Customer Research

Customer research is when a business seeks to learn more about their customers (or their competitors’ customers). Often, customer and consumer research are included in the overall market research process we mentioned above.

Here’s what a typical customer research study looks like:

• EXAMPLE: via Hotjar
• RESEARCH: A software company wanted to learn more about what their customers needed from their software, and how they could build a better product and customer experience. They used on-page surveys on their website and some observational research to dig deeper into their customers.
• FINDINGS: Based on their research, the company created in-depth customer personas that exemplified their 3 most common customers, who they are, and what challenges they face.
• CONCLUSIONS: Based on what the company learned about challenges faced by one particular customer segment, they improved a particular feature of the product to improve that customer’s experience. 

Other Common Types of Research

• Comparative research , done primarily in the social sciences, refers to studies that compare a given data set across different geographic locations or cultures. For example, a study may look at the differences in poverty between the U.S. and Canada.
• Medical research can make up a wide range of studies and experiments. The most obvious example is clinical drug trials, which are run to determine the efficacy and safety of new pharmaceuticals. But medical research can also involve observational studies to better understand new diseases and other basic research.
• Legal research most typically refers to two scenarios: 1) finding an answer to a particular legal question or decision that needs to be made and 2) looking for precedent to support a legal argument.
• Product research refers to research done by companies to better understand what their customers are looking for. It can be done during the ideation or new product development phase or to further improve an existing product.
• Empirical research data is collected by observation. In other words, it’s a record of someone’s experience, defined via the 5 senses. For example, an experiment done to figure out if listening to happy music improves subjects’ moods would be considered empirical research.
• Descriptive research is done with the intention of better understanding something. Customer and consumer research are often done in a descriptive way—describing customers and their attributes rather than trying to explain or quantify them.
• Experimental research refers to a more rigid research process than many other research types listed here. In experiential research, researchers follow the research method. They utilize strictly controlled experiments in which one variable is altered and the results either support or refute a specific hypothesis.
• Exploratory research is similar to basic research. It’s done with the goal of better understanding a given problem or phenomenon, and its findings typically inform further research to solve the problem.

Tips for Better, Faster Online Research

Whether you’re new to conducting research online or you’ve been doing it for years, there are always tips and tricks you can employ to streamline, strengthen, and refocus your research process. With that in mind, here are our top tips for conducting high-quality research online.

Know the Information You’re Looking For

With all of the information available on the internet, it’s really easy to get lost. Maybe you end up chasing down rabbit holes or trying to answer new questions every time they arise. Either way, you’re distracted from answering the original questions you set out to.

That’s why it’s so important to get clear about what those questions are, and hold yourself to researching those answers. This is what steps 1 and 2 in our online research process above are designed to help with.

Get Clear About Your Goal for Researching

While similar to the previous tip, defining your goal for research is more action-oriented. When you get answers to the questions outlined above, what will you do with them? All the questions you seek to answer with your online research should serve this overarching goal—helping you make a decision or choose your next course of action.

For example, your goal for travel research might be to choose and book a destination for your next family vacation. For competitive research, your goal may be to identify a niche audience to target within your industry.

Check the Abstract First

If you’re using scientific papers, medical studies, legal reviews, and other academic research, you know you’re in for some dense, lengthy reading. So before you commit to reading anything, check out the abstract first. If you don’t find anything compelling in the abstract, you can safely skip that paper.

Have a System and Stay Organized

As we mentioned before, the internet completely changes the stakes when it comes to research. There’s almost no limit to the amount of research you can do. That’s why it’s vital that you create a system for determining which information you’ll look at, plus how and where you’ll store it. Here are a few suggestions for staying organized:

• Create Google Drive folders to store PDFs and other documents
• Create a designated folder in your Bookmarks to store websites and URLs
• Use a reference management software (like Mendeley ) designed to help organize extensive research
• Delegate the organizing part to a virtual assistant (VA)

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Avoid analysis paralysis.

Online research can be incredibly valuable in helping you make informed decisions on a whole range of topics—but it is possible to take research too far, ending up with way more information than you can adequately process. Avoiding analysis paralysis is the only way to ensure your research makes your life easier, instead of the other way around.

Clearly outlining your goals and questions to answer is a good first step in avoiding analysis paralysis. The second part comes down to recognizing when you have enough information to make a decision. Once that happens, it’s usually time to set the research aside and act.

Evaluate Your Sources and Check Your Own Biases

In the time of #fakenews and corporation-funded scientific research, it’s more important than ever to evaluate your sources for online research. To start, just get in the habit of paying attention to who ran the study, wrote the paper, or created an article.

From there, you can look deeper into their objectivity (or lack thereof). Ask yourself whether the researcher has something to gain or lose from the information they’re sharing. Are they interpreting objective information through their own angle? Equally important: how current is the information presented?

In addition to evaluating the objectivity of your research sources, it’s even more important to identify and be aware of your own biases toward the subject matter.

Delegate Research to a Virtual Assistant

Whether you lack the time, expertise, or just desire to conduct thorough online research, there are many reasons to delegate your research to someone else. Online research, in particular, can easily be handled by a virtual assistant ( more on that later! )

Research Tools and Resources to Help with Your Online Research

When the time comes to dive into online research, most of us default to starting with an internet search on Google, followed by trying different search terms and combing through endless search result listings. That’s a fine place to start, but there are also tons of other reputable databases and search engines that can help you get straight to the most accurate and up-to-date research on just about any topic.

Below, we recommend 13 tools that can help you find reputable sources, organize your research, and even conduct your own primary research.

For General Research Articles

• Google Scholar and Google Books
• Library of Congress and LexisNexis
• Project Gutenberg
• Student’s Online Research Guide via AllConnect
• Yale University Research Guides by Subject

Academic Journals

• AcademicJournals.org

For Specialized Research

• Medical: BioMed Central , The Lancet , New England Journal of Medicine , NCBI (Nat’l Center for Biotechnology News)
• Legal: American Law Reports
• Business and industry: Nielsen and Pew Research Center

Online Research Management and Organization

Online research companies.

• 20|20 Research
• Facts ‘n Figures

Virtual Research Assistant Companies

Other great online resources for research.

If you’re looking for more info on various aspects of researching online, here are a few more top-notch resources you can reference.

• For psychological, sociological, and other behavior research: Psychology.org
• For business (market, competitive, and new product) research: QuestionPro
• For market research: Inc.
• To better understand online research and “big data:” Online Research Methods, Quantitative by Hocevar and Flanagin
• On conducting your own survey research: SurveyMonkey
• For legal, news, and public records: LexisNexis online library

Delegating Research to a Virtual Assistant

The advice and resources above are enough to turn anyone into a pro online researcher—but do you really have the time or desire to do your own research online? Regardless of how well done, effective internet research always requires one big investment: time . There’s no getting around the time investment it takes to conduct valuable online research.

Instead of investing that time out of your own busy schedule, you could outsource your online research efforts to a virtual assistant (VA). That way, you get the benefit of making informed decisions without spending days or even weeks wading through abstracts and research articles.

When you work with a Delegated virtual research assistant:

• You can hand-off basic research, competitor and market research, comparative research and more from day one
• You can work with your VA and train them to handle more specialized types of research like medical and legal

In both cases, as your VA gains experience working with you, they’ll get better and better at pulling together exactly the kind of research and insights you’re looking for. Some aspects of research they can tackle include:

• Pulling together research articles and data
• Research annotation and summaries
• Research management and organization
• Various aspects of conducting primary research

How does this work?

We know that delegating something as broad and nebulous as “research” can feel a little foreign if you haven’t outsourced it before. Most of the concerns we hear from people are very quickly quelled by the time savings that come with delegating their research.

That said, if you’re feeling unsure, here are a few of the questions we hear frequently:

How does all this work?

Your Delegated VA is available to you whenever you need them. They can pull together research articles and sources, organize and annotate them, present research summaries and conclusions, and help with many of the tasks involved with conducting your own primary research.

What kind of research can a Delegated VA handle?

Delegated VAs can handle these types of research right off the bat:

• Basic research
• Market research
• Competitive research
• Comparative research
• Data research
• Information research

That said, with a little guidance and training from you, our VAs can take over just about any kind of research you need done.

How will my VA know what information to look for?

Initially, your VA will base this judgment on the information you provide to them. Any information you ask for, they’ll pull together for you. For basic research, they’ll be able to handle most anything you need.

For more specialized research areas (like medical and legal research), your VA may need a little more help from you in the beginning. Rest assured, after a few projects, they’ll be able to handle just about everything you can throw at them.

Can my VA handle next steps after research is done?

If you provide your Delegated VA with the access and information they need to take the next step, they can do that—whether that’s booking a trip based on travel research, purchasing their recommended product, or something else entirely.

How will my VA communicate with me?

Your Delegated VA will communicate with you any way you prefer. If you choose to communicate via Slack, email, phone, or morse code, your VA will work with your preferences to streamline communication.

Wrapping Up

Whether it’s product research, medical research, or something else entirely, conducting thorough and accurate research online takes time—and going without isn’t a great option either.

If you don’t have the time, desire, or expertise to perform your own internet research, you can easily turn the keys over to a virtual assistant. With a little guidance, they can handle a lot more than you may think.

Then, you can spend less time Googling around and more time acting on your research findings.

Glossary of Online Research Terms to Know

Research problem and research question: The central question your research sets out to answer, or the central problem your research sets out to solve.

Correlation: A connection or relationship between two variables.

Causation: A connection or relationship between two variables where a change in one variable creates a change in the other.

Findings: The results and conclusions of your research.

Scientific method: An empirical, step-by-step method whereby hypotheses are formed and experiments/observations either affirm or disprove the hypothesis.

Sampling method: A method for collecting data from a small sample of a given population.

Research methodology: The specific techniques and procedures you use to identify and analyze information about your topic.

Control group: A group within an experiment to which no changes are made in the variable being studied. Control groups are used for comparison to better identify how changes in a variable affect the other group.

Experimental group: The group within an experiment which is changed or manipulated.

Primary research: Data collected directly by you, the researcher.

Secondary research: Data previously collected by other researchers.

Hypothesis: An educated guess or theory about how an experiment will turn out.

Abstract: A brief summary of the contents of a research paper or study.

Bias: Assumptions made without credible evidence, often that skew the ultimate outcome of a study. Bias can be caused by beliefs held by the researcher or by errors in sampling or data analysis.

Kiera's a content writer who works with SaaS and ecommerce companies. Located in Boston, MA, she loves cinnamon coffee and a good baseball game. Catch up with her @Kieraabbamonte or KieraAbbamonte.com.

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How to Research a Topic

Last Updated: January 10, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD and by wikiHow staff writer, Jennifer Mueller, JD . Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. There are 14 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 298,230 times.

With so much information potentially available at your fingertips, having a research assignment can be daunting. However, if you approach your research methodically, you'll be able to answer any research question in a thoughtful and comprehensive way. Develop a research question that is narrow enough to be addressed within the scope of your paper, then use keywords to find sources that have the information you need. Once you've found several sources, you'll be ready to organize your information into a logical report that adequately answers your question. [1] X Research source

Developing Your Topic

• If you don't understand any aspect of the assignment, don't be afraid to ask your instructor directly. It's better to get an explanation about something than to assume you know what it means and later find out your assumption was incorrect.

• For example, suppose your instructor assigned a research paper about a "public health concern." You might make a list that included such public health concerns as teenage vaping, anti-vaxxers, and drunk driving.
• From your list, choose one area in particular that you want to look at. This is where you'll start your research. For the purposes of this example, assume you chose to research vaping among teenagers.

• If you're doing a general internet search on your topic and not getting back many strong results, there may not be enough information out there for you to research that topic. This is typically rare, though, unless you've started off with a topic that's too narrow. For example, if you want to study vaping in your high school, you might not find enough sources. However, if you expanded your search to include all high schools in your state, you might have more luck.
• If you're not very knowledgeable about your topic, look for a resource that will provide a general overview, so you can become more familiar with possible questions you could answer in your research paper.

• For example, if you wanted to look at teenagers and vaping, you might decide to ask "Are teenagers who vape more likely to smoke than teenagers who don't?"
• How you frame your question also depends on the type of paper you're writing. For example, if you were writing a persuasive research essay, you would need to make a statement, and then back that statement up with research. For example, instead of asking if teenagers who vape are more likely to smoke than teenagers who don't, you might say "Teenagers who vape are more likely to start smoking."

Tip: Be versatile with your research question. Once you start more in-depth research, you may find that you have to adjust it or even change it entirely, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just part of the process of learning through research.

• Look at the number of results you get, as well as the quality of the sources. You might also try an academic search engine, such as Google Scholar, to see how much academic material is out there on your chosen question.

• For example, if you've selected teenagers who vape, the "who" would be teenagers. If a search of that topic yields too much information, you might scale it back by looking at a specific 5-year period (the "when") or only at teenagers in a specific state (the "where").
• If you needed to broaden your question on the same topic, you may decide to look at teenagers and young adults under the age of 25, not just teenagers.

Finding Quality Sources

• 1- to 2-page paper: 2 to 3 webpages or short journal articles
• 3- to 5-page paper: 4 to 8 journals or scholarly articles, webpages, or books
• 5- to 10-page paper: 6 to 15 journals or scholarly articles, webpages, or books
• 10- to 15-page paper: 12 to 20 journals or scholarly articles, webpages, or books

• For example, if you're researching the prevalence of vaping among teenagers, you might also include "adolescents" and "youth" as synonyms for teenagers, along with "tobacco use" or "e-cigarettes" as synonyms for vaping.
• Take advantage of academic databases available online through your school in addition to the internet.

Tip: Get help from research librarians. They know the most efficient ways to find the information you need and may be able to help you access sources you didn't even know existed.

• Currency : How recent is the information? When was the source last updated?
• Reliability : Are there references for facts and data? Is the content mostly opinion?
• Authority : Who is the creator of the content? Who is the publisher? Are they biased in any way? Does the creator have academic credentials in the field?
• Accuracy : Has the content been peer-reviewed or edited by a third party? Is the information supported by evidence? Can you easily verify facts in another source?
• Purpose/Perspective : Is the content intended to teach you something or to sell you something? Is the information presented biased?

Tip: If your source fails any prong of the CRAAP method, use extreme caution if you refer to it in your research paper. If it fails more than one prong, you're probably better off not using it.

• If an author mentions a particular source more than once, you definitely want to read that material.
• The reference list typically contains enough information for you to find the source on your own. If you find that you can't access the source, for example because it's behind a paywall, talk to your school or a public librarian about it. They may be able to get you access.

• List the citation information for the source at the top of the card, then take notes in your words. Include the page numbers (if applicable) that you would use in your citation.
• If you copy something directly from the source, put quote marks around those words and write the page number (if applicable) where that quote appears. You may also want to distinguish quotes even further, for example, by having quotes in a different color text than your words. This will help protect you against accidental plagiarism .

Organizing Your Information

• Include columns for the full citation and in-text citation for each of your sources. Provide a column for your notes and add them to your spreadsheet. If you have direct quotes, you might include a separate column for those quotes.
• Many word-processing apps have citation features that will allow you to input a new source from a list, so you only have to type the citation once. With a spreadsheet, you can simply cut and paste.

Tip: Even if your word-processing app automatically formats your citation for you, it's good practice to create the citation yourself in your spreadsheet.

• For example, if you were writing a paper on teenagers and vaping, you may have notes related to the age teenagers started vaping, the reasons they started vaping, and their exposure to tobacco or nicotine before they started vaping.
• If you used a digital note-taking app, you typically would categorize your notes by adding tags to them. Some notes may have more than one tag, depending on the information it covered.

• For example, suppose your research indicated that teenagers who vaped were more likely to switch to regular cigarettes if someone in their household smoked. The category covering teenage vapers' exposure to tobacco or nicotine before they started vaping would most likely be the first thing you talked about in your paper, assuming you wanted to put the strongest evidence first.

• Unless your instructor has specific requirements for your outline, you can make it as detailed or as simple as you want. Some people prefer full sentences in their outlines, while others have sections with just a word or two.
• Working through the outline methodically can help you identify information that you don't have yet that you need to support your thesis or answer your research question.

• Even at this late stage, don't be afraid to change your question to more accurately frame your research. Because of your research, you know a lot more about the topic than you did when you first wrote your question, so it's natural that you would see ways to improve it.

• For example, when outlining your paper about teenagers and vaping, you may realize that you don't have any information on how teenagers access e-cigarettes and whether that access is legal or illegal. If you're writing a paper about teenagers vaping as a public health concern, this is information you would need to know.
• It's also likely that as you formulated your outline, you discovered that you didn't need some sources you previously thought would be valuable. In that situation, you may need to seek more sources, especially if throwing out a source took you below the minimum number of sources required for your assignment.

Community Q&A

• Start your research as soon as possible after you get your assignment. If you leave it to the last minute, you won't have time to properly research the topic. You may also find that you overlook important information or make mistakes because you're rushing to finish. Thanks Helpful 4 Not Helpful 0
• Breaking the research process down into small chunks and accomplishing a little each day can help you manage your time. Plan on spending at least as much time researching as you spend writing, if not more. Thanks Helpful 4 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://libguides.uta.edu/researchprocess/organize
• ↑ https://researchguides.ben.edu/topics
• ↑ https://clark.libguides.com/brainstorming
• ↑ https://libraries.indiana.edu/sites/default/files/Develop_a_Research_Question.pdf
• ↑ https://www.nhcc.edu/student-resources/library/doinglibraryresearch/basic-steps-in-the-research-process
• ↑ https://ggu.libguides.com/c.php?g=106905&p=694002
• ↑ https://salve.libguides.com/c.php?g=434998&p=2963676
• ↑ https://guides.lib.lsu.edu/ENG1001/CRAAP
• ↑ https://libguides.sdstate.edu/c.php?g=842619&p=6053357
• ↑ https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/researching/notes-from-research/
• ↑ https://academicguides.waldenu.edu/writingcenter/writingprocess/organizing
• ↑ https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/outline
• ↑ https://guides.lib.k-state.edu/c.php?g=181829&p=1197416
• ↑ https://guides.lib.k-state.edu/c.php?g=181829&p=1196003

About This Article

To research a topic, you should use scholarly articles, books, and authoritative webpages, since they'll offer the most reliable information. You can find good sources by searching for keywords related to your topic online or using an academic database. For example, if your topic is about saving wild tigers, you could include keywords like "conservation," "tigers," and "wildlife," in your searches. Once you find a source you want to use, double check that it's up to date and written by someone trustworthy before you use it. Additionally, make sure you keep track of all your sources, since you'll need to make a reference list that includes each source you used. For tips on how to come up with a research topic, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Research Using the Internet

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More and more students are turning to the Internet when doing research for their assignments, and more and more instructors are requiring such research when setting topics. However, research on the Net is very different from traditional library research, and the differences can cause problems. The Net is a tremendous resource, but it must be used carefully and critically.

The printed resources you find in the Library have almost always been thoroughly evaluated by experts before they are published. This process of “peer review” is the difference between, for example, an article in Time magazine and one in a journal such as the University of Toronto Quarterly. Furthermore, when books and other materials come into the University library system, they are painstakingly and systematically catalogued and cross-referenced using procedures followed by research libraries the world over. This process is the basis for the way materials are organized in the Library, and it makes possible the various search functions of the Web catalogue.

On the Internet, on the other hand, “anything goes.” Anyone can put anything they want on a Web site, there is no review or screening process, and there are no agreed-upon standard ways of identifying subjects and creating cross-references. This is both the glory and the weakness of the Net – it’s either freedom or chaos, depending on your point of view, and it means that you have to pay close attention when doing research on-line. There are a great many solid academic resources available on the Net, including hundreds of on-line journals and sites set up by universities and scholarly or scientific organizations. The University of Toronto Library’s Electronic Resources page is one such academic source. Using material from those sources is no problem; it’s just like going to the Library, only on-line. It’s all the other stuff on the Net that you have to be cautious about.

Here are a few basic guidelines to remember:

• Don’t rely exclusively on Net resources. Sometimes your assignment will be to do research only on the Net, but usually your instructors will expect you to make use of both Internet and Library resources. Cross-checking information from the Net against information from the Library is a good way to make sure that the Net material is reliable and authoritative.
• Narrow your research topic before logging on. The Internet allows access to so much information that you can easily be overwhelmed. Before you start your search, think about what you’re looking for, and if possible formulate some very specific questions to direct and limit your search.
• Know your subject directories and search engines. There are several high quality peer-reviewed subject directories containing links selected by subject experts. INFOMINE and Academic Info are good examples. These are excellent places to start your academic research on the Internet. Google , Bing , Yahoo and other search engines differ considerably in how they work, how much of the Net they search, and the kind of results you can expect to get from them. Spending some time learning what each search engine will do and how best to use it can help you avoid a lot of frustration and wasted time later. Because each one will find different things for you, it’s a good idea to always use more than one search engine. For specialized search engines and directories you might also like to try Beaucoup which includes 2,500 + search engines and directories or the Search Engine Colossus International Directory of Search Engines that includes search engines from 230+ countries around the world.
• Keep a detailed record of sites you visit and the sites you use. Doing research on the Net inevitably means visiting some sites that are useful and many that are not. Keeping track is necessary so that you can revisit the useful ones later, and also put the required references in your paper. Don’t just rely on your browser’s History function, because it retains the Web addresses or URLs of all the sites you visit, good or bad, and if you’re using a computer at the University the memory in the History file will be erased at the end of your session. It’s better to write down or bookmark the sites you’ve found useful, so that you’ll have a permanent record.
• Double-check all URLs that you put in your paper. It’s easy to make mistakes with complicated Internet addresses, and typos will make your references useless. To be safe, type them into the Location box of your browser and check that they take you to the correct site.

The following points are guidelines for evaluating specific resources you find on the Net. If you ask these questions when looking at a Web site, you can avoid many errors and problems.

• Who is the author?
• Is the author’s name given?
• Are her qualifications specified?
• Is there a link to information about her and her position?
• Is there a way to contact her (an address or a “Mailto” link)?
• Have you heard of her elsewhere (in class, or cited in your course text or in Library material)?
• Has the author written elsewhere on this topic?
• Who is the sponsor of the Web site?
• Is the author affiliated with a reputable institution or organization?
• Does the information reflect the views of the organization, or only of the author? If the sponsoring institution or organization is not clearly identified on the site, check the URL. It may contain the name of a university (U of T Mississauga’s includes utoronto) or the extension .edu, which is used by many educational institutions. Government sites are identified by the extension .gov. URLs containing .org are trickier, and require research: these are sites sponsored by non-profit organizations, some of which are reliable sources and some of which are very biased. Sites with the .com extension should also be used with caution, because they have commercial or corporate sponsors who probably want to sell you something. The extension ~NAME often means a personal Web page with no institutional backing; use such sites only if you have checked on the author’s credibility in print sources.
• What audience is the Web site designed for? You want information at the college or research level. Don’t use sites intended for elementary students or sites that are too technical for your needs.
• Is the Web site current?
• Is the site dated?
• Is the date of the most recent update given? Generally speaking, Internet resources should be up-to-date; after all, getting the most current information is the main reason for using the Net for research in the first place.
• Are all the links up-to-date and working? Broken links may mean the site is out-of-date; they’re certainly a sign that it’s not well-maintained.
• Is the material on the Web site reliable and accurate?
• Is the information factual, not opinion?
• Can you verify the information in print sources?
• Is the source of the information clearly stated, whether original research material or secondary material borrowed from elsewhere?
• How valid is the research that is the source?
• Does the material as presented have substance and depth?
• Where arguments are given, are they based on strong evidence and good logic?
• Is the author’s point of view impartial and objective?
• Is the author’s language free of emotion and bias?
• Is the site free of errors in spelling or grammar and other signs of carelessness in its presentation of the material?
• Are additional electronic and print sources provided to complement or support the material on the Web site?

If you can answer all these questions positively when looking at a particular site, then you can be pretty sure it’s a good one; if it doesn’t measure up one way or another, it’s probably a site to avoid. The key to the whole process is to think critically about what you find on the Net; if you want to use it, you are responsible for ensuring that it is reliable and accurate.

This page is used with permission of the UTM Library.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

34 Using the Internet for Research

What you’ll learn to do: d escribe strategies for successful internet research.

The first step to an effective internet search is being familiar with the terms you are searching for. You search term should be as concise as possible, while still covering the area you would like to find. —Eric Popkoff, professor

By the end of this section, you’ll be able to describe good practices for reading using technology and explain how to research using technology. You’ll also describe techniques for keeping your personal information safe in an online context and explore additional resources for learning online.

Online Reading Strategies

Learning outcomes.

• Describe effective strategies for reading online

In an online educational environment, you’re probably going to do more reading than listening. You may do some of your reading in printed form—say, an assigned novel or textbook—but some of it might also be online in the form of a web page. Reading online isn’t the same as reading in print, so you should practice some strategies that will improve your online reading comprehension and speed. Some of the tactics you learn about here will help you with any kind of reading you might do, not just the stuff that’s online.

Print vs. Online

So what do we mean when we say that reading print is different from reading online?

Evaluate the Source for Credibility

First, when you read something—let’s say, a book—that’s been printed by a reputable publishing house, you can assume that the work is authoritative. The author had to be vetted by a publishing house and multiple editors, right? But when you read something online, it might have been written or posted by anybody. This means that you have to seriously evaluate the authority of the information you’re reading. Pay attention to who was writing what you’re reading—can you identify the author? What are his or her credentials?

Online Reading is Interactive

Second, in the print world, texts may include pictures, graphics, or other visual elements to supplement the author’s writing. But in the digital realm, this supplementary material might also include hyperlinks, audio, and video as well. This material will fundamentally change the reading experience for you because online reading can be interactive in a way that a print book can’t be. An online environment allows you to work and play with content rather than passively absorbing it.

Reading Online Can Lead You to Unexpected Places

Finally, when you read in print, you generally read sequentially, from the first word to the last. Maybe you’ll flip to an index or refer to a footnote, but otherwise the way you read is fairly consistent and straightforward. Online, however, you can be led quickly into an entirely new area of reading by clicking on links or related content. Have you ever been studying for class and fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit hole while looking for unfamiliar terms? You might have started by investigating the French Revolution, but half an hour later you find yourself reading about the experimental jazz scene in 1970s New York. You can’t really do that with a book.

Reading Comprehension: Why, What, How?

Now that you’ve heard about how reading online differs from reading print, you should know that these differences have some really practical consequences for reading comprehension. Improving your online reading comprehension will save you time and frustration when you work on your assignments. You’ll be able to understand your course subject matter better, and your performance on your quizzes and exams will improve.

Consider the why, what, and how of reading comprehension:

• Why  am I being asked to read this passage? In other words, what are the instructions my professor has given me?
• What  am I supposed to get out of this passage? That is, what are the main concerns, questions, and points of the text? What do you need to remember for class?
• How  will I remember what I just read? In most cases, this means taking notes and defining key terms.

When you keep the why, what and how of reading comprehension in the forefront of your mind while reading, your understanding of the material will improve drastically. It will only take a few minutes, but it will not only help you remember what you’ve read, but also structure any notes that you might want to take.

Explore a Web Page

Let’s put this information to use with a short exercise. Imagine that your instructor has asked you to create an argument either for or against the institution of the death penalty in California. She has pointed you to the website www.deathpenalty.org to get started. What terms or headlines stick out at you so you can begin crafting your argument? Consider the following headlines of articles from the website. Which articles seem like they might work best for helping you get started?

• “Federal Judge Says CA Death Penalty Unconstitutional”: Great! This article will have a legal argument from a federal judge—a fantastic place to get talking points for your own argument.
• “The Death Penalty Failure They’re Trying To Hide”: Good instincts—this article may give you a great point of counterattack if your argument is against the death penalty.
• “Infographic: The First Time We Ended the Death Penalty”: Yes! This will give you a historical precedent you can point to in your argument.
• “Polls Show Preference for Death Penalty Alternatives”: Well done—what’s more convincing than numbers, especially when it comes to the will of the American people?
• “Former Florida Warden Haunted By Botched Execution”: Yes—a great rhetorical tactic is to use an anecdote from the life of a person with experience with the issues you’re talking about, and this article sounds like it might be very moving. After all, it was convincing enough to change this man’s mind about the death penalty—maybe it would sway your audience as well.
• “DPF Appoints New Director of Community Outreach and Education”: Hmm, this article doesn’t seem to be the best option for your argument because it’s not directly related to your argument. Let’s skip or skim this one!
• “How to Stop a Heart”: This is another good testimony from someone affected by the death penalty, but it’s in the form of a blog post, so there’s probably better evidence out there. Maybe come back to it if you don’t have everything you need.
• “Michael Millman accepts ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’”: This article doesn’t really pertain to your assignment, so it doesn’t seem like the best possible choice. Keep looking!

Tips for Reading Online

Reading online can be challenging, but here are a few tips to help:

Getting Distracted While Reading Online

When you read online, the hyperlinks, images, audio, and video interactivity embedded in the text can be a really tempting distraction. Try reading a passage straight through at least once without clicking on any of the hyperlinks or participating in any of the interactive opportunities. First, get a basic feel for the passage, then read it with the interactive components to augment your reading.

Reading Assignments on Your Phone

It’s best not to read your assignments from the small screen of a smartphone. It’s too easy to miss words and meanings when the reading process itself is challenging.

Increasing My Reading Speed

Reading quickly and efficiently will leave you more time to study, and improve your performance in your course.

To read more quickly and efficiently online, try most of all to avoid distractions like ads, pop-ups, or hyperlinks that will lead you away from your assignment. Another tactic you can try is to scan the page before actually reading, focusing on keywords and phrases rather than every single word. This is the same technique you just tried out in the death penalty exercise we went through. It will not only help you to read faster, it’ll also give you a sense of the text’s main ideas.

Research Using Technology

• Explain how to research using technology

Research Using the Internet

Using the Internet when researching for a class assignment is an essential skill for any successful student. The research process should not be frustrating or difficult when you follow the steps of the research process and evaluate your sources so you only use credible and reliable information. Before we discuss the process for researching using the Internet, it is important to think about what research is. This short video will provide you with a basic understanding of the research process.

Research Process

The research process includes a range of steps to ensure you are successful in finding the information you need using the Internet. The first step is to define your topic. While this statement seems straightforward, it is important to think about what you are actually researching for an assignment. A professor may give you a general topic as a starting point for your research. If you use the general topic when conducting research on the Internet, you could receive millions of results. Instead, think about what you really want to learn from your research and narrow the focus of your topic to something that is manageable.

If you find that you are having trouble understanding your topic or even narrowing the focus of your topic, find background information. This background information can be from a range of sources. Think about Wikipedia , which is ostensibly an encyclopedia. While for most topics, Wikipedia can provide you with the background you need to better understand your topic, it is always important to evaluate the information you find on the Internet for accuracy.

Once you define your topic and have a better understanding of the issues related to your topic based on your background research, you can develop a research question to guide your research using the Internet. Your research question should provide enough information that anyone can understand the purpose of your research. Once you have a research question, you can use your research question to develop a research strategy. Your research strategy will comprise the main concepts of your research question that can be used as your keywords and search terms.

Now that you have a research strategy, you will need to choose a proper search tool. This tool can be a search engine like Google or maybe a library database that is available to you through your institution. As you think about which search tool to select, it is important to think about what type of information you need. You can use a general search engine like Google to find a range of information, but may need to use a library database to find scholarly journal articles.

Finally, you will perform your search and evaluate your results. As you look at your search results, consider if the information you are finding answers your research question and is from a reliable source.

Search Strategy

Now that you have an understanding of your topic, have defined what you will be researching, and have utilized background information to develop a research question, it is time to develop a search strategy. If your general topic is “social media privacy,” it is helpful to focus your research question. You can focus your search on something like, what action should social networking sites like Instagram and Facebook take to protect users’ personal information and privacy?

From the above research question, you can develop your research strategy by focusing on the main concepts in your research question.

• Personal Information

Using these key concepts from your research question, you can develop your search strategy.

Build a Strong Search Strategy

Learn how to build a strong search strategy through this video below.

Tips and Tricks for Internet Searching

In this search strategy, you see there are a number of different things happening: “social networks” AND user* AND “personal information” AND privacy.

You see that social networks and personal information are in quotes. These quotations are called phrase searching . By placing quotation marks around a phrase, you are telling the search tool to look for those words together. In this case, the search tool will look for the words social network together and the words personal information. This ensures more accurate results when you search.

You will also notice an asterisk after the search term user . This asterisk is called truncation and will tell the database to search for not only user but other terms that start with user like users.

You will notice the word AND capitalized between each search term/phrase. This capitalization is a Boolean operator and it tells the search tool to connect my search terms together and look for a source that includes all the terms. You can broaden your search by using the OR Boolean operator to search for Twitter or Facebook. And the NOT Boolean operator to search for Twitter NOT Facebook.

You can find additional tips for searching the Internet here .

Evaluating Information to Determine Credibility

Once you find information through your search strategy, it is important to evaluate the information you are using to determine if it is credible and reliable. You can do this by using the CRAAP test. CRAAP stands for

• Accuracy, and

You can learn more about the CRAAP test as a tool to evaluate Internet sources here .

SIFT Method

You can also evaluate information, particularly information found on social media, using the SIFT method. View the following video to learn more about SIFT.

Attributing Your Sources in Your Writing

When using information from a source such as a website, journal article, magazine article, newspaper article, or books and eBooks, it is important that you attribute these ideas in your academic writing. The Purdue Online Writing Lab (Purdue OWL) is a great source of information on how to cite your sources.

Safety and Personal Information on the Internet

• Describe techniques for keeping your personal information safe in an online context

More than ever before, it’s critical to keep your personal information safe on the Internet. It seems like every day there is another news story about a new database breach or identity theft scam. But in a world where we’re all connected almost constantly, how do you even know where to begin to protect your data and online identity?

As an example, let’s look at Eliana, a freshman at Mountain Brush Community College. Eliana has a Chromebook that she uses both for her schoolwork as well as her personal Internet use. She also has a Google-branded smartphone, and on both of these devices she uses the apps that came with them, like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps. Google keeps Eliana’s information very secure. However, she doesn’t have much privacy, at least when it comes to Google—they keep an astounding amount of information about Eliana. She has to decide whether she trusts Google to know so much about her or not.

Unfortunately, both security and privacy often come at the cost of some amount of convenience. It’s up to you to decide where the right balance is for you, but in order to make that decision, you need to understand the tradeoffs.

Interestingly, in today’s world, security is often easier to achieve than privacy. For one thing, we’re all used to some of the steps we have to take to keep our information secure, and it’s actually in the best interests of the big tech companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook to help us keep our information secure. The same is not true for privacy, as we’ll discuss later.

Passwords and Password Managers

The first step to achieving better online security is the one that we’re all familiar with—maintaining good, separate passwords for all of our online accounts. While it’s much easier to use a few simple, easy-to-type passwords for most of your accounts (and many people still do!), this is a great example of sacrificing security for convenience. The risk is that if someone obtains your email address and password for one account (for example, through a data breach at a company you do business with), they have your login credentials for many of your accounts and can start doing real damage.

Fortunately, password managers are a great tool for maintaining quite a bit of convenience in this scenario while achieving high levels of security. A password manager is an app that runs on all of your devices (computer, phone, tablet, etc.) and stores your passwords for all your online accounts. You only have to remember a single password: the one that unlocks your password manager. This app makes it easy to create super-secure unique passwords for your online accounts because you never have to remember them! Some popular password managers are 1Password , LastPass , and Bitwarden .

Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is an extra layer of security on top of your existing password. To gain access to a site, you must enter your password and then provide a second piece of information—often a code that is texted to your phone number. This increases the likelihood that you are who you say you are, and helps to prevent unauthorized access to your account. Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of convenience—it can be annoying to have to enter two pieces of information every time you log on to a site! A good compromise is to use 2FA on your most important accounts, where the most damage could be done if someone gains access to them—for example, bank accounts, your school account, and your email account.

That last one, your email account, is more important than you might think at first. If someone gains access to your email account, they can immediately change your password to lock you out, and then begin to go through all your online accounts, resetting your passwords to gain access to all those accounts. So protecting your email account should benext to protecting your bank accounts in terms of priority.

Security Updates

As hackers find exploits in software and operating systems that run on our phones and computers, security updates on our devices try to block these exploits. However, it’s up to you to make sure that you keep the software on your phone and computer up to date so that you get the latest security patches. The easiest way to do this is to set your devices to download and install security updates automatically.

Antivirus/Anti-malware

Another effective way to block unauthorized access of your personal data is to run antivirus/anti-malware software on your computer. Bitdefender , Malwarebytes , and McAfee Total Protection are some common software programs you can check out.

Ad Blockers

An ad blocker is an extension you run in your web browser that not only keeps you from being inundated with ads, but can help prevent your computer from becoming infected by malware. Some browsers now block ads without you having to install anything (e.g., Brave). For other browsers, common ad blocker extensions are AdBlock Plus and uBlock Origin .

Finally, you should take steps to protect your data from yourself! We don’t mean, of course, that you are likely to steal your own data. Rather, data loss is a common occurrence that, while not nefarious in nature, can still be very problematic. We tend to rely on cloud backups for more and more of our data these days, but it’s worth giving some thought to what happens to your data if your account is closed, or the company goes away, or even if you just exceed your storage limits and don’t realize it before your data starts being deleted. For pictures and documents that we store in the cloud and on our computers and phones, it’s good to have a backup stored somewhere safe—for example, on an external hard drive.

Remember Eliana from our discussion above? She was the freshman who uses a Chromebook and a Google-branded smartphone, and on both of these devices she uses the apps that came with them, like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps. While Google keeps Eliana’s information very secure, we noted that she doesn’t have much privacy, at least when it comes to Google. Google knows her name, email address, home address, birthday, gender, and phone number. They know what she looks like, what she sounds like, who her friends are, how much she talks to them, and what she talks about with them. They know what her interests are, what she searches for online, what she buys online, where she goes, what stores and restaurants she likes to visit, how much time she spends there, and how fast she drives. If Eliana wears a Fitbit to track her steps, Google also knows her weight, height, age, fitness goals, and how many calories she burns in a day.

To look through some of the data Google has stored about you specifically, you can visit https://takeout.google.com . Check all of the boxes that you’re interested in, and then click the button to export your data. It can take hours or days for Google to assemble the download for you, but they will email you when it’s ready, and you can poke through all your personal information that Google has stored. To limit the amount of data that Google collects on you, and to delete saved data, you can visit https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols .

The following image is from Google Takeout, and shows all the different categories of data that Google collects about you:

What if Eliana was in the Apple ecosystem as opposed to Google’s—would she be better off in terms of privacy? The answer depends in part on whether or not she’s using all of the same Google apps—Gmail, Google Maps, Google Search, etc.—on her Apple devices that she was on her Google devices. If she is using Google apps, then her situation is very similar. If she has opted to avoid all Google apps, then her level of privacy has improved as Apple is not sharing her data with advertisers. Remember that a key part of Google’s business model is creating a profile of you—all your interests, online purchases, web searches, etc., and using that data to deliver targeted ads to you. Apple’s business model is different. Apple charges you higher prices for their products and services rather than delivering ads to you. Because of this difference in business models, a study in 2021 found that Google collects around twenty times more handset data than Apple [1] .

However, it’s worth noting that Apple is still tracking Eliana in many of the same ways that Google does and storing her information on their servers for their own uses. So in the end, she would still need to decide to what extent she is willing to trust a large tech company with all of her personal information.

What can you do to improve your privacy? After all, almost all of us use computers and smartphones on a daily basis, and some amount of data capturing and tracking is all but unavoidable in order to use the services that we need in everyday life. However, there are some steps you can take to begin to improve your privacy without losing too much in terms of convenience.

Text Messaging

Signal and Telegram are two good privacy-focused messaging services you can use instead of the apps that come with your smartphone, and both of them are free. On an Android phone, you can even set Signal to be your default text messaging app, and it will let you communicate with your non-Signal-using friends in addition to other Signal users (unfortunately, this isn’t possible on Apple devices due to limitations in the iOS).

Web Searching

Google is the undisputed king of web searching. However, privacy-focused alternatives are starting to appear. One of the best is DuckDuckGo . Unlike Google, it doesn’t collect or share any kind of identifiable personal information. DuckDuckGo can be used in a web browser on your computer, and is also available as an app for your smartphone.

Internet Browsing

While Google Chrome has the highest market share of all browsers, other privacy-focused alternatives exist that are arguably just as good. Two popular ones are Brave and Firefox . Brave is actually built on the underlying, open-source code that Chrome is built from, which means that the browser plug-ins you use with Chrome will also work with Brave. Firefox is not built on the same technology, but has a wide range of plug-ins available as well.

Aside from privacy concerns, Gmail is a great email service—it’s easy to use, it works on almost any device, and it’s free. But again, it’s only free because Google’s business model is to sell ads rather than charging their customers. If you’re interested in improving your privacy, there are a number of email providers that you can choose from that offer private email, but the tradeoff is that they cost a few dollars per month. Popular ones include ProtonMail , FastMail , and Tutanota .

Using the Internet for Lifelong Learning

• Explore additional resources for learning using the Internet

Lifelong Learning Using the Internet

A Pew Research Center (2016) survey found that “73% of adults consider themselves lifelong learners.” This study also found that “74% of adults are what we call personal learners—that is, they have participated in at least one of a number of possible activities in the past 12 months to advance their knowledge about something that personally interests them” (Pew Research Center, 2016). This same study found that “63% of those who are working (or 36% of all adults) are what we call professional learners—that is, they have taken a course or gotten additional training in the past 12 months to improve their job skills or expertise connected to career advancement.” [2]

Whether for personal or professional development, it is now essential for everyone to continue learning throughout their life to stay on top of technological changes and innovations in society. While the Internet has been a gamechanger for how information is shared, it also provides those interested in lifelong learning with a number of options to stay on top of any topic.

As a lifelong learner, it is important to set your personal and professional objectives for learning, determine the best platform for learning, and evaluate your lifelong learning to ensure you are meeting your objectives. Like any process, you will likely need to refine your objectives as you advance personally and professionally.

Basic Lifelong Learning on the Internet

As you think about your own lifelong learning and how the Internet can facilitate the process, it is important to consider the range of platforms that are available to you and consider them for the content they provide.

For anyone who has a problem around the home, say a leaky faucet, YouTube is an excellent source of informative videos through this platform provider. The videos are often associated with user-created content from a range of sources, but it is important to know that companies and organizations often host how-to videos on this platform to reach a wide audience. These videos offer a quick and focused opportunity for lifelong learning.

In addition to YouTube videos, there are other platforms that offer skills-based lifelong learning. These platforms include WikiHow , which provides how-to guides on a range of topics.

MOOC Platforms

The range of available platforms for lifelong learning on the Internet continues to grow, but includes options based on your personal and professional interests and needs. Here is a list of massive open online course (MOOC) providers that can meet lifelong learning needs. While the courses offered as MOOCs should be open and freely available, some providers do charge fees for transcripts or certificates to indicate you have completed a course or program. Of course, this list will change but it offers an excellent starting point for anyone interested in learning a new skill or expanding their knowledge.

• Great Courses
• Khan Academy

Lifelong Learning through Synchronous Events

Whether for personal or professional growth, synchronous webinars hosted by professional organizations and other associations offer an excellent option for lifelong learning. In the professional space, webinars are often hosted by professional organizations and associations focused on providing professionals in a field with training to meet the current needs of their members. For example, the American Nurses Association serves as a professional association for registered nurses. This association, like those in other industries, offers professional development opportunities to their members. You can see on the American Nurses Association website that they offer a range of workshops, webinars, and continuing education courses.

While professional organizations and associations offer a range of lifelong learning opportunities, there are also opportunities for lifelong learning for personal growth. Just as the American Nurses Association offers a range of workshops, webinars, and continuing education courses, you can find lifelong learning opportunities from a range of organizations. For example,  the Smithsonian Institution offers a range of online events and has expanded their offerings through their Smithsonian Associates Streaming platform that includes lectures and tours. For those interested in continuing their personal education, it is a matter of finding the right organization or institution.

Regardless of your lifelong learning goals, the Internet will continue to expand access to information, making it easier for anyone to grow personally and professionally.

Boolean operator: terms such as AND, OR, and NOT that can be inserted to categorically focus an online search

interactive: the unique quality of online texts that allows a reader to move in a non-linear fashion to hyperlinked material and mixed-media resources

phrase searching: the online research technique that involves placing quotations around a phrase, which tells a search tool to look for those words together

privacy: the degree of control we have over who sees our online data and identity

security: the degree to which we protect our online data and identity

truncation: the online research technique that places an asterisk after a term to find terms that include and extend from the original term

vetted: a term describing an authoritative text that has been carefully reviewed, edited, and most likely peer-reviewed by qualified scholars

• Leith, Douglas J. "Mobile Handset Privacy: Measuring The Data iOS and Android Send to Apple And Google."  Trinity College Dublin, Ireland , 25 March 2021, https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf ↵
• Horrigan, John B. "Lifelong Learning and Technology."  Pew Research Center , 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/03/22/lifelong-learning-and-technology/. ↵

a term describing an authoritative text that has been carefully reviewed, edited, and most likely peer-reviewed by qualified scholars

the unique quality of online texts that allows a reader to move in a non-linear fashion to hyperlinked material and mixed-media resources

the online research technique that involves placing quotations around a phrase, which tells a search tool to look for those words together

the online research technique that places an asterisk after a term to find terms that include and extend from the original term

terms such as AND, OR, and NOT that can be inserted to categorically focus an online search

the degree to which we protect our online data and identity

the degree of control we have over who sees our online data and identity

Using the Internet for Research Copyright © 2023 by April Ring is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Online research: Definition, Methods, Types and Execution

Online survey research is much more impactful than traditional research, considering the ease of access and cost savings they come with. The response rates received for online research are much higher than the others as the respondents are assured that their identity will be protected.

There’s constant progress in the field of online survey research with the progress that’s happening on the internet and social media. Social media has been a catalyst in the entire process of online research regarding access to databases and the experiments that can be conducted on this platform.

What is Online Research?

Online research is a research method that involves the collection of information from the internet. With the advent of the internet, the traditional pen-and-paper research techniques have taken a backseat and made room for online research design .

Online surveys , online polls , questionnaires , forms , and focus groups are various tools of online research that are vital in gathering essential information for market research . The internet has created impressive avenues for small and large businesses to conduct market research with zero to a minimum investment. Online research can be carried out for product testing, targeting an audience, database mining, customer satisfaction et al.

LEARN ABOUT:  Market research industry

5 Online Research Methods and Techniques:

Researchers and statisticians collect data from respondents using various online research techniques. They are often called internet research or web-based research methods. Many of these research methods are already being used in one way or another but are being revived for online mediums. The latest in this line of online research methods in social media research, as it offers extended levels of complexities and, thus, new avenues for research.

Researchers extensively use 5 such online research methods due to the precise nature of the offered results.

• Online focus group: A subset of the online research techniques, online focus groups are methods usually used for B2B research, consumer research and political research. A moderator is assigned to conduct and supervise the focus group who invites pre-selected and qualified participants who represent a specific area of interest to be a part of this focus group at a particular time. The respondents are usually incentivized to be a part of the discussion, which usually is an hour and 90 minutes.

LEARN ABOUT: B2B Online Panels

• Online interview: This online research method is quite similar to the face-to-face interview methods yet different in terms of the required standard practices, understanding with respondents, and sampling. Online interviews are organized using various computer-mediated communication (CMC), essentially SMS or Email. Based on  the response time for these interviews, they’re classified into synchronous and asynchronous methods.Synchronous online interviews are carried out via mediums such as online chat, where the responses are received in real-time. Asynchronous online interviews are those that happen over Email, where the responses are usually not in real-time. Just like face-to-face interviews, online interviews probe into respondents’ thoughts and feedback about a particular topic to get insights into their experiences, ideas, or attitudes.
• Online qualitative research: Other than the mainstream online focus groups and online interviews, there are various aspects of online qualitative research . These aspects include blogs, mobile diaries , and communities . These methods contribute toward cost and time savings and are supremely convenient for the researchers to gather information for their research topics. The level of sophistication that online qualitative research methods bring to the table is superior to any other traditional forms as the respondents can be either recruited from existing databases, or panels or can be added by conducting surveys . LEARN MORE: Qualitative Research Questions and Questionnaires
• Online text analysis: This analysis technique is an extension of text analysis which exists since the 17th century which is a collection of various online research examples used to derive insights from content available online. By using this online research technique, researchers can explain penned, verbal or graphic communication formats. Categories such as web pages, paragraphs, sentences, quasi-sentences, documents, etc. It is most often used for quantitative research but for better interpretation of the text, researchers also use qualitative techniques.

LEARN ABOUT: Qualitative Interview

• Social network analysis: Social network analysis is an emerging online research technique which is gaining acceptance due to the increased adoption of social networking platforms. By conducting social network analysis, a researcher can map and measure flows and relationships between people, organizations, URLs, groups or computers using graph theory. For instance, the latest meme culture has developed new social structures in which the people associated are termed as “nodes” and memes are the “links” between these nodes.

LEARN ABOUT: Best Data Collection Tools

Types of online research:

• Customer satisfaction research: Earlier, this type of research used to be conducted over phone calls but nowadays, the customers are accustomed to getting mail asking them to give their feedback on their recent experience with an organization. For instance, if you own a newly opened restaurant, you’d want to know customer satisfaction . You can either have a survey ready for them to fill out after their meal, send it out after taking their email address or use the offline app to conduct the survey.
• New product research: The launch of a new product can be unnerving. Understanding whether a new product will succeed with the target audience is much needed. New product research can be carried out by testing the product with a group of selected guinea pigs and collecting feedback almost immediately. It can be highly effective when conducting research for a new mall outlet (read: Walmart!), launching a car variant, or introducing adding new credit card options.
• Understand brand loyalty: Many small and big businesses survive merely on brand loyalty . It’s undoubtedly a big deal but to every organization needs to work on it to either maintain or improve it. Conduct online research to know what attracts a customer to a particular brand or the points that are currently keeping them from being loyal to your brand.
• Employee engagement and employee satisfaction research: Understanding what employees think about working with your organization is the key to success. The mood and morale of the employees must be tracked regularly so that they effectively contribute to the growth of the company. Surveys should be sent to improve employee engagement and also to strive to maintain employee satisfaction . 

Learn More: Data Collection Methods: Types & Examples

Things to keep in mind for online survey research

Online survey research is one of the most impactful ways to carry out web-based research that yield effective results. Here are a few points that all organizations should take care of while designing an online survey for research:

Give open-ended questions a miss:

A respondent needs to think before submitting open-ended questions, so the time taken for completion can increase. This can annoy them to a point where they’d simply quit the survey. Yes-No questions, multiple choice questions, or ranking questions will be much easier for respondents to fill out and as effective as open-ended questions .

Show urgency but also be tolerant:

In case you want a response for something important, sending more than one invitation for respondents to fill out is alright. But, a prerequisite for this is that your database should be very well aware of this, and they should have no objection to it. Most importantly, be patient with the results once you’ve conducted an online survey. Appoint someone from the team who will take care of the entire process of conducting this survey.

Detailed surveys produce better results:

Survey takers can sit through a survey that would take them a maximum of 25 minutes. They would usually quit to never return, even for the surveys that you might send out in the future. The inclusion of drop-down questions or multiple choice questions (with accurate options) will help reduce the survey size and, in turn, the time invested by the survey takers.

Online Research Advantages:

• Access to data across the globe: The Internet is an elaborate platform for researchers to invest their time in retrieving crucial information that would otherwise consume a lot of their time. It is straightforward for them to conduct research skills even if they’re lazing on their couch and have deadlines.   
• Minimum investment of time and resources: Online mediums have become the numero uno resort for individuals to look up information to broaden their horizons of knowledge. There’s information being updated daily, and researchers latch onto this information for their benefit. It has eased the process of publishing and collecting information and thus saves time and money.  
• Central pool of facts and figures: Researchers and statisticians keep searching for updated information on various important topics. Students explore the internet for academic purposes, which is the most significant edge the internet offers.
• Capable tools for collecting information: Surveys, questionnaires, and polls are being conducted via online mediums like emails or QR codes, or embedded websites to gather or spread vital information.

Know more about the various online research methods.

LEARN ABOUT: 12 Best Tools for Researchers

QuestionPro’s robust suite of research tools provides you with all you need to derive research results. Our online survey platform includes custom point-and-click logic and advanced question types.

LEARN ABOUT: Market research vs marketing research

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Elizabeth J. Peterson

Thinking Through Philosophy, Culture, and Psychology

A Guide to Using the Internet for Research

This is the second in a series on using the internet as a learning device. You can read part one here and part three here .

We are looking at the best practices for using the Internet for research. Think of the internet as a library; it houses information on every topic you can imagine. It can point you to the best resources on Earth for information or link you to an authority on whichever topics capture your imagination.

The Internet as a Library

This massive library, a place where “reading materials are systematically arranged,” represents the whole of human knowledge, and sits accessible day and night. It can jump-start your research, narrow down sources, challenge your ideas on your topic and questions, and yield a ton of information very easily. In the words of Noam Chomsky, it’s invaluable as a research tool.

However, because the Internet isn’t regulated, anyone can post anything, regardless of it’s accuracy. There is no committee tasked with making sure the internet is a safe and truthful place; we are truly still in the Wild West days of internet usage. You need to develop an incredibly skeptical approach to claims or ideas you discover, and a process to determine their accuracy, to see through bias – the author’s and your own – to separate fact from opinion.

A few questions to start with:

• Is the owner or author’s name and contact information available?
• What kind of sources do they use, and are their conclusions reasonable based on the information presented?
• What sort of proof or references do their posts offer?
• Do they link to research or original documents, to news releases or other blogs?
• Do they link to other pages or offer proof at all?

Then, a few tips to keep in mind while looking for information online:

Be cautious and find out information about the author and their background or qualifications, as well as look at the information they link to or reference in their work. Verify their claims and sources back to the original source or document. You want to be confident in the reliability of a writer’s work.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking breaking news is better. It takes time for details and facts to be validated and a clear picture to emerge. Often, informing yourself with older, established aspects of the subject will equip you to process the newer and more detailed articles and reading you do later.

It’s worth looking at whether the website is updated and links are not broken, so you’re aware that facts or research found there may be out of date. However, not every website needs to be recently written to be accurate, especially when dealing with older, historical figures and facts. I’ve found hobby websites and posts on explorers and other figures through history which were written years ago to be full of facts and quotes which didn’t make it into the summaries on the person. They were simply written in 2012, instead of this year. However, do rigorously check the claims and facts on these older posts and sites.

Keep in mind the role bias can play in writing and reading research. Bias leads us to only seek out news or facts which bolster our beliefs. When doing research, we want to find information which challenges those beliefs, to test them for accuracy.

Most importantly, search with the end in mind. Consider the purpose of your research, as this will dictate the nature of sources to look for. If you’re doing research to come up with ideas, perhaps reading through blogs and websites will supply creative ideas. If you are writing for an academic audience, scholarly articles and peer-reviewed sources would provide a firm foundation for your paper. If you want to know the latest discoveries in current research on a specific topic, news releases and publications will likely point you in the right direction. Sources become more or less convincing depending on your goals.

As I’ve shared in a couple editions of Five for Friday, Wikipedia has significantly improved its quality and the veracity of its sources since its beginnings in 2001. Once a joke among students, and blacklisted by instructors, the “free encyclopedia” has all but reinvented itself. Now, its summaries often inform the search results in the sidebars of internet browsers, and more likely than not, the top search results lead to Wikipedia.

Where once Wikipedia pages were primarily opinion and often false or misleading, now entries are vetted and continually improved. Behind the webpages, a team of over 130,000 monthly editors work to clean up grammar, flag when a source needs to be cited, and discuss the intricacies of perceived bias and opinion.

This increase in standards has positioned Wikipedia to become a serious rival to other databases, like the Encyclopedia Britannica website. Where the Encyclopedia Britannica articles have historically been written by celebrated academics or leaders in their fields, including Nobel laureates and former presidents, Wikipedia allows anyone to edit and contribute. This has been the source of much hesitancy, and in part, contributed to the ribbing visited upon anyone seriously citing Wikipedia in conversation. If anyone can write what they want, how can anything be trusted?

The website requires rigorous validation and quality sources to be cited. There are discussions about bias, opinion, and diversity of experience. This also allows for more people, more debate, and ultimately more consensus on a topic. Britannica have paid their contributors, attracting talent, but therein limiting the number of participants and entries. Wikipedia, with their millions of registered volunteers, attracts writers and researchers because they care about the topic at hand. Perhaps this passion for knowledge is what has allowed Wikipedia to succeed.

Wikipedia is also the more extensive source to start with when researching living people. Wikipedia has made this their calling card, over the years, with updates happening seemingly instantaneously. The Wikipedia article on Elon Musk, for instance, currently sits at over 11,000 words, while the Britannica listing is just over 900 words, though, to be fair they do link to related articles about his businesses.

I’ve found the single most useful feature of Wikipedia to be the “Further Reading” section at the bottom of most entries. This lists books, videos, articles, and other vetted sources on the topic, often from which the entry has been compiled. After familiarizing myself with a summary of the person or idea, I click on this section. It is a wealth of information, listing out biographies, documents available online, and other quality source material which you can then explore and learn from yourself. For example, in my recent research on Marshall McLuhan, I discovered that his family maintains an extensive website with quotes, notable appearances or references to his work, and a full biography and bibliography. I was able to find several quality books and webpages from the single Further Reading one section on McLuhan’s Wikipedia page .

Other Websites

For any topic you can list, there is a blog about it. Blogs and other personal websites can also be very helpful, particularly when they list or link to their source material. Not all websites link to source material; many simply quote other stories without bothering to verify any further. When you are looking for accurate information, you’ll need to take on this work yourself, finding the actual book, study, or interview to which the article is referring. Don’t be content with the fact that everyone else seems to think it’s legitimate; do the work to know for certain that the information is valid.

Encyclopedia Britainnica is a great resource for historical research in particular. The Encyclopedia website is written by professionals, which adds a bit of weight to their articles. Those former Presidents and globally respected leaders write extensively about their interest and sources, which provides the reader with a long list of references to explore.

Scholarly sources are also a great place to gather information. Depending on your topic and the purpose of your research, you may want to focus primarily on these sources. Google Scholar searches through academic articles. The drawback here is that Google searches the entire document, rather than only the abstracts, which may or may not be available to you to view online. You may also need to pay to access the research returned in a search. Many of these studies are rather pricey, averaging $25 for a copy of a single study. If you are a student, most likely your institution has access to many of these databases already. Otherwise, I would recommend going through your public library, and asking which databases they have access to. In either case, ask your librarian and they’ll know how to help you gain access. Google Scholar allows you to refine with Boolean terms, or within a certain time range. This is great for when you are looking for particularly newer research. Their search results also show how many times a particular study has been referenced, and include links to other articles which cite the original study. This is a great place to discover studies on related topics.

JSTOR is an academic library, which hosts books, journals, and other scholarly material. Their search system is more similar to a database search. You can use quotations to search for exact phrases, which will help return more exact results.

For philosophy, and many psychology theories and figures, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an amazing source of scholarly essays on nearly every topic imaginable. They have biographies, thorough examinations of theories and implications of philosophical ideas, and helpful summaries of every major school of philosophy and philosopher.

Other resources to look at are the websites of the Library of Congress and National Archives. Many philosophers, authors, and historical figures have inspired dedicated websites, or even societies, which can also be rich sources of information.

Online courses and podcasts are also great options for learning and finding interesting ideas; they are just more likely take more time. If you want to take a deep dive into a particular topic or find more sources, you could look into a course. I don’t usually use these sources, though, unless I have weeks to devote to the topic.

A more recent discovery for me is lectures on YouTube. The platform has information on just about any topic you could imagine; there are lectures from JRR Tolkien on his Middle Earth epics; obscure history videos sharing lesser known details about historical events; you can hear lectures given by modern thinkers. There are also videos on art history, famous speeches, and any hobby you can think of. Rather than being a platform where we waste time, YouTube can actually be a great source of learning material and research. Recently, I’ve listened to several lectures and debates from Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher and professor in the 1960s and 70s. His work dealt with the impact of information and media on society and many of his lectures and interviews on YouTube, aren’t available in text or other mediums.

When you look for a video, you’ll want to be specific in your search terms, and look for videos from universities, legitimate organizations, or the estate of author’s (as in the case of Tolkien or McLuhan, for example). You’ll probably also want find a video around twenty minutes; long enough to cover an overview, but not so short you don’t gain any context or information. A great video will also list sources or further study suggestions in the video description for you to continue your research.

Discovering Books

The internet is also unparalleled in discovering books, particularly those which are obscure or older. Books are amazing for research because of the amount of concentrated information they contain. The underrated index and reference sections are gold-mines for finding more books on your topic of interest. Read the index and reference sections of books you enjoyed, or on topics you want to explore more. Go through the bibliography and write down the titles of a couple books to look up and read.

A habit I am working to develop is looking through the reference section of books as I finish them, and choosing at least one title to read next. Every book is written from an amalgamation of the author’s references and experiences, often in the form of dozens of books. While each and every title of inspiration may not be listed, the author will take great care to acknowledge the sources of the material which directly made it into the book. Every piece of writing is the result of cutting out and removing other ideas, references, and information – some of which will interest you. By continuing your reading in related books, you are building a more complete understanding of the topic at hand and how it fits into the larger context of society.

So far as choosing books, I first tend to look at how many times a title is referenced. After getting titles from the bibliography of a book, I’ll usually do an internet search on the topic, then go to Wikipedia to see the references and further reading recommendations.

If the same author’s name keeps popping up, that should indicate to you that their text is widely read and accepted. If Wikipedia lists a title, and that same title has been referenced in a book I’ve read, I usually go to Amazon to look it up. On Amazon, I first look for reported issues concerning the quality of certain editions. I’ll also look to see whether the work has mixed reviews. I’m not looking for high reviews so much as discussion or differing opinions. I tend to gravitate toward ideas with are older and maybe discussed a bit less, in order to widen my perspective on a topic. Reading through the reviews can usually give you an idea of whether their ideas are popular today or not.

There are of course many out of print books and primary sources which exist only in analog form. The internet, particularly Google Scholar, can help to narrow down the topics and ideas presented in these older books.

Round ups of books on specific topics can also be very helpful. Take a general topic, such as “media history” and do an internet search for the best books on media history. From there you can refine, perhaps you want to look closer at yellow journalism and muckraking in the early 20th century. Perhpas you are more interested in the digital revolution’s effects on journalism. Start out general, then use authors names and more specific topics to whittle down the results until you are left with a manageable number of sources.

Get Specific

The internet is the greatest resource mankind’s knowledge has produced. With a simple internet search, you have access to the wisdom of history – from Plato’s cave allegory, detailed and put into striking video – to NASA’s documentation of 1969’s mission to the moon and everything in between. There is no single resource as detailed, and capable of high quality as the internet. However, mixed in with these extraordinary creations and accounts of genius, there are a lot of duds; a lot of mediocre information exists.

No matter how specific your topic is, there are thousands of resources available. The internet is simply too large to function well under general terms. In order to find high quality information, we need to get specific. The internet rewards specific interests.

Putting It Together

While all of these resources are great starting places, they are only that – a place to start. Developing a deep understanding of a subject requires effort and quality material. Note the ideas and titles in your commonplace book, along with your takeaways. When you come across a name or new term, do an internet search and go to the Wikipedia page. Read the summary at the top, and jump to what stands out or lines up with your original reason for the search. Allow your curiosity to lead you to surprising places, and always verify that your sources are reliable. Keep in mind the purpose of your research, whether for deeper personal understanding, an academic presentation, or to familiarize yourself with new ideas. Take your responsibility toward your education seriously, and keep asking questions.

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The internet has turned our phones and computers into pocket libraries. You no longer have to go to your nearby community resource center to find information. As long as you know how to use the internet, you can get what you need.

So if you're having difficulty finding the information you need, don't give up. You can find what you're looking for by using the following tips.

1. Be Google Smart

Before the advent of the internet and search engines, research had to be done manually and by hand. You had to go through stacks of index cards and be familiar with the library catalog system to find what you need. It was pretty difficult to search books by topic—you had to either know the title or the author to find the book.

Today, researching is a whole lot easier. All you need is to type down the keywords you're looking for on Google, and you'll get the most relevant results. However, what if you needed specific results?

This is where the Google search operator comes in. Whether you need to search for something published within a date range, on a website, or even reverse search an image, you can now do that by appending operators to your keywords.

That way, Google would know what to include and exclude in the results it'll show you.

Related: Google Search Tricks to Power Up Your Research

2. Start With Wikipedia

Most academic professors would say that Wikipedia isn't 100% reliable, so you shouldn't use it as your primary source. That's because the site is open-source—meaning anyone could change its contents as long as they make an account.

While Wikipedia does have developed systems to ensure they have accurate information, it still isn't accepted by most institutions. However, that doesn't mean Wikipedia is useless for your research.

After all, since the authors on the page must provide sources for whatever they say, you can click on the links they cite to see their sources for yourself. If you find these sources reliable, then you can use that source as your own.

Furthermore, you can read Wikipedia articles as a jumping-off point for your research. For example, if you're learning about the life of President Eisenhower, you can read the complete article and look at the key points in his life noted there. From there, you can use that as a basis to build your own research.

But remember, ensure that whatever you cite is from a reliable source and has other supporting documents to prove what you're saying.

3. Get In-Touch With the Author

If you're doing academic research, and you find that the rest of the information you need is behind a paywall, don't despair.

Instead of paying through the nose for access, you can instead find the email of the author of the paper and then email them some questions you might have.

Of course, don't email them out of the blue demanding answers. Instead, introduce yourself courteously, tell them what kind of research you're doing, and why you're contacting them.

If they respond, that's when you can inquire if you could ask them a couple of question. Should they respond positively, then that is when you can start asking.

If your conversation goes well enough, you might even be able to ask for a copy of their research paper. Furthermore, this is an excellent way to build your network and improve your credentials in your field of study.

4. Find the Source of Your Source

If you're looking through articles online, and you see them quoting someone with a link, you should go to the linked page. That way, you can exactly see what was said and even read the context on how it was delivered.

This is especially important if you're researching current events. That's because if a news outlet quotes something, they'll usually link it to a corresponding press release or social media post.

Related: Great Websites to Find Statistics

Just ensure that they're linking to a legitimate site or account so that you're 100% sure of the integrity of the information you're quoting.

5. Research on Social Media

As companies and chief executives expand their presence on social media, you can get a lot of substantiated information from there. As long as the announcement comes from the company's verified account, you can use that as a reliable source.

After all, big companies like Microsoft and Samsung use social media platforms like YouTube to make major announcements. Even Instagram uses Twitter to release important statements, like the company's direction for 2022.

You can also follow the chief executives of these companies for updates.

For example, Microsoft's VP and GM for Connected Home and Commercial Client Group announced that they're shipping the 12th-generation Intel mobile processors to laptop manufacturers on Twitter. You would have missed this important news if you weren't following him on social media.

6. Ask Yourself if It’s Reliable

This is the crucial question you have to ask yourself when you're gathering information—is the source you're quoting reliable? Do they have supporting documents to back up their claims? Are their results peer-reviewed and confirmed by other experts?

Since almost anyone can publish anything on the internet, you have to be extra careful about what you read on it. Back in the day, only news organizations and major institutions have access to widespread information dissemination.

That means whatever information they share, they have to vet it carefully so as not to destroy their reputation of trustworthiness.

But today, the widespread adoption of the internet means anyone can publish whatever they want. And if they know how to catch people's attention, they can gather enough popularity to make their claims look legitimate, even if they are not.

Related: The Best Open Access Journal Sites for Students

​​​​​​​That's why you have to be careful of these, especially if you're a researcher.

Information Is in Your Pocket

Just a decade ago, you needed a computer to execute a proper internet research. But today, you can do that from your smartphone or smart device wherever you are. As long as you're connected to the web, you can find information.

With Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, and Siri, you can even ask them questions directly, and they'll return with an answer. We no longer have a dearth of information—in fact, some might say we have too much of it.

​​​​​​​Your responsibility as a researcher is to use the tools we have to find great, accurate results.

• Browsing Tips

How to Research: Ultimate Guide [+Online Tools]

The ability to effectively research is a skill that every student needs to succeed in their educational career. However, most people don’t really understand what research entails. Does it mean spending hours at your university library exploring archives? Or is searching for information online from the comfort of your home enough? And why can’t you just rely on Wikipedia, after all?

Our specialists have created this guide for students who feel lost when putting together an essay, paper, or presentation. Here, we will describe how to research in a detailed, step-by-step manner. We have also provided links to useful tools and resources that will help you along the way. First of all, let’s cover the definitions.

❓ What Is Research?

• Develop a Topic
• Look Through Sources
• Evaluate the Sources
• Write Your Paper
• Cite Your Sources

💡 9 Online Tools for Research

Research refers to the systematic process of discovering information and developing knowledge. We use it to understand new topics and to gain more insight into known issues. This happens through the collection and analysis of relevant data. The ability to research efficiently is one of the most fundamental skills in academia.

Any type of research will include the following features:

• A sound hypothesis on which the rest of the study is based. It will be either proven or disproven by the evidence gathered.
• Systematic investigative methods . These are controlled and follow a pre-established set of rules.
• Logical analysis . It follows a set procedure that involves deductive and inductive reasoning.
• Empirical data based on actual observation and evidence.
• Analytical study of the findings . This ensures in-depth exploration and minimizes mistakes.
• Creation of new questions and new lines of inquiry about the subject via the research.

With that being said, a research paper is more than just the sum of its sources. Its primary purpose is to analyze or argue a particular perspective. In the end, your thoughts and ideas should be the ones you investigate. The evidence you discover during the research process will be the basis for your hypothesis.

There are three universal purposes of research that you should know about:

📚 How to Research: Step-by-Step Guide

As all the definitions you need are covered, we can proceed to learn about the process itself. We have developed this guide so that you won’t have any trouble conducting your research. In the image below, you can see all the required steps.

In the following sections, you will examine each step in detail. Also, you’ll see the reasons why our tips are practical and how to find sources for your research. Good luck!

1. Develop a Topic

1.1. pick or create a topic.

The first step to research is landing on the right idea. This process isn’t always easy, especially when you aren’t familiar with the chosen area of study. However, don’t fret. You can always change your topic later.

Let’s explore how to select your first research idea.

Research is always conducted for a particular reason. It will always relate to writing a paper, creating a project, validating existing results, etc. Your research depends on the goal of your assignment.

The answers will help you define the direction of your work:

• Do you have a list of pre-assigned topics? Can you come up with one yourself?
• What is the due date for your work? How much time does that leave for research?
• What is the scope of your assignment? (Presentation length, number of words/pages, etc.)
• Are there any specific requirements regarding the sources that you are allowed to use?
• Is it essential to use recent information and current sources?

When you have the answers to all the key questions, you can think of your topic. The following tips will help you:

• Choose an idea that is relevant to your assignment. Usually, your instructor will give you detailed instructions before you start working. If you are unsure about your guidelines, don’t be afraid to ask for clarification.
• Ensure that there are enough resources for you to use. When you think of an idea, do a quick preliminary search. It will allow you to determine whether there is enough available information on your topic. Take time to validate those resources and make sure they’re reliable.
• Search for a topic that is not too broad or too narrow. This step directly correlates with the one above. If you are finding too much general information, narrowing down your search might be a good idea. However, if you struggle to find credible sources, it could be a sign to broaden your topic.
• Try to be original. Restating the same ideas that have been explored thousands of times could damage your grade. Chances are, your instructor has heard it all before and isn’t all that interested in hearing it again. Yet, choosing an unconventional approach with a fresh perspective might earn you extra credit for creativity.
• Aim to find an area that will be interesting to explore. If you find a topic that you, personally, are curious about, researching it will be much more pleasant. This way, when you start writing or searching for information, you might actually enjoy the process.

1.2. Formulate Research Questions

As soon as you have chosen a topic, take the time to format it correctly. Wording it as a question will ensure that your focus is precise and nuanced.

And here is how you create research questions:

Step 1 : Do some research.

Take a look at the most recent discussions and debates on your selected topic. You can check out academic journals and scholarly conferences. Keep your focus on the main arguments to acquaint yourself with the concepts.

Step 2 : Try narrowing down your topic.

It is a lot more effective to target a single dimension of a broader topic than to tackle everything. To do this, try focusing on a particular aspect, such as a specific location or time period. You can also aim to discuss certain debates or issues that exist within the topic.

Step 3 : Keep your audience in mind.

There is a difference between crafting a presentation for your classmates and writing a research paper. Your audience will determine the level of detail that goes into your question.

Step 4 : Ask questions.

Once you have considered the above steps, it is time to begin asking yourself questions. Make sure they’re open-ended and start with ‘why,’ ‘how,’ or ‘what.’

Step 5 : Evaluate your questions.

After you come up with a couple of ideas, jot them down on paper. Look back at all the requirements for a successful research question. Which one of them will be the most effective for your assignment?

1.3. Choose a Research Strategy

To develop constructive research questions, you will need to conduct an initial survey of your resources. Take everything you’ve learned so far as your foundation. Now, you will need to create an efficient strategy for your further actions.

Your research strategy will depend on the following:

1.4. Figure out Keywords

With your research questions, strategy, and some background info covered, it will be easier to determine the keywords . They will help you look for resources and locate your work in the future. Over here, see how to work with keywords.

Once you have a selection of keywords, you can improve them by doing the following:

• Break them into related concepts. By the end, you should have four or five columns with associated keywords.
• Choose one keyword from each column. Use your library’s search engine to look them up. Don’t forget to type ‘AND’ in-between the words. It will narrow down the search so that only articles containing all the selected keywords will appear.
• Explore the results! Don’t be afraid to try several different combinations. You should also make sure to list all those keywords that bring you the most valuable results.
• If you don’t have enough results, try using fewer keywords. Alternatively, you can try to make your keywords broader.
• If you have too many results, try using more keywords. Alternatively, you can try to make your keywords narrower.
• Pay attention to which articles are the most relevant to your needs. Make sure to save them and skim them for a list of keywords. Write them down, and create a new list!
• Once you have exhausted your first list, you can create another one. Run another search following these steps. Don’t forget to note down the relevant materials – you’ll need them for your citations!

1.5. Improve Your Topic

As we mentioned above, you can change and refine your topic as many times as you need before you begin writing. That is why in this section, we will talk about how to polish and improve your idea. At the very least, we’ll give you tips on how to format it correctly.

First of all, we need to make sure that your topic is researchable. To accomplish this, answer the 5 ‘w’ questions :

• Why are you choosing this particular topic? How is it interesting or different from the rest? What is your stance on the matter?
• What are the main issues your topic is trying to explore? Is it controversial? What other opinions and questions exist on the subject?
• Who is talking about the topic? What points of view exist, and who is giving them? What is their agenda?
• When was this topic discussed? Is the issue recent or historical? Does the time frame matter?
• Where lays the importance of your topic? Is it debated on an international, national, or local level? Is there a particular place that is more affected than the rest of the world?

After answering these questions, you need to evaluate your idea from these two perspectives:

• Is your topic too broad?

It may happen if you find far too much information on the subject that doesn’t seem relevant. You will want to narrow it down and include some specifics, such as:

• Place (country, city, street, part of the world, etc.);
• Time (year, era, century, etc.);
• Populace (ethnicity, gender, age, occupation, etc.);
• Event or characteristic (historical occurrence, institutional perspective, etc.);
• Individual or group (a particular point of view, specific person or persons, etc.).
• Is your topic too narrow?

If you are discovering too few sources to build a proper case, your topic is too narrow. Try to broaden it using the following methods:

• Remove some of the specifics (place, time, populace, etc.).
• Expand some of the specifics (place, time, populace, etc.).
• Use synonyms to reword your topic.
• Look in other databases to broaden your horizons.
• Consider looking into a less current issue (the newer an idea is, the harder it is to find sources).

2. Look Through Sources

2.1. determine possible sources.

By this time, you most probably looked for background information on your topic a couple of times. Now it’s time to look for more specific info.

For starters, get the keywords you’ve chosen and see if there is enough information available. You can start by checking appropriate titles in the online libraries. Look for sources in encyclopedias and dictionaries to overview what books or articles you can use.

You can use the following websites for this purpose:

• Oxford English Dictionary
• Wordreference.com
• Encyclopedia Britannica Online
• Oxford Reference Online

Apart from encyclopedias and dictionaries, there are, of course, other places you can check. For instance, you can search for books in your local or university library . When you look through the text on the shelf, pay attention to the books nearby – they can become useful too in the subject area.

Additionally, you can find information in your textbooks and assigned readings. Use your library’s electronic databases that keep magazines and newspapers on the topic. In case you are not sure how to do that, ask your librarian. Also, use search engines to locate materials on the Internet. These types of sources will be helpful when looking for generic information.

2.2. Skim Some Books

When it comes to using books for your research, both hard and electronic copies work as well. In this section, we will tell you how to use them for your research.

If you are a student, you probably do not have time to read every single book. When working on a short paper, essay, or presentation with limited time, you are simply looking for citations. Luckily, there is no need to waste your time examining each book thoroughly. Skimming is enough to understand if the source works for you or not.

To get the needed information in the book, look at the following elements:

• Title Page. There, you can find all the essential details about the book, the author’s name, title, the publisher’s name, the date of publication, etc.
• Table of Contents. This part provides you with a list of all the chapters in the book. You can get a general idea of what topics the author covered.
• List of Illustrations. In some books, authors use illustrations, tables, drawings to support the arguments and the facts. Looking through them can help you see the stats or some other facts quickly.
• Preface or Introduction. Usually, this part of the book provides the author’s intentions and the purpose of the book. Read it to see whether the book’s topic is necessary for your research.
• Bibliography. This part of the book provides a list of materials that the author used. You can check the bibliography for additional resources or references.
• Index. Skimming an index is excellent for identifying where the relevant information is located in the book. It can also give you some additional keywords that might be helpful for your research.

How to Find Books: Free Resources

You can find paperback books in your school’s library or ask your professor if he can lend you some helpful resources. To look for ebooks, we recommend using one of the following services:

For more free books and textbooks, check out the list of online learning resources for different subjects.

2.3. Find Relevant Articles

Scholarly articles are essential parts of every research. Even small argumentative essays usually contain citations from these resources. Here, we will explain how to work with them.

But first, you have to understand how to differentiate based on where these articles are being published. There are two types:

• Peer-reviewed journals

These journals include articles written by an expert in the field. Another expert (experts) read the article and provided feedback. Thus, the author implemented the needed changes based on the review.

• Scholarly journals

Experts write articles for these journals. They address the papers to other academics in the same field. Usually, scholarly journals are written by professional associations or academic press.

Usually, students can use academic and scholarly journals interchangeably. However, you should ask your instructor to explain if sources called “academic” are acceptable.

Not to read every single piece of writing, you need to learn how to identify if the article is credible or not. For that, pay attention to the following elements:

• Author. Look out for the author’s degrees and credentials. Additionally, see if they are a member of any association or work at a university or official organization.
• Intended audience. Understanding the article’s aim is essential. If the author intends to entertain and inform the general public, it may not be the best source for a student. You can still read and learn from without citing.
• Publication type. Some of the ways to recognize the type are:
• Go online and read the sections’ “aims and scope.”
• Check the visual appearance. If the article has colorful images and graphics, it is most probably written for the general public.
• Structure. You can also look at the length and formatting of the article. If it has a clear organization with headings, then most probably, the piece is scholarly. Same with the size. Short papers (with less than five pages) in general are likely to be not academic articles.
• Style. Examine the language, the point of view, and the tone of the article. If the document has many technical terms and professional jargon, then it is usually scholarly or peer-reviewed. Ask yourself what level of education one needs to comprehend the text entirely.

If all of the following parameters fit your expectations, you can only start by reading and analyzing the article.

How to Find Articles: Free Resources

Not sure where to look for articles? Check the following resources that our team recommends:

2.4. Examine Useful Databases

If you still don’t know what sources to use, you can study databases. These collections contain many high-quality books and articles and conference presentations, video lectures, illustrations, etc. In this section, see how to use them and how to benefit from doing this.

A database is a collection of stored and structured information, usually controlled by a dates management system (DBMS). Information is generally modeled in rows and columns in different tables. Thus, even your university’s online library can be considered a database.

Here are some crucial tips on using databases:

• AND ➡️ when you want to use both terms.
• OR ➡️ when you can choose either time.
• NOT ➡️ when you want to exclude words.
• Type asterisks, exclamation points, and questions marks. If you don’t use asterisks and wildcards, some databases will not provide the search you need. They are also beneficial in making your search more specific.
• Look out for the “subject search” option. This way, you will search for information located on the heading field. It is possible due to a system called controlled vocabulary .
• Improve your keywords. Try to be creative with your key phrases and words. Look for all the possible ways to express your topic by using synonyms and associated concepts.
• Try using parentheses . When you look for complex queries, use parentheses. They will allow you to group terms together.
• Search for clues. Carefully look for tips and hints in the results. Analysis of the trends, indications, and numbers can help you understand the information better.
• Check the stacks . Stacks are linear data structures that follow a specific pattern. As collections of elements, they can help you with one particular search.
• Look through different databases. You can look across other databases and combine what you’ve found. The more data you will consider, the more precise your results are.

Free Databases to Use for Research

There are many open-access databases that you can use when conducting your research. Our experts previously mentioned a lot of those in the sections about ebooks and scholarly articles.

Here are some more databases that you can find to be helpful:

We also recommend looking at the available open databases prepared by the University of California at Santa Barbara and Elmira College .

2.5. See Other Websites

Besides search engines and databases, there are other online resources that you can use as a starting point for your research. The only issue is that you might not know if the information is legit.

These websites are suitable for academic research:

• Educational sites (*.edu)
• Government sites (*.gov)
• News sites (CNN, NBC News, FOX News, etc.)
• Professional, nonprofit organizations (Unicef, WWF, etc.)
• General informative websites (Wikipedia)

Of course, you can use online resources for research. They are especially great when you’re looking for background information or defining the topic. Yet, one thing to keep in mind is to choose the websites and data from them carefully.

Here are some cons of using these online sources:

• Unreliable. Anyone can write websites, and they are rarely checked for accuracy, bias, and credibility. They are also regularly filled with old content.
• Chargeable. A lot of websites are free of charge. Yet, very often, to read the full article or cite the page you need, you have to pay.
• Tricky to cite. Most websites do not have any citation tools, so it can be hard to add them as references.
• Unstable. Websites are usually not permanent. Both the content and the address change – the link might not be available later on.

Free Websites to Use for Research

Using different websites for background information search and a general understanding of a given topic makes total sense. But when needed, you can use them for actual research.

For this purpose, we recommend the following websites:

3. Evaluate the Sources

3.1. select what sources to use.

By this step, you have collected many sources for your work. Now is the time to sort through them and get rid of the ones you don’t need. Here, we will explain how to choose appropriate sources for your research.

When checking the quality and credibility of a source, use this checklist:

3.2. Take Notes

When you have sorted through your sources, you can start reading through them at length. You will still have the opportunity to filter out unneeded information. To accomplish this, we recommend marking down the relevant fragments that you will use in your work.

We advise you to study your sources in the following order:

Step 1 : Skim through the text.

Don’t immediately spend an excessive amount of time reading paragraphs and paragraphs of text. First, run through the source to identify the most relevant passages and headings. Note any words or terminology that catch your eye. It will allow you to form a rough idea of the author’s main arguments.

Step 2 : Ask questions.

After you finish skimming through the text, write down any questions that formed in your mind. Make sure that you keep them relevant to your topic. These questions will help you figure out what information you are hoping to obtain from the source.

Step 3 : Underline or highlight.

It’s time to read the source actively. Grab a highlighter or a pen and note down anything that seems relevant or interesting. Pay special attention to the passages that caught your eye earlier. Once you find answers to your questions (or think of even more questions), make sure to jot them in the margins.

Step 4 : Summarize .

As you have finished reading, write down a quick summary of your findings. Do this immediately after you finish while the information is still fresh in your mind. Organize your notes and look up any terminology that isn’t familiar. Also, take a quick look at the bibliography provided by the source – you could find something useful!

Step 5 : Write down key information.

Before moving on to the next source, don’t forget to note everything you need for the bibliography. Write down the title, the author’s name, the publisher, and the date of publishing. If you are using a website, save the URL. Double-check which citation format you’re required to use.

4. Write Your Paper

4.1. formulate your thesis.

A thesis statement is often referred to as the heart of your work since it contains the main idea and stance of the author. The writing process starts with figuring out what you want to say. State it in one sentence, referring back to all the research that you have conducted thus far.

Here are a few tips you could use in writing a compelling thesis statement based on your research:

• State your point clearly. Your argument needs to be explicit and direct. Remember that you will have to address it within the limited confines of your work. There isn’t the space to consider too many points of view. That is why your audience must be clear on the direction your debate is going to follow.
• Be specific. You have to ensure that your wording is as clear-cut as possible. The thesis needs to state the exact idea you will be exploring. If you formulate it too vaguely, the content of your work will be all over the place. Polish your thesis until it becomes specific to your argument.
• Question what you think. To accomplish this, you will need to keep your target audience in mind. Consider what views your readers must have to understand the point you are trying to make. Your statement must be grounded to those who don’t necessarily have the same ideas as you.
• Showcase a strong position. Don’t forget that your thesis statement is a reflection of your comprehension of the topic. While it must be clear and coherent, it should also advance your unique position on the matter. Instead of simply making an observation about something, don’t hesitate to take a stance.

Formulating a successful thesis statement takes time and practice. It is likely that you will not get it completely right on your first try. If you feel like you need some training or require examples, try using our thesis statement generator .

4.2. Outline Your Paper

If you have reached this stage in your work process, it means that you have everything you need. You have composed a strong thesis statement and have your notes and arguments beside you. Now, you have to put them together in a logical order. This way, your reader will see your thought process clearly.

To organize your paper , try this approach:

• Determine the research problem. This isn’t just your thesis statement but is also the key to creating your title. It is the central point of your work. Try formulating it in a single sentence or phrase for efficiency.
• Identify the key arguments. Think of what points you are trying to make with your research. Very briefly note them in your introduction. You will proceed to explore and build on them throughout the rest of your paper.
• Formulate the first category. Consider which point you should cover first. Typically, it is a good idea to start with definitions and clarifications of any critical terminology. You may also want to introduce the background of a particular theory or concept you are exploring.
• Include subcategories if needed. For now, try listing them in the form of a bullet list. The subcategories should provide the basis and support the main points you’re making.
• Sum up and conclude. Once you have created the rough draft, tie everything together. Conclude your project and refer back to your thesis. Make sure that you haven’t strayed away from your research question in creating your outline.

If you have followed these steps, you should end up with a defined beginning, middle, and end. Naturally, different research papers will have carrying outlines. For example, a term paper will have a smaller number of subcategories than a dissertation. Moreover, some projects will require you to mention your research methods, results, etc. You can find more information on how to write an essay or another type of paper in specialized online guides.

4.3. Add Quotes and Examples

To prove that you aren’t making up arguments on the fly, you should provide supporting evidence. You have to refer back to your sources and cite articles and books found during your research.

You can cite a source as supporting evidence like this:

You will be rephrasing and analyzing others’ opinions on your chosen topic for most of your work. However, from time to time, a direct quotation is necessary to support your arguments. This is suitable in the following cases:

• You don’t want to lose the author’s original meaning by summarizing or paraphrasing their words.
• The language in the source material is very effective and would be weakened if you tried to reword it.
• The language that the author is using is important historically.
• The authority found in the source will lend more credibility to the point you are trying to make.

5. Cite Your Sources

Congratulations – your work is nearly finished! You have only a couple of steps left. To round up your research, compile a list of sources you have used. You should also indicate which parts you have cited in your text. That is what we are going to discuss in this section.

Simply put, a citation is used to refer back to the source material. You can cite anything, from an academic article or book to a video or even a viral tweet. This is how you give credit to the original author for their work.

There are a couple of ways to utilize citations in your work correctly:

• When employing quotations, summarizing, or paraphrasing in your text, use in-text citations . These must be placed directly in the body of the work in parenthesis, following the cited fragment. The in-text citations are always shortened, referring only to the author and the year of publishing. Sometimes, for larger works, the page number is also included.
• The full citations go into the references/works cited page at the end of your work. This is also sometimes referred to as a bibliography. These include various features, such as the title of the work, the author’s name, date of publishing, etc. Different citation styles require different elements to be mentioned. Make sure to double-check which one your institution expects you to use.

As we mentioned, while creating any academic work, you are expected to use references. You will have to choose a particular citation style or be directed to one by your instructor. This style will be used consistently throughout your work. Each one has its specific features and guidelines.

Here is what you can expect from them:

You can read more about each citation style if you follow the links for the related referencing guides .

In the previous sections, we have examined search engines, databases, and websites that you can use in your research. However, there are plenty of other online tools that can be very useful for your work process. We are going to talk about them here.

The following online tools can help you immensely while you research:

• ProCon.org is a website that allows you to consider several viewpoints on debatable issues. It features multiple controversial topics and lets the readers experience different sides of the arguments in a non-biased manner.
• Journal TOCs is a service that allows you to discover the newest academic papers as soon as they are available online. When writing about current events, it is essential to stay up-to-date, especially concerning research.
• EndNote is a multifunctional tool with many valuable features. It provides you with fast database search, automatic bibliography, and more. Research takes an incredible amount of time and effort, and this program is determined to save you time and resources.
• Paperpile is an extension for your browser and can be installed on your mobile devices as well. Tracking down and compiling your references can become a hassle – this is why Paperpile manages them for you.
• Zotero is another useful extension for your browser. It collects and organizes your research for you. It can also help you with the creation of your citations and allows you to collaborate with others.
• RefWorks is a tool that allows you to save your references from any webpage. It also helps you import them from online databases. You will be able to annotate and highlight your texts, as well as quickly search through them.
• Science Daily allows its readers to browse through all the latest news in several different spheres. Keeping up with updates in the scientific sphere is essential for any researcher, but especially those in the STEM fields. ScienceDaily is a must-have if you need to save time.
• DeepDyve gives you access to different current research articles for a limited time. A large number of valuable sources online are locked behind a paywall. It tends to be troublesome and expensive. DeepDyve allows you to check articles for free to see whether you need them for your research or not.

Thank you for your attention! We hope that you are now feeling more prepared to approach research in any sphere. Share this page with other students who you think could use our guide.

🔗 References

• Basic Steps in the Research Process – North Hennepin Community College
• How to Do Research A Step-By-Step Guide: Get Started – LibGuides at Elmira College
• Conducting Research: the Process – Research Guides at Washington University in St. Louis
• Research Process: Select your Topic – Nash Library & Student Learning Commons at Gannon University
• Developing Research Questions – Research & Learning Online, Monash University
• How to Write a Research Question – Guides at The Writing Center, George Mason University
• Research Process Step by Step: Identify Keywords – Subject and Course Guides at University of Texas at Arlington
• Start Your Research: Evaluate Your Info – Library Guides at University of California, Santa Cruz
• 19 Notetaking Tips for College Students – Post University
• Writing a Paper: Outlining – Academic Guides at Walden University
• How to Outline – Purdue Online Writing Lab, College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University
• What Is Research: Definition, Types, Methods & Examples – QuestionPro
• Thesis Statements – The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 5 Steps to Create the Perfect Outline – Brandon Ramey, Herzing University
• How to Cite – University of Arizona Libraries
• The Research Process: How to Cite – LibGuides at Franklin & Marshall College
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Student’s internet research guide for 2024

Apr 29, 2024 — 5 min read

Read our student internet research guide for ways to search smart, check for credible sources and cite your sources.

The internet is crowded! It’s brimming with all kinds of information and resources. With so many choices online, it can be tricky to narrow down what you’re looking for.

But, with the right tips and tricks, you’ll learn how to responsibly navigate the internet and give credit to your sources when doing research.

Read through our student internet research guide below for ways to search smart, check for credible sources and cite your sources. 

• Where do you start

Search smart

• Is your source credible ?
• Cite carefully

Let’s get started!

Where do you start?

Before you embark on your research, you should:  • Ask lots of questions.  • Brainstorm and think out of the box!  • Make a list of what kinds of sites would work best for your topic.  • Break down your research assignment into small parts to tackle it easier. 

What types of resources will you come across in your research?  • Opinion : Based on personal feelings, thought, belief or anything that can’t be proven. Often contain stories and experiences.   • Fact-Based : Can be proven and observed. Often based on reports and studies. Use fact-based sources to guide your research!

Don’t forget to use your school network! It’s likely that your teacher or a librarian can give you access to paid subscriptions or journals that aren’t available in a regular internet search.

Lastly, be patient and stay focused. Search engines turn up millions of results, so it’s easy to get distracted. 

Tips to stay focused:  • Log off of your email or social networks before you start.  • Mark your place and take 5 to 10 minutes to refresh and stretch if you need a break. 

How to search smart: Start your research with a well-known search engine, like Google or Bing. Always check your spelling and be clear when typing in the search bar. 

Narrow down your search by using unique and specific words. Specific searches can make a huge difference in finding what you need! 

Example: If you’re researching the history of mobile cell phones, typing in “cell phone” is too broad. This will bring up cell phone companies or products to buy. Narrow it down by typing in “When did cell phones become popular?” Try putting quotation marks around “your search” to limit the results. 

Although the search engine may list your results in a certain way, this doesn’t mean the ones at the top are the most relevant for your topic. Sort through your results!

Is your source credible? 

You are in the middle of research and come across a new source you’ve never seen before! How do you know if it’s credible?

Follow this checklist: 

Type of website

A college or university website that ends in .edu or a government website that ends in .gov are typically safe choices. Government websites are good for statistics and reports! 

Sites that end in .org are run by a nonprofit organization. These can be good resources but may have a strong bias or opinion. Check with your teacher if it’s a good site for your project.

A business or commercial site that ends in .com is in most cases created to help sell a product. Blogs, personal sites and social media platforms that end in .com are likely to give you an opinion, not facts. Be wary of these sites when doing online research! 

Established news sites are often safe to use, but always check that it’s an original source. If the article cites another source, go directly to that source for the information. 

Subjective vs. objective 

Remember earlier in the guide when we talked about opinion vs. fact-based sources?

A subjective source is opinion-based. You may come across Wikipedia.org in your search. This is a very popular site, but the info can be edited by anyone, no matter what the topic is! It’s best not to rely on Wikipedia. Treat it like any other site, and double-check the sources that the article cites.

An objective source is fact-driven. It’s unbiased, meaning it is not swayed by a person’s opinion. Examples of objective sources are research studies and government statistics.

Is your source credible? (Cont.)

• Currency ◦ Is there a publish date listed? If an article or study was written 10 or more years ago, it may not be the most reliable. Dig deeper to see if your topic has newer, fresher information. If not, it may be that the topic doesn’t change frequently. • Authority ◦ Is the name of the author on the page? Look for the author’s occupation, years of experience, job position or education. With what organization or institution are they with? Is the author qualified to write on this topic and why? Ask these questions to verify.  • Cited Sources ◦ If you find a list of references for your resource, this is a good sign! People can write anything they want online, so it’s a good idea to check the info against other sources to make sure it’s reliable.  • Functionality  ◦ If the site looks very poorly made, has misspellings or security warnings pop up, it’s best to steer clear! But be careful, just because a site may look good, it doesn’t mean it’s always reliable. 

Cite carefully 

When you research online, it can be easy to copy and paste text, then forget to go back later and cite it. However, this is considered plagiarism! 

Plagiarism is when you take someone else’s words or ideas and pass them off as your own. There are tools your teacher can use to quickly check your work for plagiarism. This can have serious consequences, so it’s best to stay on the safe side and always give credit to your source!

If you don’t think you can express an idea better in your own words, you can directly quote the source. It’s helpful to cite as you go and keep track of what you quote from a source each time. 

There are many different formats to cite your source. Read on to the next slide for common citation styles! 

Citation Styles 

The two most common formats are MLA and APA. If you aren’t sure what format to use for your project, check with your teacher! 

MLA – This format is commonly used by the Humanities.

The core elements of this citation include: Author. Title. Title of the container. Other contributors, Version, Number, Publisher’s name, Date of publication, Location

APA – This format is commonly used by Education, Psychology and Sciences. 

The core elements of this citation include: Contributors. (Date). Title. Publication Information.

Be sure to check the MLA and APA websites for additional details. There are also online citation generators that can help you cite your source. Always remember to give credit to other people’s work! 

Peer reviewed journals or websites ending in .edu or .gov are great places to start if you’re looking for reliable sources.

They are not necessarily unreliable, but they should be used with caution. Sites ending in .com are generally considered more reliable than .net sites.

Search engines can be extremely helpful when researching, but make sure you use clear and specific wording. You can narrow down your results by using keywords, Boolean operators and specific indexes while searching.

Written by:

Editor, Broadband Content

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The Student's Internet Research Guide - 2024 Edition

Research skills are the foundation of academic growth. our 2024 edition equips students with the latest tools and techniques..

Lyndon Seitz - Editor-in-Chief

Date Modified: April 18, 2024

In today's digital age, internet research stands as an indispensable skill for students worldwide. As Bill Gates once remarked, "The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow." Recent studies indicate that 96.4% of students rely on the internet for academic research, emphasizing its pivotal role in education.

However, while the vast expanse of the internet offers immense resources, discerning credible information remains a challenge. This guide aims to equip students with strategies to navigate and harness the web's potential, ensuring academic rigor and success.

Understanding Internet Research

Basics of internet research for students.

Internet research refers to the systematic process of seeking, collecting, and evaluating online information to draw meaningful conclusions or aid in decision-making . Its significance is underscored by the rich reservoir of data and perspectives it unlocks for students, granting them access to a universe of knowledge beyond traditional textbooks.

Types of Internet Research

• Academic Research: Primarily focuses on scholarly pursuits, involving the utilization of journals, educational databases, and official publications to procure credible and in-depth information pertaining to various subjects.
• Comparative Research: This involves juxtaposing various sources, opinions, or datasets available online. It aids students in developing analytical acumen, enabling a multifaceted understanding of topics through comparative analysis.
• Data-driven Research: Grounded in statistical exploration, this type leverages online databases, government publications , and credible organizations’ resources to obtain factual, quantitative information essential for objective analytical assignments.

The diligent use of internet research is directly proportional to academic success . A student's capacity to discern quality sources, synthesize varied information, and utilize it effectively in their academic pursuits is a testament to not just their research acumen but also their readiness for higher education and professional life.

Challenges in Online Research

As the digital landscape burgeons with information, the complexities of sourcing, interpreting, and leveraging this information grow in tandem. It's not just about finding data anymore; it's about finding the right data and understanding its context .

Key Challenges in Online Research:

• Information Overload: With billions of pages at our fingertips, filtering pertinent information can be overwhelming. One must skillfully use search operators and specialized databases to hone in on relevant content.
• Evaluation of Credible Sources: Not all information is created equal. According to a report from the Stanford History Education Group, many students struggle to evaluate the reliability and credibility of online sources. It's essential to scrutinize the authority, accuracy, and objectivity of any source.
• Spotting Red Flags: The web is rife with skewed perspectives, intentionally false data, and biased content. Recognizing these pitfalls is a critical skill to prevent being misled.
• Avoiding Plagiarism: Directly lifting content from the web without proper attribution is not only unethical but can have serious academic and professional repercussions . Platforms like Turnitin and Copyscape have become essential tools to ensure originality.

The challenges of internet research are manifold, but with the right strategies and a discerning approach, one can transform these challenges into opportunities for enriched understanding. 

Starting Your Research

Define Objectives Clearly

Embarking on a research journey without a clear map can lead to wandering aimlessly in the vast ocean of information that the internet presents. 

Starting your research rightly not only sharpens your focus but also streamlines the process, ensuring efficiency and accuracy. The fundamental step in this endeavor is to define the research objectives with clarity, acting as a guiding light throughout your journey.

• Purpose: The primary step in any research journey. It's about answering the 'why' of the research. What is the main goal? Whether it's understanding consumer behavior, exploring a historical event, or gauging the impact of a technological advancement, the purpose sets the tone and direction.
• Achievement: This answers the 'what' of the research. What milestones need to be reached? It can be gathering specific data, drawing certain insights, or producing a comprehensive report.
• Target Audience: Knowing the 'who' can shape the 'how' of research. Is the research intended for academics, businesses, policymakers, or general audiences? Tailoring the research to the needs and preferences of the intended audience ensures its relevance and usability.

Efficient research leads to well-informed arguments, fosters critical thinking, and elevates the quality of academic output . Moreover, by serving the genuine interests of its readers, the research becomes a beacon of knowledge, contributing significantly to the academic community and beyond.

Choosing Reliable Sources

In online research, source credibility is crucial to maintain integrity. Choosing reliable sources ensures accuracy and validates your work to critical readers , as scholarly work depends on trustworthy sources.

• Scholarly Articles: Peer-reviewed journals and publications are gold standards in research. They undergo rigorous evaluation by experts in the field , ensuring accuracy and credibility. Sources like Google Scholar or JSTOR can be invaluable.
• Recognized Institutions: Universities, research centers, and professional organizations often publish studies, papers, and reports. Their reputation hinges on the quality of information they disseminate, making them trustworthy sources.
• Government Agencies: Government publications, statistics, and reports are typically well-researched and factual. Websites with domains ending in '.gov' or similar official extensions indicate authentic government-associated resources.
• Expert Blogs and Forums: While they may lack the formal scrutiny of academic journals, expert-authored blogs or niche forums can offer insights, especially on contemporary or emerging topics. However, they always cross-reference their claims with established sources .

Developing a Research Question

The essence of fruitful research often lies in the strength of the question that guides it. A well-phrased research question not only provides clarity but also ensures that your exploratory journey remains productive, purposeful, and focused.

Crafting Questions

Forming open-ended and focused questions is crucial. While open-ended questions such as "What are the impacts of social media on mental health?" provide a broader perspective, focused questions like "How does social media usage among teenagers in the US correlate with anxiety levels?" delve into specifics, ensuring depth in research.

Focused Topics

A research project's success often hinges on the specificity of its subject matter. Instead of attempting to cover the vast expanse of a topic like "The history of art," narrowing it down to "The influence of Renaissance art on modern graphic design" can provide more actionable insights and allow for a thorough exploration.

Guided Search

A well-constructed research question is a researcher's compass. For instance, if one were to investigate the " Economic impact of the 2008 financial crisis on small businesses in New York ," search engines and databases can be used more effectively to filter relevant studies, articles, and data pertaining to that precise topic, making the process efficient.

The art of formulating a research question is a blend of curiosity and precision . In an age where the internet offers an overwhelming abundance of information, the ability to ask the right questions is the key to unlocking valuable insights.

Creating a Research Plan

Crafting a research plan offers a blueprint, illuminating each step of the process and ensuring efficiency and direction. Given the sea of information available online, this blueprint becomes especially pivotal in maximizing productivity and maintaining focus.

Task Breakdown

Deconstructing your research into granular tasks and steps ensures a systematic approach. For instance, researching the impact of AI in healthcare can be broken down into tasks like "Study AI algorithms," "Analyze AI applications in diagnostics," and "Evaluate AI's role in patient management."

Realistic Deadlines

Establishing a timeline fosters accountability and pace. If you're researching for a 10-page paper on "Sustainable Energy Solutions for Urban Areas" due in a month, you might allocate the first week for background reading, the next two for detailed research, and the final week for drafting and refining.

Review Time

No research is complete without thorough revision and validation. Setting aside ample time to revisit gathered information ensures accuracy and comprehensiveness . For a topic like "Blockchain in Financial Transactions," after accumulating data and drafting initial findings, dedicating a few days to validate sources, cross-check facts, and tighten arguments can make all the difference.

Developing Effective Research Strategies

Utilizing Keywords Effectively

Keywords are crucial in digital research because they help filter and find relevant information in a vast digital archive. Using keywords effectively is not just about searching well; it's about getting precise and in-depth results in an age of information overload.

Relevant Keywords

Central to any search process, understanding and selecting appropriate search terms is paramount. For instance, while researching the "Impact of climate change on marine life," terms like "ocean acidification," "coral bleaching," and "sea temperature rise" can hone in on niche topics within the broader subject.

Long-tail vs Short-tail

Short-tail keywords, like "climate change," provide a broader scope, ideal for an initial exploratory phase. In contrast, long-tail keywords, such as "effects of climate change on Antarctic penguins," offer a narrow, in-depth perspective, beneficial for detailed investigations.

Keyword Tools

While search engines are powerful, tools like Google Keyword Planner can elevate the search experience. It provides keyword suggestions, search volume data, and competitive insights. Alternatives such as SEMrush or Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer can offer expanded functionalities, catering to diverse research needs.

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators act as a refined toolkit, enabling scholars to navigate vast datasets with surgical precision. Mastering these operators transforms searches from simple queries into strategic endeavors, streamlining access to desired content .

Using AND, OR, NOT

The Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT are the guardians of search relevance. Using "AND" unites terms, narrowing results (e.g., cats AND dogs). "OR" broadens searches by embracing multiple terms (e.g., cats OR dogs), while "NOT" excludes unrelated information (e.g., cats NOT lions).

Nested Searches

Parentheses breathe structure into complex searches. They help manage the chaos, allowing for intricate combinations of terms and operators, thus sharpening the sword of specificity. For example, using parentheses in a search like (cats OR dogs) AND (pets OR animals) refines and organizes the onslaught of information.

Truncation and Wildcards

Symbols like '' or '?' are the allies of adaptability in search queries, allowing for variations of keywords to be included. Truncation (e.g., teach) would embrace 'teacher', 'teaching', or 'teachable', while wildcards (e.g., wom?n) allow for flexibility, capturing terms like 'woman' or 'women'.

Using Advanced Search Features

Advanced search functionalities, often underutilized, are akin to a master key, unlocking doors to refined results. Their adept use can streamline the research process, bringing accuracy and efficiency to the forefront.

• Search Engine Features: Leverage specialized functionalities such as Google’s "verbatim" or "similar" searches to cultivate richer, more precise results. These features, when adeptly utilized, transform generic searches into focused, purpose-driven queries, offering a gateway to more relevant information.
• Filters: Applying filters like "time," "region," or "language," elevates the specificity of search outcomes. For instance, filtering news articles to display results from the past week can significantly refine the timeliness and relevance of the information retrieved, ensuring it aligns more closely with current trends or discussions.
• File Type and Date: Direct your search towards specific document types such as PDFs or PowerPoint presentations, or focus on publication dates to ensure the relevance of sourced materials. For example, seeking academic research papers published in the last two years and filtering for PDF file types can help locate the most recent scholarly discussions available in a ready-to-use format.

Evaluating Online Sources

Criteria for Assessing Source Credibility

The credibility of sources shapes the foundation upon which our knowledge and arguments stand. But how do we differentiate the trustworthy from the deceptive? The following criteria offer a guiding light.

• Author Qualifications: A discerning eye towards the author's credentials is fundamental. For instance, a scientific article authored by a Ph.D. holder with expertise in the relevant field carries more weight , ensuring that the content is steeped in knowledge and experience.
• Source Citations: The robustness of a source is often reflected in its citations. A well-sourced article, referencing reputable and relevant works , stands as a pillar of reliability. For example, a health-related article citing recent medical journals demonstrates a strong foundation.
• Publication Date: Timeliness is key. An article on technology trends from a reputable source but dated five years ago may not contribute valuable, up-to-date insights. It's imperative to seek information that echoes the current state of knowledge or developments .
• Peer Reviews: In academic circles, peer-reviewed articles are golden standards. They undergo rigorous scrutiny, ensuring that the research presented is sound and validated by experts. For instance, in scientific research, journals like "Nature" and "Science" are esteemed for their peer-review process, bolstering the credibility of their publications.

Meticulous evaluation using these criteria doesn't just elevate the quality of research; it ensures integrity, fostering trustworthiness and excellence.

Understanding Source Bias and Perspective

In the age of information, discerning the neutrality of online content is paramount. As every source carries its undertones, identifying bias and recognizing objectivity becomes the linchpin of credible research.

Bias/Objectivity

Content often mirrors the perspective of its creator. For instance, a tech review may lean favorably towards a product if sponsored by its manufacturer, while independent reviewers might provide a more balanced assessment. Hence, researchers should cross-reference multiple sources, ensuring a holistic understanding devoid of undue influence .

Relevance to Your Topic

Ensure the source directly addresses your research query. For example, a study focusing on the impacts of social media on mental health is pertinent when researching mental wellness trends among teenagers in the digital age. This focused approach promotes relevant and valuable insights, bolstering the integrity of your research outcomes.

Accuracy and Reliability

Always validate the trustworthiness of information. For instance, a claim stating " 93% of global youth use social media daily " should be corroborated with reputable datasets or studies, such as those from Pew Research Center. Such a rigorous approach filters out discrepancies, ensuring research is rooted in undeniable facts.

Cross-Verification Techniques

Cross-verification stands as a researcher's sentinel, ensuring online information withstands scrutiny and consistently aligns with multiple trusted sources, thereby cultivating a garden of genuinely insightful and trustworthy knowledge.

Multiple Sources

The key to a well-rounded perspective lies in comparing information from various reliable sources.

• When researching climate change, cross-referencing data from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), NASA, and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) ensures a comprehensive view.
• For political analysis, combining insights from The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, and Al Jazeera offers a balanced outlook.
• In health research, verifying findings from the World Health Organization (WHO), CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), and respected medical journals reinforces credibility.
• Exploring tech trends becomes more insightful when data from MIT Technology Review, Wired, Forbes, BroadbandSearch and TechCrunch converge, providing multifaceted perspectives.

Consistent Facts

One of the cornerstones of evaluating online sources is identifying consistent facts across multiple reputable references. For instance, in researching the health benefits of a particular diet, cross-referencing sources like Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School can validate consistent claims about its positive impacts. This verification approach strengthens the credibility of the information and minimizes the influence of bias, fostering more reliable research outcomes .

Cross-referencing

Efficient cross-referencing is a key element in source evaluation, empowering researchers to navigate the digital landscape with precision. Utilizing specialized tools and strategies ensures accuracy and minimizes the influence of bias.

• Google Scholar: An invaluable resource for academics , it allows users to explore academic papers, patents, and legal opinions across multiple disciplines, aiding in thorough source comparison.
• Library Databases: University libraries often offer access to databases like JSTOR, facilitating cross-referencing across peer-reviewed journals.
• Fact-checking Websites: Platforms like Snopes or FactCheck.org verify claims, helping researchers debunk or substantiate information.
• Media Bias/Fact Check: This online resource rates news outlets on their bias and credibility, offering insights into the reliability of news sources.

Identifying Fake News and Misinformation

Spotting characteristics of misleading content misinformation and fake news are rampant online, threatening to erode trust in information sources. Understanding their common characteristics is essential:

• Sensationalism: Content with exaggerated claims or alarmist language, such as "Groundbreaking Cure Found for All Diseases!" often aims to evoke strong emotions , leading to uncritical acceptance.
• Lack of Credible Sources: Misleading information often lacks reputable references, making it challenging to verify claims. For example, an article claiming a new scientific discovery without citing any scientific journals or experts.
• Confirmation Bias: Misinformation often reinforces existing beliefs or prejudices, resonating with preconceived notions. This bias can cloud critical judgment , as individuals are more inclined to accept information that aligns with their beliefs.
• Anonymity or Pseudonymity: Sources that conceal the identity of authors or organizations may raise suspicion. Misinformation can thrive in the shadows, as accountability is often absent.

By recognizing these characteristics, individuals can become more adept at evaluating online sources and safeguarding themselves against the spread of misinformation.

Managing and Organizing Information

Effective Note-taking Strategies

Effective note-taking is a superpower. It's the compass that guides us through the mystery of knowledge, helping us capture insights, facilitate learning, and stay organized.

Digital Tools for Note-taking

Digital note-taking tools have revolutionized the way we capture and organize information . Discover how these versatile tools, like OneNote, Evernote, and Google Keep, empower users to streamline note-taking, enhance productivity, and effortlessly manage digital information, making them essential assets in the digital age.

• OneNote: Microsoft's OneNote is a versatile digital notebook that seamlessly integrates with other Microsoft apps. Users can create notebooks, organize notes into sections, and incorporate multimedia content. For instance, students can create dedicated notebooks for different subjects, enhancing study efficiency.
• Evernote: Evernote is a cross-platform note-taking app that excels in organization. It offers features like notebooks, tags, and a powerful search function. Business professionals can use Evernote to collate meeting notes, research, and ideas, streamlining workflow.
• Google Keep: Google Keep is a user-friendly, cloud-based note-taking app ideal for quick, accessible notes. Its integration with Google Workspace enhances collaboration. For instance, teams can use Google Keep to brainstorm ideas, create to-do lists, and share them seamlessly.

Strategies for Organizing Notes Effectively

Effective note-taking isn't just about jotting down information; it's about organizing it systematically:

• Create Categories: Organize notes by themes or subjects. For instance, a student can categorize biology notes into subtopics like "Cell Structure" or "Genetics."
• Use Tags: Apply descriptive tags to notes. In a work setting, tags like "Meeting Minutes" or "Project Updates" help quick retrieval.
• Color Coding: Assign colors to categories or priorities. For example, in a to-do list, urgent tasks can be highlighted in red.
• Date Stamping: Always date your notes. This practice aids in tracking the timeline of events or progress on projects.
• Table of Contents: Create a summary or table of contents for longer documents, facilitating quick navigation within extensive notes.

Effective Summarizing Techniques

Efficient summarizing techniques are essential for distilling complex information into concise, comprehensible notes:

• Highlight Key Points: Identify and underline the most important details within your notes to create a quick reference.
• Use Bullet Points: Condense information into bullet points, simplifying content while retaining crucial data.
• Paraphrase Succinctly: Rewrite information in your own words, ensuring clarity without losing the essence of the content.
• Mind Mapping: Visualize relationships between ideas with mind maps, aiding in grasping concepts holistically.
• Create Flashcards: Summarize key facts or concepts on flashcards for efficient revision and memorization.

Annotating Sources

Annotating sources enhances note-taking efficiency and comprehension:

• Margin Notes: Jot down key insights and thoughts directly in the margins of physical texts or PDFs, providing context and quick reference.
• Highlighting and Underlining : Use colors to emphasize essential information within texts, aiding later review and understanding.
• Sticky Notes: Digital sticky notes in applications like Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Edge enable you to add comments, questions, or insights to specific pages.
• Linking to Notes: Create hyperlinks between notes and related source materials, facilitating seamless navigation and cross-referencing.
• Commenting and Annotating Apps: Apps like Notability and GoodNotes allow for in-depth annotations, including handwriting, diagrams, and multimedia, transforming notes into comprehensive resources.

Citation Styles

Citation styles are the unsung heroes of research, ensuring that credit is given where it's due and lending credibility to academic and professional work.

APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard

• APA (American Psychological Association): Predominantly used in social sciences and education , APA focuses on clarity, conciseness, and precision in citation. Example: "Smith, J. (2019). The Impact of Social Media on Adolescents."
• MLA (Modern Language Association): Commonly used in humanities, arts, and literature, MLA emphasizes author-page format for in-text citations . Example: "(Smith 22)."
• Chicago (Chicago Manual of Style): Adopted in history, arts, and social sciences, Chicago offers two styles—author-date and notes-bibliography. Example (Notes-Bibliography): Smith, John. "The Chicago Skyline." In Chicago: A Visual Journey, 2019, 45-60.
• Harvard: Widely used in various disciplines, Harvard employs author-date citations, prioritizing accessibility. Example: "(Smith 2019) "The Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture."

Citation Generators

Citation generators are invaluable aids in maintaining the accuracy and consistency of citations. Here are a few reliable tools and their correct usage:

• Citation Machine : A user-friendly tool that generates citations in various styles, from APA and MLA to Chicago and Harvard. Simply enter the source information, and it formats it correctly. This is ideal for students and researchers looking for a hassle-free experience.
• Zotero : A robust tool for collecting, organizing, and citing research materials. It seamlessly integrates with your browser to save sources and generate citations. Perfect for scholars managing extensive references.
• Mendeley : A reference manager and academic social network that assists in generating citations, creating bibliographies, and collaborating with peers. It's favored by researchers who want an all-in-one solution.
• EndNote : A comprehensive citation management software often used in research institutions, EndNote offers advanced features for organizing and citing sources. It's particularly useful for large-scale research projects.

These tools save time and ensure accurate citations, reducing the risk of errors in academic and professional work .

Collaborating with Peers Online

Online collaboration has become an indispensable tool for individuals and teams seeking to work together efficiently, regardless of geographical boundaries.

Leveraging Collaboration Tools

Google Workspace and Microsoft Teams offer real-time document editing and communication features, streamlining collaborative work for teams worldwide. Google Workspace allows seamless collaboration on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, fostering productivity and teamwork. Meanwhile, Microsoft Teams facilitates secure online meetings and file sharing , making it ideal for remote collaboration.

Sharing Resources and Insights Effectively and Securely

With secure cloud storage and file-sharing platforms like Dropbox or SharePoint, you can easily distribute and access resources while maintaining data security. For instance, Dropbox Business provides secure file storage and sharing, ensuring efficient collaboration without compromising data integrity.

Coordinating and Managing Group Research Projects Online

Tools like Trello or Asana enable teams to manage projects efficiently. For example, Trello offers a visual project management approach with boards, lists, and cards, making it simple to assign tasks, track progress, and collaborate effectively on research projects.

These strategies empower you to collaborate seamlessly, sharing resources and knowledge while maintaining security and efficiency in an increasingly digital workspace.

Advanced Research Tools

Utilizing Academic Databases

Knowledge is power, and academic databases stand as digital treasure troves, offering access to a wealth of scholarly resources and research materials.

Access Methods

Navigating databases like PubMed, JSTOR, and Google Scholar involves utilizing specific search queries, filters, and advanced search options to unearth precise scholarly content.

Database Benefits

Academic databases offer curated, peer-reviewed content, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of research materials. In contrast, standard search engines may yield less credible sources , making databases indispensable for academic and professional research.

Subscription vs. Free

Subscription-based databases like ProQuest provide extensive collections of academic resources, while free databases like DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) offer open-access content. Subscription databases often grant access to premium research journals and archives , while free databases promote open knowledge sharing.

Essential Software and Extensions

Specialized software and browser extensions have become indispensable assets for researchers, amplifying productivity and information retrieval.

• Research-friendly Browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge): These browsers offer a multitude of extensions and plugins designed to enhance research, from reference management tools to PDF annotators. For example, the Zotero extension for Firefox allows seamless citation management and reference organization.
• Grammarly: Beyond correcting grammar, Grammarly analyzes context, offering suggestions for writing clarity and correctness. Whether you're composing an academic paper or a professional email, Grammarly ensures your message is precise and polished.
• Turnitin: An essential tool for academia, Turnitin aids in plagiarism detection and prevention . It scans documents for similarities with an extensive database of academic content, ensuring the originality and integrity of research papers.

AI and Machine Learning Tools

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools are revolutionizing research by analyzing vast datasets, predicting trends, and automating tasks, empowering researchers with unparalleled insights and efficiency.

AI-Powered Search

Tools like Semantic Scholar employ AI to provide relevant, context-aware search results, helping researchers discover articles, journals, and studies tailored to their interests. For instance, Iris.ai employs natural language processing to understand research papers and generate connections between them and Citeulike's AI-driven recommendations enhance academic discovery.

Machine Learning for Data Analysis

Machine Learning algorithms enable researchers to identify intricate patterns in vast datasets, aiding in fields like genomics and climate modeling. Example: TensorFlow, used for natural language processing in sentiment analysis.

AI Applications

AI-driven tools like IBM Watson and GPT-4 assist researchers in automating tasks, from literature reviews to data extraction, improving research efficiency and accuracy. Watson Discovery offers AI-driven data insights, while GPT-3 generates human-like text.

Ethical Considerations in Online Research

Respecting copyright laws.

Maintaining ethical standards in online research involves respecting copyright laws, acknowledging the importance of intellectual property , and seeking permission when using others' work to ensure a responsible and lawful online research practice.

Overview of Copyright, Fair Use, and Public Domain

Copyright laws grant creators exclusive rights to their work, but fair use exceptions exist for purposes like education and commentary. Materials in the public domain can be freely used. For instance, a public domain image can be used without restrictions.

Guidelines for Using Images, Videos, and Text from the Internet

When using online content, ensure proper attribution , adhere to usage restrictions , and obtain permissions when necessary . 

• Pixabay: Offers high-quality images and videos for free use.
• Unsplash: Provides a vast collection of professional photos.
• Pexels: Features free stock photos and videos.
• Flickr Commons: Offers historical images and cultural heritage content.

Ethical Use of Data and Privacy Considerations

Respecting data privacy and ethical data use are imperative in online research, safeguarding individuals' rights and ensuring responsible research practices.

Implications of Using Sensitive Data

Researchers must comprehend the legal and ethical consequences of handling sensitive or private data, especially in healthcare or financial studies, to protect participants and avoid data breaches. Comply with laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when handling personal data. For instance, GDPR ensures the lawful and transparent processing of individuals' data.

Respecting Participants’ Privacy and Confidentiality

Informed consent, anonymization, and secure data storage are crucial. Research ethics boards and organizations like the American Psychological Association (APA) provide guidelines. For example, in medical research, patient data should be de-identified to protect confidentiality. 

Following Ethical Guidelines for Data Handling

Platforms like Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and journals have specific ethical standards for research data. In social sciences, researchers must gain consent, store data securely, and follow ethical guidelines during analysis and publication.

Engaging with Online Communities Ethically

Engaging with online communities ethically entails respecting their norms, privacy, and trust. It involves upholding the principles of informed consent and ensuring that the research contributes positively to the community.

Participating Responsibly in Online Forums and Groups

Uphold respectful and responsible conduct when engaging in online communities such as Reddit, Quora, and Stack Exchange. Respect community norms, obtain consent if necessary, and avoid spamming or self-promotion.

Understanding the Implications of Misinformation and Disinformation

Misinformation and disinformation have profound societal impacts . Recognizing their consequences helps researchers address these issues effectively, as highlighted by studies conducted by organizations like the Pew Research Center.

Avoiding and Addressing Cyberbullying and Harassment

Online harassment is a growing concern . Referencing recent statistics from platforms like Twitter or academic research on online harassment trends can shed light on the prevalence and strategies for addressing this issue.

The Takeaway

In the realm of academia, mastering the art of internet research is akin to unlocking a treasure trove of knowledge. Throughout this comprehensive guide, we've navigated through the essential principles of internet research, from formulating precise research questions to employing advanced research tools. We've explored ethical considerations, source evaluation, note-taking strategies, and the ethical use of data, equipping students with a robust skill set to excel in their academic journeys.

As students, your capacity for growth is boundless. Embrace internet research as a lifelong skill, an ever-evolving art that can open doors to new discoveries and insights . In a world brimming with information, your ability to discern, evaluate, and synthesize knowledge will set you apart.

So, here's the call to action: embark on your research endeavors with confidence, apply the techniques learned, and approach each quest for knowledge with curiosity and critical thinking. As you do, you not only enhance your academic prowess but also contribute to the broader culture of continuous learning and intellectual advancement. Your journey as a researcher has just begun; the virtual library of the internet awaits your exploration, so keep learning, keep growing, and keep researching.

Can I rely solely on open-source information for my research?

Open-source information can be valuable, but it's essential to diversify your sources. Depending on your topic, you may need peer-reviewed articles, data from academic databases, or expert insights not readily available in open sources.

What role do social media platforms play in research?

Social media can be a resource for real-time data and discussions, but it should complement, not replace, traditional sources. Use it cautiously, considering issues like bias and privacy, and cite social media posts properly in academic work.

Is it necessary to pay for academic databases when much information is available for free?

Paid academic databases offer access to extensive, peer-reviewed content critical for in-depth research. While free sources are valuable, consider the depth and quality of information required for your study when deciding.

How can I improve my research efficiency without compromising on the quality of information?

Enhance research efficiency by refining your search queries, using advanced search tools, and organizing sources effectively. Prioritize sources based on credibility, relevance, and recency to streamline your research process.

What steps can I take if I cannot find information on my research topic?

If information is scarce, broaden your search terms, explore related fields, or consult with experts. Additionally, consider adjusting your research question or exploring unconventional sources for insights.

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• Starting the research process

A Beginner's Guide to Starting the Research Process

When you have to write a thesis or dissertation , it can be hard to know where to begin, but there are some clear steps you can follow.

The research process often begins with a very broad idea for a topic you’d like to know more about. You do some preliminary research to identify a  problem . After refining your research questions , you can lay out the foundations of your research design , leading to a proposal that outlines your ideas and plans.

This article takes you through the first steps of the research process, helping you narrow down your ideas and build up a strong foundation for your research project.

Table of contents

Step 1: choose your topic, step 2: identify a problem, step 3: formulate research questions, step 4: create a research design, step 5: write a research proposal, other interesting articles.

First you have to come up with some ideas. Your thesis or dissertation topic can start out very broad. Think about the general area or field you’re interested in—maybe you already have specific research interests based on classes you’ve taken, or maybe you had to consider your topic when applying to graduate school and writing a statement of purpose .

Even if you already have a good sense of your topic, you’ll need to read widely to build background knowledge and begin narrowing down your ideas. Conduct an initial literature review to begin gathering relevant sources. As you read, take notes and try to identify problems, questions, debates, contradictions and gaps. Your aim is to narrow down from a broad area of interest to a specific niche.

Make sure to consider the practicalities: the requirements of your programme, the amount of time you have to complete the research, and how difficult it will be to access sources and data on the topic. Before moving onto the next stage, it’s a good idea to discuss the topic with your thesis supervisor.

>>Read more about narrowing down a research topic

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So you’ve settled on a topic and found a niche—but what exactly will your research investigate, and why does it matter? To give your project focus and purpose, you have to define a research problem .

The problem might be a practical issue—for example, a process or practice that isn’t working well, an area of concern in an organization’s performance, or a difficulty faced by a specific group of people in society.

Alternatively, you might choose to investigate a theoretical problem—for example, an underexplored phenomenon or relationship, a contradiction between different models or theories, or an unresolved debate among scholars.

To put the problem in context and set your objectives, you can write a problem statement . This describes who the problem affects, why research is needed, and how your research project will contribute to solving it.

>>Read more about defining a research problem

Next, based on the problem statement, you need to write one or more research questions . These target exactly what you want to find out. They might focus on describing, comparing, evaluating, or explaining the research problem.

A strong research question should be specific enough that you can answer it thoroughly using appropriate qualitative or quantitative research methods. It should also be complex enough to require in-depth investigation, analysis, and argument. Questions that can be answered with “yes/no” or with easily available facts are not complex enough for a thesis or dissertation.

In some types of research, at this stage you might also have to develop a conceptual framework and testable hypotheses .

>>See research question examples

The research design is a practical framework for answering your research questions. It involves making decisions about the type of data you need, the methods you’ll use to collect and analyze it, and the location and timescale of your research.

There are often many possible paths you can take to answering your questions. The decisions you make will partly be based on your priorities. For example, do you want to determine causes and effects, draw generalizable conclusions, or understand the details of a specific context?

You need to decide whether you will use primary or secondary data and qualitative or quantitative methods . You also need to determine the specific tools, procedures, and materials you’ll use to collect and analyze your data, as well as your criteria for selecting participants or sources.

>>Read more about creating a research design

Finally, after completing these steps, you are ready to complete a research proposal . The proposal outlines the context, relevance, purpose, and plan of your research.

As well as outlining the background, problem statement, and research questions, the proposal should also include a literature review that shows how your project will fit into existing work on the topic. The research design section describes your approach and explains exactly what you will do.

You might have to get the proposal approved by your supervisor before you get started, and it will guide the process of writing your thesis or dissertation.

>>Read more about writing a research proposal

If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Methodology

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

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Selecting a Research Topic: Overview

• Refine your topic
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• Writing help

Here are some resources to refer to when selecting a topic and preparing to write a paper:

• MIT Writing and Communication Center "Providing free professional advice about all types of writing and speaking to all members of the MIT community."
• Search Our Collections Find books about writing. Search by subject for: english language grammar; report writing handbooks; technical writing handbooks
• Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation Online version of the book that provides examples and tips on grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and other writing rules.
• Select a topic

Choosing an interesting research topic is your first challenge. Here are some tips:

• Choose a topic that you are interested in! The research process is more relevant if you care about your topic.
• If your topic is too broad, you will find too much information and not be able to focus.
• Background reading can help you choose and limit the scope of your topic. 
• Review the guidelines on topic selection outlined in your assignment.  Ask your professor or TA for suggestions.
• Refer to lecture notes and required texts to refresh your knowledge of the course and assignment.
• Talk about research ideas with a friend.  S/he may be able to help focus your topic by discussing issues that didn't occur to you at first.
• WHY did you choose the topic?  What interests you about it?  Do you have an opinion about the issues involved?
• WHO are the information providers on this topic?  Who might publish information about it?  Who is affected by the topic?  Do you know of organizations or institutions affiliated with the topic?
• WHAT are the major questions for this topic?  Is there a debate about the topic?  Are there a range of issues and viewpoints to consider?
• WHERE is your topic important: at the local, national or international level?  Are there specific places affected by the topic?
• WHEN is/was your topic important?  Is it a current event or an historical issue?  Do you want to compare your topic by time periods?

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• Information Navigator home
• Sources for facts - general
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• Last Updated: Jul 30, 2021 2:50 PM
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Expert Commentary

Research strategy guide for finding quality, credible sources

Strategies for finding academic studies and other information you need to give your stories authority and depth

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Keely Wilczek, The Journalist's Resource May 20, 2011

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/home/research-strategy-guide/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Knowing how to conduct deeper research efficiently and effectively is a critical skill for journalists — especially in the information age. It is, like other facets of the profession such as interviewing, a matter of practice and establishing good habits. And once you find a successful routine for information-gathering, it will pay dividends time and again.

Journalists need to be able to do many kinds of research. This article focuses on creating a research strategy that will help you find academic studies and related scholarly information. These sources can, among other things, give your stories extra authority and depth — and thereby distinguish your work. You can see examples of such studies — and find many relevant ones for your stories — by searching the Journalist’s Resource database . But that is just a representative sample of what exists in the research world.

The first step is to create a plan for seeking the information you need. This requires you to take time initially and to proceed with care, but it will ultimately pay off in better results. The research strategy covered in this article involves the following steps:

Get organized

Articulate your topic, locate background information.

• Identify your information needs

List keywords and concepts for search engines and databases

Consider the scope of your topic, conduct your searches, evaluate the information sources you found, analyze and adjust your research strategy.

Being organized is an essential part of effective research strategy. You should create a record of your strategy and your searches. This will prevent you from repeating searches in the same resources and from continuing to use ineffective terms. It will also help you assess the success or failure of your research strategy as you go through the process. You also may want to consider tracking and organizing citations and links in bibliographic software such as Zotero . (See this helpful resource guide about using Zotero.)

Next, write out your topic in a clear and concise manner. Good research starts with a specific focus.

For example, let’s say you are writing a story about the long-range health effects of the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant based on a study published in Environmental Health Perspectives titled, “The Chernobyl Accident 20 Years On: An Assessment of the Health Consequences and the International Response.” (The study is summarized in Journalist’s Resource here .)

A statement of your topic might be, “Twenty years after the Chernobyl disaster, scientists are still learning the affects of the accident on the health of those who lived in the surrounding area and their descendants.”

If you have a good understanding of the Chernobyl disaster, proceed to the next step, “Identify the information you need.” If not, it’s time to gather background information. This will supply you with the whos and the whens of the topic. It will also provide you with a broader context as well as the important terminology.

Excellent sources of background information are subject-specific encyclopedias and dictionaries, books, and scholarly articles, and organizations’ websites. You should always consult more than one source so you can compare for accuracy and bias.

For your story about Chernobyl, you might want to consult some of the following sources:

• Frequently Asked Chernobyl Questions , International Atomic Agency
• Chernobyl Accident 1986 , World Nuclear Association
• Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment , New York Academy of Sciences, 2009.
• “Chernobyl Disaster,” Encyclopedia Britannica, last updated 2013.

Identify the information you need

What information do you need to write your story? One way to determine this is to turn your overall topic into a list of questions to be answered. This will help you identify the type and level of information you need. Some possible questions on consequences of the Chernobyl accident are:

• What are the proven health effects?
• What are some theorized health effects?
• Is there controversy about any of these studies?
• What geographic area is being studied?
• What are the demographic characteristics of the population being studied?
• Was there anything that could have been done at the time to mitigate these effects?

Looking at these questions, it appears that scientific studies and scholarly articles about those studies, demographic data, disaster response analysis, and government documents and publications from the Soviet Union and Ukraine would be needed.

Now you need to determine what words you will use to enter in the search boxes within resources. One way to begin is to extract the most important words and phrases from the questions produced in the previous step. Next, think about alternative words and phrases that you might use. Always keep in mind that different people may write or talk about the same topic in different ways. Important concepts can referred to differently or be spelled differently depending on country of origin or field of study.

For the Chernobyl health story, some search keyword options are: “Chernobyl,” “Chornobyl”; “disaster,” “catastrophe,” “explosion”; “health,” “disease,” “illness,” “medical conditions”; “genetic mutation,” “gene mutation,” “germ-line mutation,” “hereditary disease.” Used in different combinations, these can unearth a wide variety of resources.

Next you should identify the scope of your topic and any limitations it puts on your searches. Some examples of limitations are language, publication date, and publication type. Every database and search engine will have its own rules so you may need to click on an advanced search option in order to input these limitations.

It is finally time to start looking for information but identifying which resources to use is not always easy to do. First, if you are part of an organization, find out what, if any, resources you have access to through a subscription. Examples of subscription resources are LexisNexis and JSTOR. If your organization does not provide subscription resources, find out if you can get access to these sources through your local library. Should you not have access to any subscription resources appropriate for your topic, look at some of the many useful free resources on the internet.

Here are some examples of sources for free information:

• PLoS , Public Library of Science
• Google Scholar
• SSRN , Social Science Research Network
• FDsys , U.S. Government documents and publications
• World Development Indicators , World Bank
• Pubmed , service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine

More quality sites, and search tips, are here among the other research articles at Journalist’s Resource.

As you only want information from the most reliable and suitable sources, you should always evaluate your results. In doing this, you can apply journalism’s Five W’s (and One H):

• Who : Who is the author and what are his/her credentials in this topic?
• What: Is the material primary or secondary in nature?
• Where: Is the publisher or organization behind the source considered reputable? Does the website appear legitimate?
• When: Is the source current or does it cover the right time period for your topic?
• Why: Is the opinion or bias of the author apparent and can it be taken into account?
• How: Is the source written at the right level for your needs? Is the research well-documented?

Were you able to locate the information you needed? If not, now it is time to analyze why that happened. Perhaps there are better resources or different keywords and concepts you could have tried. Additional background information might supply you with other terminology to use. It is also possible that the information you need is just not available in the way you need it and it may be necessary to consult others for assistance like an expert in the topic or a professional librarian.

Keely Wilczek is a research librarian at the Harvard Kennedy School. Tags: training

About The Author

Keely Wilczek

Research Help: Using the Internet for Academic Research

• Ask a Librarian
• Subject Guides
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• How Do I... Guide
• Information for New Students
• Evaluating Web Sources
• Primary and Secondary Sources
• Scholarly and Non-scholarly sources
• Preparing a Search Strategy
• How to Find Articles on Your Topic

Using the Internet for Academic Research

• Citation Guides & Bibliographic Tools
• APA Style Guides
• Chicago Style Guides
• MLA Style Guides
• Citing Government Information
• Other Citation Style Guides
• Annotated Bibliographies
• Writing Guides
• Academic Integrity: Avoiding Plagiarism

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• A - Z List of Databases
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• CAIRN @ MTA

This guide assumes a basic familiarity with using the Internet. For assistance researching specific topics, please contact a Librarian at the Library Research Help Desk, at 364-2564, or by e-mail: [email protected] or contact the Subject Librarian for your topic directly.

Things You Should Know:

• Not everything is available on the Internet. There may be little or no relevant information on your topic. What is available may not be as appropriate as the information in other sources. The Internet is only one of the research tools and provides access to only some of the many sources of information available to you.  
• Research on the Internet will take time. All research does.  
• Information on the Internet is not stable. At any time, information may be moved, altered, or deleted. This is a major problem when it comes to using an Internet source for academic research. Your professor may not accept Internet sources; check with your professor in advance. See "Using & Citing Internet Sources" below for manuals that provide guidelines for citing Internet sources in footnotes and bibliographies.  
• Not everything on the Internet is accurate, true, current, or reliable. See "Evaluating What You Find" below.

Finding Information:

There are two major ways to begin a search on a research topic: by subject or keyword.

Searching by Subject: Use an academic subject directory. These are sites organized by librarians or other academics providing a collection of links to sites that are appropriate for academic research.

• The Mount Allison Libraries web site has links to information for the subjects taught at Mount Allison University. Select Subject Guides , then a subject. A list of larger, more comprehensive subject directories is also available under the Quick Link: "Online Reference Sources & Quick Facts". Select Internet Search Engines & Directories .

Searching by Keyword: A keyword search may be more appropriate for a very specific topic. Use Internet search engines to do a keyword search. A selection of search engines is available from the library web page Online Reference Sources & Quick Facts . Select Internet Search Engines & Directories .

Things to keep in mind about keyword searching: Keyword searching is not the same as subject searching! There is no standard or controlled vocabulary yet for finding information on the Internet. This means you will have to think of synonyms, variants in spelling, different word endings, etc.

Google ( http://www.google.com ) is currently one of the best Internet search engines. It displays the search term in context and has an excellent results ranking system. Google has "Basic" and "Advanced" search modes. Here are some tips for doing "Basic" Internet searches using Google:

• Phrase searching: Use quotation marks for words that should be found together in that order.

(e.g. "electoral reform" )

• Multiple terms: Boolean "and" is stated as the automatic default, so entering two or more words should retrieve pages

containing all of the terms you enter. (e.g. elections reform ) However, if not all terms are found, results will display without them. To force retrieval of results for all keywords, enter each word with a plus sign (+) directly before it. (e.g. +elections +reform )

• Narrowing a search: Enter more search terms to specify

more clearly what you want to find. (e.g. elections reform canada )

• Broadening a search: Use "OR" to search for alternative terms at the same time.

(e.g. "election reform" OR "electoral reform" ) NOTE: truncation is not available on Google.

Advanced Searching: See the Google Advanced Search page for more ways to search efficiently. Consider also using other search engines. Selected subject-specific search engines may be listed in the Library Subject Guides .

Evaluating What You Find:

It is important to evaluate the information you intend to use for a research paper. This applies to printed books and articles found in a library, but even more so for information found on the Internet. Quality in print resources is often assured by editors and publishers who pay the costs of publishing, and by libraries that select the best. On the Internet, anyone can put up a web page at any time, with no control. Some web sites have strict editorial policies; some have none at all. A basic keyword search on a search engine will find them all, so you will have to know how to determine which are appropriate.

Things to look for when evaluating information on the Internet:

• Author(s), could be a person or an organization:

Who are they? What is their background or expertise? Why should they be trusted to know about the field? Are they affiliated with an institution or university? What are their credentials? What is their bias or point of view? etc.

Most, if not all, information is only relevant in a context of time; if no date is given, the information should be suspect. There may be an original creation date and a date for when the information was last modified. Each document should have a date; the date given on a web site's home page may not be applicable to each document within it.

• Host site or "Publisher":

Web addresses often indicate the country of origin (e.g. .ca = canada, .fr = france), or the type of organization hosting the web site. (e.g. .edu=educational (US), .com=commercial, .gov=governmental (US), .org=organization) You may have to back up to the home page to find out more about the web site on which a document is found and who is responsible for it. If the information at the site is not original, make sure the original source is given, and is cited properly.

• Type of Information:

Many different kinds of information resources can be found on the Internet, from peer-reviewed journal articles and books, government documents, professional working papers, and student essays, to personal letters, fiction, and spoofs of serious research. In print these are usually easy to distinguish; on the Internet they may not be. A screen of text from any of these will look much the same.

Commercial uses of the Internet are growing faster than any other, so much of the "information" on the web is advertising. The Internet is also a very effective propaganda tool; be aware of the purpose of the site, and of the document, you are viewing. Check all the "meta-data" available, ie. all the clues you can find that put the information in context or provide details about it.

More tips on evaluating Internet sites:

Mount Allison University Libraries Guide to Evaluating Web Sources a short and useful guide to the major points to consider Evaluation of Information Sources. http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/evaln.htm a large collection of links to other sites on evaluating Internet resources

Retrieving the Results of a Search:

When you have determined that an Internet source is appropriate to use in your research, you can take notes, print, download, cut and paste to your word processing file, or e-mail the information to yourself. Whichever method you use, make sure that the source URL appears in full on the document you are retrieving. It is a good idea to check the style guides below BEFORE starting your research, so that you know what information to include in your footnotes or bibliography for all sources you retrieve from the Internet.

Using and Citing Internet Sources:

All information on the Internet is protected by copyright unless specifically stated otherwise. Do not plagiarize; be sure to cite all information used for your paper. The standard citation manuals include instructions on how to cite electronic resources in the body of your paper and in the bibliography. The related web sites have selected examples.

MLA style (humanities):

Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers . 7th ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009. (In library: LB 2369 .G53 2009 Reference)

MLA Homepage FAQs: http://www.mla.org/style_faq1

APA style (sciences):

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association . 6th ed. Washington, DC : American Psychological Association, 2010. (In library: BF 76.7 .P83 2010 Reference)

APA DOI and URL Flowchart: http://blog.apastyle.org/files/doi-and-url-flowchart-8.pdf APA Style Help: http://www.apastyle.org/apa-style-help.aspx

For more information and guides to the MLA and APA Styles, please see the Citation Guides & Bibliographic Tools page.

Updated Sept. 2018 / LL

Off-Campus Access to Electronic Resources

Why is off-campus access different.

Access to subscribed library resources is easy when you are using a university computer or the campus wireless network. The library gives publishers information about our campus networks when we set up a subscription for the university. When you are off-campus, you need to log in to your account to identify yourself as associated with Mount Allison University. This is required by the terms of the licenses we sign with publishers.

How can I get access off-campus?

There are two approaches to getting access to electronic resources from off-campus.

1. Start from the library website or catalogue:

If you click on a link from the library website, such as a database in the A-Z List of Databases, you will be asked to log in with your MTA account. From that point on, your access will be the same as it is on campus.

2. Start from a publisher website and use the MTA Libraries Off-Campus Bookmarklet

If you usually start your search from a publisher website, or click on non-library links, you can use the off-campus bookmarklet to sign into your MTA account. Follow the instructions for installing the bookmarklet below. Once it is installed, you click on the bookmarklet to get to a sign-in screen when you are visiting a publisher website. You will be returned to the website and at that point your access will be the same as it is on campus.

Install the off-campus bookmarklet:

Note: You will have to set your browser to show the bookmarks or favourites if that is not your default setting. Bookmarklets are bookmarks that contain JavaScript commands, so JavaScript must be supported for the bookmarklet to function.

• In Chrome / Safari: Drag and drop the " MTA Libraries Off-Campus Bookmarklet " link to your Bookmarks.
• In Firefox: Right click on the " MTA Libraries Off-Campus Bookmarklet " link and select "Bookmark this Link" or drag and drop the link to your Bookmarks toolbar.
• In Internet Explorer: Right click on this " MTA Libraries Off-Campus Bookmarklet " link and select "Add to Favorites" or drag and drop the link to your Links toolbar.
• On an iPhone: instructions coming soon. more complicated! Elizabeth will add these instructions if the rest of the content is approved. -->

How to use the MTA Libraries Off-Campus Bookmarklet:

Click on the bookmarklet when you are at the website for a licensed academic resource for which the Libraries has paid. Every time you open a new tab, click on the bookmarklet. You won't have to log in on every tab - clicking on the bookmarklet again just extends your login session to the new tab.

If Mount Allison University Libraries and Archives does not license and pay for the content on the site, you will get an error message. This message means that the website is not set up as a MTA library resource. In those cases, requesting the item through ILL (if there is a cost) or browsing without the bookmarklet (if freely available) is the best approach.

If you have any questions about the MTA Libraries Off-Campus Bookmarklet, please contact Elizabeth Stregger, Data and Digital Services Librarian.

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Evaluating Internet Resources

Unlike similar information found in newspapers or television broadcasts, information available on the Internet is not regulated for quality or accuracy; therefore, it is particularly important for the individual Internet user to evaluate the resource or information. Keep in mind that almost anyone can publish anything they wish on the Web. It is often difficult to determine authorship of Web sources, and even if the author is listed, he or she may not always represent him or herself honestly, or he or she may represent opinions as fact. The responsibility is on the user to evaluate resources effectively. Remember to evaluate Wikipedia articles too;  Evaluating Wikipedia gives some tips.

Ask yourself these questions before using resources from the Internet:

• Is the name of the author/creator on the page?
• Are his/her credentials listed (occupation, years of experience, position or education)?
• Is the author qualified to write on the given topic? Why?
• Is there contact information, such as an email address, somewhere on the page?
• Is there a link to a homepage?
• If there is a link to a homepage, is it for an individual or for an organization?
• If the author is with an organization, does it appear to support or sponsor the page?
• What does the domain name/URL reveal about the source of the information, if anything?
• If the owner is not identified, what can you tell about the origin of the site from the address?

Note: To find relevant information about the author, check personal homepages on the Web, campus directory entries and information retrieved through search engines. Also check print sources in the Library Reference area; Who's Who in America, Biography Index, and other biographical sources can be used to determine the author's credentials.

Knowing the motive behind the page's creation can help you judge its content.

• Scholarly audience or experts?
• General public or novices?
• Inform or Teach?
• Explain or Enlighten?
• Sell a Product?

Objectivity

• Is the information covered fact, opinion, or propaganda?
• Is the author's point-of-view objective and impartial?
• Is the language free of emotion-rousing words and bias?
• Is the author affiliated with an organization?
• Does the author's affiliation with an institution or organization appear to bias the information?
• Does the content of the page have the official approval of the institution, organization, or company? 
• Are the sources for factual information clearly listed so that the information can be verified?
• Is it clear who has the ultimate responsibility for the accuracy of the content of the material?
• Can you verify any of the information in independent sources or from your own knowledge?
• Has the information been reviewed or refereed?
• Is the information free of grammatical, spelling, or typographical errors?

Reliability and Credibility

• Why should anyone believe information from this site?
• Does the information appear to be valid and well-researched, or is it unsupported by evidence?
• Are quotes and other strong assertions backed by sources that you could check through other means?
• What institution (company, government, university, etc.) supports this information?
• If it is an institution, have you heard of it before? Can you find more information about it?
• Is there a non-Web equivalent of this material that would provide a way of verifying its legitimacy?
• If timeliness of the information is important, is it kept up-to-date?
• Is there an indication of when the site was last updated?
• Are links related to the topic and useful to the purpose of the site?
• Are links still current, or have they become dead ends?
• What kinds of sources are linked?
• Are the links evaluated or annotated in any way?
• Note: The quality of Web pages linked to the original Web page may vary; therefore, you must always evaluate each Web site independently.
• Be very critical of any information you find on the Web and carefully examine each site.
• Web pages are susceptible to both accidental and deliberate alteration, and may move or disappear with no notice.
• Print out or download all pages you plan to use in your research so that your bibliography will be complete and accurate.
• Are you sure the Web is where you want to be? It may take an hour to find the answer to a question on the Web that would take a Reference Librarian two minutes to find. When in doubt, ask a Librarian!

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

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Internet & Technology

72% of u.s. high school teachers say cellphone distraction is a major problem in the classroom.

Some 72% of high school teachers say that students being distracted by cellphones is a major problem in their classroom.

How Americans Navigate Politics on TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram

Electric vehicle charging infrastructure in the u.s., when online content disappears, sign up for our internet, science, and tech newsletter.

New findings, delivered monthly

X stands out as a place people go to keep up with politics. Still, some users see political posts on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, too.

How Americans Get News on TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram

X is still more of a news destination than these other platforms, but the vast majority of users on all four see news-related content.

64% of Americans live within 2 miles of a public electric vehicle charging station, and those who live closest to chargers view EVs more positively.

A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.

A quarter of U.S. teachers say AI tools do more harm than good in K-12 education

High school teachers are more likely than elementary and middle school teachers to hold negative views about AI tools in education.

Teens and Video Games Today

85% of U.S. teens say they play video games. They see both positive and negative sides, from making friends to harassment and sleep loss.

Americans’ Views of Technology Companies

Most Americans are wary of social media’s role in politics and its overall impact on the country, and these concerns are ticking up among Democrats. Still, Republicans stand out on several measures, with a majority believing major technology companies are biased toward liberals.

6 facts about Americans and TikTok

62% of U.S. adults under 30 say they use TikTok, compared with 39% of those ages 30 to 49, 24% of those 50 to 64, and 10% of those 65 and older.

Many Americans think generative AI programs should credit the sources they rely on

22% of Americans say they interact with artificial intelligence almost constantly or several times a day. 27% say they do this about once a day or several times a week.

REFINE YOUR SELECTION

Research teams, signature reports.

The State of Online Harassment

Roughly four-in-ten Americans have experienced online harassment, with half of this group citing politics as the reason they think they were targeted. Growing shares face more severe online abuse such as sexual harassment or stalking

Parenting Children in the Age of Screens

Two-thirds of parents in the U.S. say parenting is harder today than it was 20 years ago, with many citing technologies – like social media or smartphones – as a reason.

Dating and Relationships in the Digital Age

From distractions to jealousy, how Americans navigate cellphones and social media in their romantic relationships.

Americans and Privacy: Concerned, Confused and Feeling Lack of Control Over Their Personal Information

Majorities of U.S. adults believe their personal data is less secure now, that data collection poses more risks than benefits, and that it is not possible to go through daily life without being tracked.

Americans and ‘Cancel Culture’: Where Some See Calls for Accountability, Others See Censorship, Punishment

Social media fact sheet, digital knowledge quiz, video: how do americans define online harassment.

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• 25 Jun 2024
• Research & Ideas

How Transparency Sped Innovation in a $13 Billion Wireless Sector

Many companies are wary of sharing proprietary information with suppliers and partners. However, Shane Greenstein and colleagues show in a study of wireless routers that being more open about technology can lead to new opportunities.

• 22 May 2024

Banned or Not, TikTok Is a Force Companies Can’t Afford to Ignore

It may be tempting to write off TikTok, the highly scrutinized social media app whose cat clips and dance videos propelled it to the mainstream. However, business leaders could learn valuable lessons about engaging consumers from the world's most-used platform, says Shikhar Ghosh in a case study.

• 13 May 2024

Picture This: Why Online Image Searches Drive Purchases

Smaller sellers' products often get lost on large online marketplaces. However, harnessing images in search can help consumers find these products faster, increasing sales and customer satisfaction, finds research by Chiara Farronato and colleagues.

• 07 Nov 2023
• Cold Call Podcast

How Should Meta Be Governed for the Good of Society?

Julie Owono is executive director of Internet Sans Frontières and a member of the Oversight Board, an outside entity with the authority to make binding decisions on tricky moderation questions for Meta’s companies, including Facebook and Instagram. Harvard Business School visiting professor Jesse Shapiro and Owono break down how the Board governs Meta’s social and political power to ensure that it’s used responsibly, and discuss the Board’s impact, as an alternative to government regulation, in the case, “Independent Governance of Meta’s Social Spaces: The Oversight Board.”

• 29 Aug 2023

As Social Networks Get More Competitive, Which Ones Will Survive?

In early 2023, TikTok reached close to 1 billion users globally, placing it fourth behind the leading social networks: Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Meanwhile, competition in the market for videos had intensified. Can all four networks continue to attract audiences and creators? Felix Oberholzer-Gee discusses competition and imitation among social networks in his case “Hey, Insta & YouTube, Are You Watching TikTok?”

• 15 Aug 2023

(Virtual) Reality Check: How Long Before We Live in the 'Metaverse'?

Generative AI has captured the collective imagination for the moment, eclipsing the once-hyped metaverse. However, it's not the end of virtual reality. A case study by Andy Wu and David Yoffie lays out the key challenges immersive 3D technology must overcome to be truly transformative.

• 15 Nov 2022

Why TikTok Is Beating YouTube for Eyeball Time (It’s Not Just the Dance Videos)

Quirky amateur video clips might draw people to TikTok, but its algorithm keeps them watching. John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld explore the factors that helped propel TikTok ahead of established social platforms, and where it might go next.

• 22 Aug 2022

Can Amazon Remake Health Care?

Amazon has disrupted everything from grocery shopping to cloud computing, but can it transform health care with its One Medical acquisition? Amitabh Chandra discusses company's track record in health care and the challenges it might face.

• 06 Jan 2021
• Working Paper Summaries

Aggregate Advertising Expenditure in the US Economy: What's Up? Is It Real?

We analyze total United States advertising spending from 1960 to 2018. In nominal terms, the elasticity of annual advertising outlays with respect to gross domestic product appears to have increased substantially beginning in the late 1990s, roughly coinciding with the dramatic growth of internet-based advertising.

• 21 Jan 2020

The Impact of the General Data Protection Regulation on Internet Interconnection

While many countries consider implementing their own versions of privacy and data protection regulations, there are concerns about whether such regulations may negatively impact the growth of the internet and reduce technology firms’ incentives in operating and innovating. Results of this study suggest limited effects of such regulations on the internet layer.

• 18 Jul 2019
• Lessons from the Classroom

The Internet of Things Needs a Business Model. Here It Is

Companies have struggled to find the right opportunities for selling the Internet of Things. Rajiv Lal says that’s all about to change. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 04 Mar 2019
• What Do You Think?

What’s the Antidote to Surveillance Capitalism?

SUMMING UP: As companies increasingly build business models around our personal data, what can be done to fight back? James Heskett's readers suggest there are no easy answers. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 30 May 2018

Should Retailers Match Their Own Prices Online and in Stores?

For multichannel retailers, pricing strategy can be difficult to execute and confusing to shoppers. Research by Elie Ofek and colleagues offers alternative approaches to getting the price right. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 24 May 2018

Distance Still Matters in Business, Despite the Internet

The internet makes distance less a problem for conducting business, but geography still matters in the digital age. Shane Greenstein explains why. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 12 Mar 2018

Using Online Prices for Measuring Real Consumption Across Countries

The increasing availability of big data can improve measurement of real consumption in closer to real time. This study shows that online prices may enhance data of the International Comparisons Program, dramatically improving the frequency and transparency of purchasing power parities compared with traditional data collection methods.

• 02 Mar 2018

Evidence of Decreasing Internet Entropy: The Lack of Redundancy in DNS Resolution by Major Websites and Services

Stabilizing the domain name resolution (DNS) infrastructure is critical to the operation of the internet. Single points of failure become more consequential as a larger proportion of the internet's biggest sites are managed by a small number of externally hosted DNS providers. Providers could encourage diversification by requiring domain owners to select a secondary DNS provider.

• 16 Nov 2016

Turning One Thousand Customers into One Million

In the second part of a series on growing startups, Thales S. Teixeira explains how Uber, Etsy, and Airbnb climbed from one thousand customers to one million. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 19 Oct 2016

Three Critical Mistakes Digital Businesses Make With Content

Do companies really understand the nature of today's digital transformation? Bharat Anand's book The Content Trap offers a new view of digital strategy that shifts the focus from "produce the best content" to "create the best connections." Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 14 Sep 2016

Web Surfers Have a Schedule and Stick to It

Note to web marketers: Consumers won't carve out more time to visit your site. So how do you attract them? Start by understanding their online habits, reports new research by Shane Greenstein and colleagues. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 17 Aug 2016

The Empirical Economics of Online Attention

This study uses extensive data on user online activity between 2008 and 2013 to examine the links between user allocation of attention and characteristics of user. Findings show remarkable stability in how households allocated their scarce attention over the five years. Results imply that suppliers are competing for a finite supply of user time while generally lacking the ability to use price discounts to attract user attention.

16 Library and Internet Research

As repositories of our collective knowledge, libraries and the Internet host our cultural heritage, the memory of our present and past civilizations. Admittedly, though, the cornucopia of information accessible via the Internet and archived in libraries can be overwhelming, particularly if you are just becoming accustomed to the research process.

Conducting library and Internet research helps you quickly find the information you need. This page provides useful suggestions about how to conduct Boolean searches, for instance, and offers advice about how to identify whether you should begin your research using the Open Web, the Gated Web, or the Hidden Web.

Research Libraries vs. the Web

Many people are confused about what constitutes library research versus what constitutes Internet research. Some people argue that effective research is never conducted on the Internet, that one needs access to the resources of a library to conduct thorough investigations. People in this camp argue that institutional libraries pay significant sums to provide access to proprietary databases to their customers — that is, databases that offer abstracts, bibliographical information, and, oftentimes, full texts of articles published in scholarly journals. Also, research purists may argue that documents published on the Internet lack the authority of research that is peer-reviewed and published by major publishers. Something important to consider is the difference between an Internet resource and an academic resource accessed via the Internet. For example, if I simply Google “research method,” one of my first search results is from about.com – a good resource, but not necessarily an academic resource. Although I can glean about.com for useful information about the generics of a topic like “research methods,” for the purposes of an academic research assignment, it may be wise to use the Internet to access my library’s databases (like Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, etc.) for online access to a plethora of information pertaining to my search term. The Internet hosts a variety of resources, some of which are useful for casual, everyday references (like about.com) and others which are more appropriate for an academic research assignment (like my library’s databases: Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, etc.)

Because of a misunderstanding about the way in which the Internet serves both purposes (casual, everyday research and formal, academic research) some students report they never use their library’s resources. Studies of the research processes of students have found that many students limit their investigations to search engines such as Google, paying especially close attention to the first eight or so hits on any search. Unfortunately, students who conduct research in this way often end up with sources that they later realize aren’t useful in crafting informed, thorough, formal academic research and/or arguments.

To conduct effective research, you may need to use both the library and the Internet. Limiting yourself to the library cuts off some very innovative work that may not yet be accessible for your library’s periodical indexes and abstracts. In turn, relying solely on the Internet is like trying to dig a hole with your tongue rather than a shovel: extremely counterproductive and a waste of time.

Information junkies know arguments for using either the library or the Internet are out of touch with reality. As research libraries increase the number of electronic resources they subscribe to, many traditional resources are now accessible via the Internet–although passwords may be required. In other words, distinctions between the library and the Web are blurring.

The Open Web, the Gated Web, and The Hidden Web

To conduct thorough research, you need to access information in three places: the Open Web, the Gated Web, and the Deep Web.

• The Open Web refers to the free information on the Internet that is readily searchable with an Internet search engine and accessible with an Internet browser, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.
• The Gated Web refers to information that requires a log-in and password for access. Information archived at the gated web tends to be copyrighted and accessible for a fee. To pay their expenses–including payments for authors, editors, and for salespeople who represent and market the work–publishers need to see a return on their investment so they do not simply post their publications to the Internet. Libraries pay publishers and database index companies significant sums of money so their users can access information via the Gated Web. When you use your computer to log in to your college or university’s library, you may be prompted to provide your name, social security number, or student identification number. After authenticating your information, the library’s computer server allows you to access the journals and databases to which your library subscribes.
• The Hidden Web, the Deep Web, the Invisible Web are terms that are used interchangeably to refer to Web sites and databases that contain information that can’t be found using top-level search engines like Yahoo or Google. The Deep Web includes non-html files, such as PDFs; gated sites that require log-ins; interactive tools like map directions or mortgage calculators; and dynamically created Web pages–that is, pages created by databases. The Deep Web is 500 to 700 times larger than the Open Web. According to Bright Planet, the Deep Web “contains billions of high-quality documents in about 350,000 specialty databases.

Licenses and Attribution

“Library and Internet Research” by Joseph M. Moxley is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Using Research to Support Scholarly Writing Copyright © 2021 by Matthew Bloom; Christine Jones; Cameron MacElvee; Jeffrey Sanger; and Lori Walk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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How to Start a Research Project: Choosing a Topic

• Choosing a Topic

Beginning Your Research Project

You have an assignment coming up in class. You need to write a research paper, create an annotated bibliography, or make a presentation. These are just some research projects you may need to do.

This guide will show you different ways to start a research project. When following this guide, please consider 3 concepts:

• Center your personal research interests - What are you interested in?
• Take as long on each step as you would like.
• Skip steps and repeat steps as you need.

Starting from Nothing: The Mind Map

A mind map is a visual way of building a topic into a research question .

A topic is the basic idea that interests you. This is the idea that sparks your research. A topic could be "barbeque," "The Cold War," "flightless birds," or "the common cold." If you are having trouble choosing a topic , review the class syllabus or canvas modules. Find a topic covered in class that you can see yourself spending time with.

A research question is the focus of your research project. It is the thesis of your paper or the point of your presentation.

Work with us through the mind map steps to build your own research question .

To create a mind map , you will need to be able to write or type text, and the text must also be rearrangeable.

• Start with an idea like "Kitchen Design". Place your idea in the center.

• Surround your central idea with related concepts. I wrote all the kinds of kitchens I could think of. I could have also chosen to list appliances or design themes instead.

• Out of the kitchen-types, I was most drawn to "Hospital Kitchens". I then added concepts around "Hospital Kitchens". These concepts can be moved to also combined with other ideas.

• I also thought more about "Home Kitchens". I combined, "Kitchen Safety", "Consumer Preferences", and "Advertisements."

• My final version of my mind map example is very small. Don't worry if you have many more ideas and need more time rearranging your cards and planning.

I have identified two different starting research questions by combining my concepts:

• How could hospital managers design hospital kitchens to be safer for employees?
• How do kitchen appliance manufacturers advertise the safety of their products to consumers?

Research Questions

A research question is the focus of your research project. It is the thesis of your paper or the point of your presentation. Here are some requirements of a good research question:

• Research questions cannot be answered with "yes" or "no".
• Research questions can be researched.
• A small research paper shouldn't have a research question with a giant scope: How does preventative healthcare get planned?
• A small research paper should have a research question with a manageable scope: How do preventative care programs for type II diabetes in Alabaman clinics get advertised?

In this example, we narrowed the scope of our initial research question in a few ways:

• Type: "Preventative care" was limited to - "type II diabetes"
• Place: We had no initial location limit. We limited ourselves to "Alabaman clinics"
• Action: "Planned" was defined as "advertised"

Sometimes, research questions need to change slightly after you have done some research. If you were not able to find any useful resources for the example research question, then you could try changing the scope. If you cannot find anything specific to Alabaman clinics, then you could change that part of your research question to "United States clinics" or "Alabaman healthcare providers."

Still stuck? Please check Monash University's Developing Research Questions guide .

Turning your Research Question into a Search

Useful links.

• Purdue OWL: Choosing a Topic This handout provides detailed information about how to write research papers including discussing research papers as a genre, choosing topics, and finding sources.
• UNC: Brainstorming This handout discusses techniques that will help you start writing a paper and continue writing through the challenges of the revising process. Brainstorming can help you choose a topic, develop an approach to a topic, or deepen your understanding of the topic’s potential.
• University Writing Center Schedule a session with a tutor at the University Writing Center.
• Next: JSTOR >>
• Last Updated: Aug 12, 2024 9:27 AM
• URL: https://libguides.southalabama.edu/start-research

How To Do Keyword Research For SEO

Published: Aug 14, 2024, 8:25am

Table of Contents

What is keyword research, how to do keyword research for seo in 5 steps, bottom line, frequently asked questions (faqs).

If you’re just getting started building a website or are upgrading it, you’re likely asking yourself how people will find it. Even if you’re selling the coolest, most innovative products on the internet, no one will know about them if they can’t get to your website. Keyword research is an essential part of ensuring the people looking for the information or services you offer can find them. Read on to learn more about how to get started with keyword research.

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Keyword research is an essential part of a larger SEO and digital marketing strategy. It is the process of researching and analyzing the terms and phrases your ideal audience and potential customers are looking up online to find the information they need.

When people want to find a product or service online, they generally start by typing a few words into a search engine. The results they find are the ones most relevant to the terms they looked for. As a business owner, your goal should be to rank highly for the keywords that represent the products and services you offer. But which ones are they? Conducting keyword research is how you figure this out.

Keyword research is also important because it can reveal marketing insights and customer trends, tell you what potential customers are interested in and help drive traffic to your website by curating your content and copy to this interest.

Keyword research starts generally and then gets more specific. Here are the main steps to take when starting your keyword research.

 1. Brainstorm the Main Keywords That Are Most Relevant to Business

The first part of keyword research is brainstorming the very basic terms that are relevant to your business. This general list will come in handy later when you search for more targeted keywords. For example, say you are running an online jewelry company. An initial list of general keywords may look like this:

• Engagement rings

You’ll want to come up with five to 10 terms. Since this is only the first step in keyword research, don’t worry about making this list perfect or spending too much time on it.

 2. Research Related Keywords Customers and Competitors Are Using

Now that you have a starting point, it’s time to get more specific by adding relevant keywords. You can start drafting this list of more specific keywords by looking up the search terms in your original list. The idea is to get an understanding of how your customers think about the products or services you offer and what specific terms they are searching for to find what they need. For example, when you type “necklace” into a search engine, you may find the term “pendant” is often an associated term. That’s helpful information for keyword research and a term that can be included on your list.

While “necklaces” is a very general term, there are many more specific keywords. “Gold necklace,” “silver necklace” and “pearl necklace” are three examples that could be relevant for your website, depending on what you offer.

In SEO, there are short-tail keywords (keywords with one or two words) and long-tail keywords, which are full phrases or sentences. Long-tail keywords are typically easier to rank for since there’s usually less competition. Later, you’ll look at how difficult each term is to rank for. But for now, keep an eye out for long-tail keywords, or sentences people may be searching for related to your product or service.

As you write down more specific terms, you can look up these new terms to generate even more ideas for keywords and get even more specific. What are examples of some of the common keywords that come up when you search for “gold necklace”? Some terms you might come across include:

• 14k gold necklaces
• yellow gold necklaces
• gold necklace women
• gold necklace men

This is also a good time to look at what companies offering similar services or products are ranking for. There may be terms you haven’t considered, or this process may even inspire you to come up with new terms that you do not see online. As this is still the brainstorming phase, write down as many terms as you find or can come up with.

Later, you’ll look at these terms from a marketing strategy perspective and consider which ones are worth ranking for.

3. Expand Your List With Long-Tail Keywords

Remember long-tail keywords? Once you have a list of a few dozen keywords and phrases, you can expand your brainstorming by thinking about which long-tail keywords people might be searching for.

A few online tools can help with this.

Answer the Public is a helpful website to find out what people are searching for online, especially what questions they are asking. For example, if you type in “14k gold necklaces,” you’ll find dozens of popular questions people ask about this topic, such as “how much are 14k gold necklaces?” and “what is 14k gold jewelry?” These questions can be great starting points for brainstorming blog topics or an FAQ page on your website. The free version lets you look up three terms per day.

Soovle is another popular free tool that shows the phrases people search for across multiple platforms including Google, Yahoo and YouTube. When you type a keyword, Soovle will show you keywords that are often paired with yours in the search. For example, for the term 14k gold necklace, the phrases “14k gold necklace extender” and “14k vs 18k gold necklace” come up. This shows you what people are searching for and gives insight into what your potential customers want.

 4. Use Keyword Tools To Gather Data on Terms

Now that you’ve created a list, it’s time to evaluate which ones are worth trying to rank for based on your business objectives. There are many online tools you can use to gain insight into keywords. The goal is to identify which keywords are less competitive to rank for in a search engine, but also relate most closely to your company and business objectives.

Ahrefs and Semrush are two SEO analytic tools that charge a monthly (or annual) subscription fee and provide all the data and analytics you might need for extensive keyword research, including identifying valuable keywords. Ahrefs and Semrush provide a few free features, but the main software costs money. There are a few free tools that can provide more data. Google Keyword Planner can help you find ideas for keywords as well as the search volume for these terms. Google Trends can also help you identify popular key terms.

Once you gather this data, you’ll have a better idea about which keywords make sense to focus on trying to rank for. You may be surprised that a term you thought was uncommon is very difficult to rank for. On the other hand, terms you thought would be too hard to rank for might be less competitive. This research process may also lead to new keywords you can add to your list. Both Ahrefs and Semrush , for example, will list keywords related to the ones you’re searching for, which can help you streamline your list.

5. Choose the Keywords You Want To Focus on First

Once you’ve narrowed your list of keywords, you’ll want to choose a few to focus on for your website. You should select these based on which terms have high traffic and low competition but also represent your brand accurately. For example, “14k gold necklace extenders” could be a competitive term, but it won’t be relevant to your business if you don’t sell necklace extenders.

Keyword research is one of the first steps in the process of driving traffic to your website. The general steps of keyword research are to go from very general terms to a narrowed-down list of more specific phrases and sentences. The goal is to end up with short-tail and long-tail keywords you can incorporate into your website that will help drive traffic.

How long does keyword research take?

The amount of time it will take you to conduct keyword research will depend on a number of factors, including what stage you are in your business, how thorough you want to be and whether you already have experience researching keywords. A ballpark estimate would be to carve out one week for keyword research as part of an overall SEO strategy.

Is Ahrefs a good SEO tool?

Ahrefs is one of the best tools available for keyword research. However, while the company offers many free tools, the main software may be costly for some small businesses just starting out with keyword research. If that’s the case, check out our article on top Ahrefs alternatives .

What is a long-tail keyword?

A long-tail keyword is a phrase or sentence that is longer and more specific than one word or phrase. For example, a long-tail keyword could be “how to take care of a 14k gold necklace” while a short-tail keyword would simply be “gold necklace.” Long-tail keywords are typically easier to rank for in search engines since they don’t receive as much competition.

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Leeron is a New York-based writer with experience covering technology and politics. Her work has appeared in publications such as Quartz, the Village Voice, Gothamist, and Slate.

Formulating a Research Topic

by Evan Kramer

Motivation and scope

As master’s and PhD students, we all aspire to conduct quality research. The question many of us are faced with is: how do we formulate a research topic that is well poised for performing quality research? Research topics are meant to encompass the majority or entirety of our work during our graduate career and, when well-defined, can result in opportunities to publish several high-impact academic papers. The effort required to formulate a well-defined research topic is significant, but necessary to avoid running into unforeseen challenges during your PhD. This blog post discusses the concepts that should be considered for anyone looking to define their research topic. While students have varying degrees of autonomy in shaping their research due to funding constraints and advisor expectations, the concepts discussed in this blog post account for these facets and can serve as a framework for any situation.

Overview diagram of a framework for formulating a well-defined research topic.

What is quality research?

Quality research is independent , important , and unique .

This definition identifies a set of requirements that a research topic must meet. These requirements will be discussed in more detail to orient the research topic formulation process.

Independent – Independent research can be conducted entirely by you without assistance from outside sources. While you should actively seek collaborations with others to boost the reach of your work, will you be able to complete your research objectives without relying on resources provided by others? Framing your research topic and objectives in this manner gives you protection to flakey collaborators and will keep you on track to graduate on time. For example, something you may want to avoid is crafting a research topic around the usage of one particular data set maintained by a private company. While initial collaboration talks may go smoothly, you don’t want your ability to pursue your research project in the hands of someone else!

Important – Important research makes a contribution towards answering a specific question, or a gap in knowledge, among a research community that has been posed by several scholars. You may ask yourself: if you carry out your research to completion, will your contributions answer outstanding questions posed by multiple scholars in your research community? Note that the question your work addresses may not be explicitly posed in the literature, but identifying common limitations can help formulate a gap in knowledge that you can work towards filling. Aligning your research objectives with specific and commonly posed questions can increase the chance of your work being cited by other scholars and integrated into practices in industry. 

Unique – Unique research makes a first-of-its-kind contribution. There are several ways in which your research can be unique. For example, uniqueness may be assumed if you contribute the first work to a completely unanswered question in your field. Alternatively, you may make a unique contribution to a question that has already been addressed by approaching it in a new way. Knowledge of your chosen field’s state of the art and previous foundations is useful when checking the uniqueness of your work, which can only be verified by thorough literature review. Regardless of the way your research is unique, it is important to identify the uniqueness of your work within the context of existing work in related areas.

With these three research topic characteristics in mind, the following presents a high level path to formulating your well-defined research topic.

A framework for formulating a well-defined research topic

1. look inwards.

Based on previous experiences in coursework, internships, and extracurricular activities, create a two-column list. The first column lists research fields you found interesting. The second column lists ideas that align with your personal motivations for pursuing a career in STEM research. An example of this list may look like the following:

2. Read Widely

Given the two-column lists you created, start familiarizing yourself with the current state of the art. Starting with articles in popular science media outlets can be effective for initial cursory surveys. Any articles that pique your interest should be followed by deeper dives into related literature in Google Scholar. It is likely that several of the topics in the left column of your list get crossed off quickly when you realize they no longer interest you. Continue this process until a subset of around three areas remains. Your two-column list may then look like this:

Note that the right hand column remains unchanged. You very likely will not be able to address all of your personal motivations for pursuing STEM research in your eventual research topic, but now is when you can start connecting topics you find interesting to research applications that personally motivate you. 

3. Consider funding and lab focus areas

While the research topic definition process should be approached predominantly with your own interests in mind, at this stage, it is important to consider where your funding is coming from. Typically, there will be specific fields your research must overlap with based on your funding source. Schedule a discussion with your advisor to share your topic definition process so far and ask if there are topics you should add to your list based on research group and funding requirements. Based on this discussion, add a third column to the list you’ve created that describes the necessary areas of overlap for your research.

4. Continue reading and form a research statement

At this point you are trying to iterate on combinations identified in your three-column list. You can begin to formulate an overarching research statement from these combinations. Research statements generally have the form “To…by…while…”. This sentence structure explicitly identifies what you are trying to accomplish, how you will accomplish it, and which constraints you will account for. A possible research statement could be defined with one entry from each column, or you may be able to create a topic with multiple entries from each column. In this blog’s example list, a research statement could be the following:

To enable efficient natural disaster response for remote communities by developing an AI-powered rapid response scheduling algorithm for a remote sensing satellite while accounting for limitations to satellite operations imposed by the space environment .

5. Iterate and keep track of your work

You may create a few iterations of overarching research statements like this. As you continue to read focused areas in the literature, formulate a focus area Venn Diagram. By allocating articles in your literature search to portions of the diagram, you can stay organized and keep track of the work you’re doing. For the example statement above, your Venn Diagram could look like this:

Venn diagram of research topic focus areas. The most relevant literature review items can be added to each region of the diagram to track and organize your efforts.

At this point, you are well on your way to formalizing your research topic. The formalization step involves writing research questions, drafting objective statements, and identifying your research contributions. AeroAstro Communications Lab fellows can help you with these next steps through one-on-one appointments !

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Topics: Community Engagement , Five Questions

How to Make Research More Relevant to All

Five questions with courtney beard on engaging communities in research..

Courtney Beard , PhD, faced a problem familiar to many Harvard Medical School researchers: How to diversify your research studies to make them more applicable to the general population.

In Beard’s case, she was planning a study in the general population to evaluate a mental health app she developed as a cognitive-behavioral tool for so-called interpretation bias, which studies suggest is an important factor in anxiety and depression. The app was first tested at McLean Hospital, which serves a mostly white, well-educated population. She wanted to make sure her app also worked well for people historically under-represented in research studies, including people who identify as Black, Hispanic, and Latinx.

Serendipitously, Beard learned from a colleague about the study review service offered by the Community Coalition for Equity in Research , and immediately signed up. She filled out a two-page equity-focused template describing her study and made a 10-minute video outlining her research interests. Shortly thereafter, she found herself video-conferencing with a panel of community-embedded experts who provided individualized advice and guidance on how to make her study more equitable.

Beard, a clinical psychologist with expertise in anxiety disorders and cognitive behavior therapy, is associate professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (HMS), and director of the Cognition and Affect Research and Education (CARE) Laboratory at McLean Hospital.

The app you’ve developed, HabitWorks, supports new ways of thinking for people facing mental health problems. How does this fit into the CARE lab?

Much of our work involves identifying mechanisms that keep people anxious or depressed, such as mental habits, and then developing treatments to target those very specific mental habits. Habit Works is a perfect example of that. It focuses on how people interpret the countless ambiguous situations they face throughout the day. We know that interpretation bias plays a big role in how people feel in the moment, and it impacts what they do, especially if they’re feeling anxious.

HabitWorks has been developed and tested over a number of years in people who have lived experience with these conditions. The aim is to help people become more aware of how they’re interpreting situations and consider opening to alternative interpretations. Perhaps they become a little more flexible in their thinking, or at least start to pause when they notice themselves jumping to a particular type of conclusion.

Your second HabitWorks study plan was reviewed by the Community Coalition for Equity in Research in September of 2022. Did your approach change at all as a result of the review?

Yes, it changed substantially. We originally planned to jump right into a pilot study to test our app in a general population and recruit a few hundred people. As a result of the review, we decided to take a step back and do a much smaller study specifically with people who identify as Black, Hispanic, or Latinx. We wanted to understand how they were experiencing the intervention and make sure it was acceptable to them before testing it more broadly, precisely because it had been first developed and tested in the primarily white population served by McLean. At the end of the study, we interviewed participants to clearly understand how they were using and experiencing the app.

“That warm handoff is critical. It has enabled us to be much more successful in getting people to respond to us. Otherwise, I’m just another Harvard professor wanting something from them.”

A particular concern was that the app presents day-to-day situations that are uncertain or ambiguous in some way. For people from minoritized backgrounds, those types of situations may bring up discrimination experiences or questions of identity in addition to the anxiety-related interpretations that are being targeted for reframing. We wanted to be sure the app wasn’t bringing up thoughts about discrimination, causing stress, or creating a perception that we were asking people to reappraise certain types of situations, which could be invalidating and unhelpful.

With changes recommended by the Coalition, we were able to answer many of those questions in advance of the bigger study in a broader population, which we’ve now just started. We found the app itself was easily accepted. People enjoyed using it and it didn’t cause harm. That was very reassuring.

In response to the Coalition’s recommendations, we also expanded and revamped the resources we provide to people along with the app. We added more resources around finding a therapist based on various aspects related to identity, as well as information on topics such as financial supports and coping with discrimination. We now have an exhaustive resource list that we give people.

You’re also working with the new Community Ambassador Initiative on a separate research program that uses the HabitWorks app to tackle parental transference of anxiety. What does that entail?

The community ambassadors have been helping us form connections and spread the word about an NIMH-funded trial that is testing how parents’ interpretation bias might get passed down and ultimately cause anxiety in kids.

Quite a bit of data supports the idea that anxieties are passed down, and parenting behaviors might be even more important than genetics. Some data suggests that how parents interpret threat in their world leads them to engage in parenting behaviors that teach the child that the world is threatening, that maybe they can’t handle it and should avoid it. Those behaviors can keep the parent anxious as well as transfer anxiety to the children.

We’re using the HabitWorks app to manipulate parents’ interpretations and examine the downstream effects on their anxiety and their parenting behaviors related to anxiety. Then we bring in their kids and assess their own interpretations and anxiety.

What were some of the challenges you faced that the community ambassadors have been helping address?

We’re trying to enroll 300 parent-child dyads and would like at least 30% of those to be parents of color, mostly focusing on Black, Hispanic, and Latinx families. We also want fathers to represent 30% of our cohort because they have been largely ignored in this literature so far.

“Everyone’s hopefully realizing that if we want our research to have an impact, community-engaged research is something everyone should be trained in and conducting.”

We’ve been partnering with different organizations in the Springfield area in Western Massachusetts. We’re still early in the process, but we hope to expand the reach of our study beyond the populations of Boston and its affluent suburbs. The goal is to have a representative sample from which we can draw meaningful conclusions for all groups of people.

The people we’re working with are deeply embedded in their communities. They’re very well connected across many different community-based organizations and have helped us identify which might be a good fit for our outreach. When I reach out to these organizations, I can say I’m working with someone they already know.

That warm handoff is critical. It has enabled us to be much more successful in getting people to respond to us. Otherwise, I’m just another Harvard professor wanting something from them. That’s not a good way to start.

Community-engaged research has become such a buzzword. What does it mean to you and what do you think it means to other researchers?

It’s something I wish I had learned about when I was in graduate school. A subset of people have been doing this type of research for a long time, but it was not necessarily viewed as relevant to all researchers. I think that is changing now. Everyone’s hopefully realizing that if we want our research to have an impact, community-engaged research is something everyone should be trained in and conducting.

In my work developing treatments for depression and anxiety, I’ve always included the perspectives of people with lived experience. A patient advisory board helped us develop the app, and we’ve asked people about their experiences. But our community engagement had always been specific to the clinic I was partnering with, whether at McLean or primary care clinics. Working with the Coalition has helped me go even further.

I’m eager to get to know these communities, to learn more from them, and to have them inform our future studies. So far, what we research has always been led by my team and me. I’m eager to realize the next phase of this process, to really listen to what research the community thinks is important to conduct.

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Understanding Science

How science REALLY works...

• Understanding Science 101

When seeking scientific information, look for resources that come from scientific authorities, that do not have ulterior motives, that are regularly updated, and that provide citations regarding the source of the information presented.

Getting to the source: Where can I get more information?

Your science toolkit: evaluating scientific messages.

• Where does the information come from?
• Are the views of the scientific community accurately portrayed?
• Is the scientific community’s confidence in the ideas accurately portrayed?
• Is a controversy misrepresented or blown out of proportion?
• Where can I get more information?
• How strong is the evidence?

Sometimes an article in your local newspaper just isn’t enough. Maybe you’ve opened your morning paper to a report on herbal treatments for cold symptoms. With your stuffy nose and scratchy throat, the idea sounds appealing — but you need more information about side effects, drug interactions, and the supporting  evidence . Or perhaps you’ve heard about policy changes that would encourage people to buy cars that can run on ethanol instead of regular gasoline, but before you jump on the bandwagon you want to know the scientific basis for this switch. A popular science article or an article in your local paper may not give you enough information to make a judgment and may even selectively discuss evidence, ignoring some  lines  entirely — but with a little extra research, you can do better than your local paper. Where should you go to learn more about the science underlying these issues? For topics of current research, the books available at your library may be out of date and many details are likely squirreled away in  journal  articles that could be difficult to access and interpret. In this situation, the internet is a great resource, but not all internet sites are created equal and not all of them offer unbiased explanations of the science at stake.

Here are a few considerations for finding additional sources of scientific information online:

• Avoid ulterior motives.  Try to avoid websites from groups that might stand to gain by biasing the information presented, like some lobbying or advocacy groups. It’s particularly important (and easy) to avoid websites that are trying to sell something. For example, Buyherbal.com is unlikely to give unbiased evidence of the effectiveness of the herb Echinacea. Instead you might try the National Institutes of Health website, since that organization has no stake in the issue other than helping people stay informed and healthy.
• Keep it current.  Science is ongoing and is continually updating and expanding our knowledge of the universe. Scientists publish many hundreds of papers each year on areas of active scientific research. For example, in 2020 alone, more than 14,000 scientific articles on the topic of breast cancer were published.* Because of the rapid pace at which our scientific knowledge advances, websites can easily become out-of-date if not actively maintained. So a website last updated in 2012 is unlikely to give you a useful understanding of the costs and benefits of using ethanol as fuel. Instead, look for a more current website.
• Check for citations.  As described in  Scientific culture , scientific publications generally give credit to related research by providing a list of  citations  — and that means that citations can help you gauge a website’s scientific validity. A website that provides a comprehensive list of citations from scientific journal articles is more likely to provide an accurate portrayal of the science involved than one with suspicious, scanty, or nonexistent references. As an added bonus, by studying those references, you can double-check the website’s information or dig even deeper into the issue.

As an example of how one might get more information on a science-related issue, let’s return to  our sample article  on global warming, which briefly describes scientist Lonnie Thompson’s ice core studies. Where could one find more details on ice cores and how they can inform global warming research? First, you might check out  NASA’s introduction to ice cores . It’s from a trustworthy source without ulterior motives (NASA) and was posted relatively recently (2017).  And  this article  from the British Antarctic Survey was published in 2014 and includes even more details and citations.

• Take a sidetrip
• Teaching resources

Citations are one mark of a trustworthy scientific resource — but what do these citations look like? Here are just a few examples of sources of scientific information that provide a list of citations (usually at the bottom of the page):

• The Centers for Disease Control on autism
• Science  magazine on ethanol
• The National Institutes of Health on Echinacea

Learn more about how to tell if research is peer-reviewed and why this is important from  Sense About Science .

Learn strategies for building lessons and activities around Your Science Toolkit:

• Grades 9-12
• Grades 13-16

*According a search of PubMed, 14,235 articles published in 2020 included the term "breast cancer" in the title.

What controversy: Is a controversy misrepresented or blown out of proportion?

Convince me: How strong is the evidence?

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Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World

Effective ways to communicate research in a journal article

Oxford Academic: Journals

We publish over 500 high-quality journals, with two-thirds in partnership with learned societies and prestigious institutions. Our diverse journal offerings ensure that your research finds a home alongside award-winning content, reaching a global audience and maximizing impact.

• By Megan Taphouse , Anne Foster , Eduardo Franco , Howard Browman , and Michael Schnoor
• August 12 th 2024

In this blog post, editors of OUP journals delve into the vital aspect of clear communication in a journal article. Anne Foster (Editor of Diplomatic History ), Eduardo Franco (Editor-in-Chief of JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute and JNCI Monographs ), Howard Browman (Editor-in-Chief of ICES Journal of Marine Science ), and Michael Schnoor (Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Leukocyte Biology ) provide editorial recommendations on achieving clarity, avoiding common mistakes, and creating an effective structure.

Ensuring clear communication of research findings

AF : To ensure research findings are clearly communicated, you should be able to state the significance of those findings in one sentence—if you don’t have that simple, clear claim in your mind, you will not be able to communicate it.

MS : The most important thing is clear and concise language. It is also critical to have a logical flow of your story with clear transitions from one research question to the next.

EF : It is crucial to write with both experts and interested non-specialists in mind, valuing their diverse perspectives and insights.

Common mistakes that obscure authors’ arguments and data

AF : Many authors do a lovely job of contextualizing their work, acknowledging what other scholars have written about the topic, but then do not sufficiently distinguish what their work is adding to the conversation.

HB : Be succinct—eliminate repetition and superfluous material. Do not attempt to write a mini review. Do not overinterpret your results or extrapolate far beyond the limits of the study. Do not report the same data in the text, tables, and figures.

The importance of the introduction

AF : The introduction is absolutely critical. It needs to bring them straight into your argument and contribution, as quickly as possible.

EF : The introduction is where you make a promise to the reader. It is like you saying, “I identified this problem and will solve it.” What comes next in the paper is how you kept that promise.

Structural pitfalls

EF : Remember, editors are your first audience; make sure your writing is clear and compelling because if the editor cannot understand your writing, chances are that s/he will reject your paper without sending it out for external peer review.

HB : Authors often misplace content across sections, placing material in the introduction that belongs in methods, results, or discussion, and interpretive phrases in results instead of discussion. Additionally, they redundantly present information in multiple sections.

Creating an effective structure

AF : I have one tip which is more of a thinking and planning strategy. I write myself letters about what I think the argument is, what kinds of support it needs, how I will use the specific material I have to provide that support, how it fits together, etc.

EF : Effective writing comes from effective reading—try to appreciate good writing in the work of others as you read their papers. Do you like their writing? Do you like their strategy of advancing arguments? Are you suspicious of their methods, findings, or how they interpret them? Do you see yourself resisting? Examine your reactions. You should also write frequently. Effective writing is like a physical sport; you develop ‘muscle memory’ by hitting a golf ball or scoring a 3-pointer in basketball.

The importance of visualizing data and findings

MS : It is extremely important to present your data in clean and well-organized figures—they act as your business card. Also, understand and consider the page layout and page or column dimensions of your target journal and format your tables and figures accordingly.

EF : Be careful when cropping gels to assemble them in a figure. Make sure that image contrasts are preserved from the original blots. Image cleaning for the sake of readability can alter the meaning of results and eventually be flagged by readers as suspicious.

The power of editing

AF : Most of the time, our first draft is for ourselves. We write what we have been thinking about most, which means the article reflects our questions, our knowledge, and our interests. A round or two of editing and refining before submission to the journal is valuable.

HB : Editing does yourself a favour by minimizing distractions-annoyances-cosmetic points that a reviewer can criticize. Why give reviewers things to criticize when you can eliminate them by submitting a carefully prepared manuscript?

Editing mistakes to avoid

AF : Do not submit an article which is already at or above the word limit for articles in the journal. The review process rarely asks for cuts; usually, you will be asked to clarify or add material. If you are at the maximum word count in the initial submission, you then must cut something during the revision process.

EF : Wait 2-3 days and then reread your draft. You will be surprised to see how many passages in your great paper are too complicated and inscrutable even for you. And you wrote it!

Featured image by Charlotte May via Pexels .

Megan Taphouse , Marketing Executive

Anne Foster , (Editor of Diplomatic History)

Eduardo Franco , (Editor-in-Chief of JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer institute and JNCI Monographs)

Howard Browman , (Editor-in-Chief of ICES Journal of Marine Science)

Michael Schnoor , (Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Leukocyte Biology)

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How Reddit became the most important website on the internet

I love Reddit . You probably do too.

Google suddenly loves Reddit

Ai built on reddit.

But increasingly, you may have noticed it gaining more prominence than you’d expect a simple forum to receive. It’s all over the news, and certainly all over your Google Search results — quietly going from a fledgling forum born in the internet’s awkward teen years to the most important backbone of Google Search. Increasingly, it’s becoming an important part of the future of the internet too, thanks to AI.

There might be more to the story, though, than just natural organic growth of a popular platform. Perhaps it’s worth remembering that old internet adage — if you’re not a paying customer, you are the customer.

We have some new data on the increasingly tight relationship between Reddit and Google Search.

According to Similarweb , Reddit traffic from Google has reportedly increased by 50% just since September of 2023. Meanwhile, as of June 2024, Google now represents 60% of its overall traffic, with just a third of its traffic coming directly from reddit.com.

This is no coincidence, of course. According to the report, this increase in traffic is thanks to people upending the word “reddit” to searches, such as “ Elden Ring reddit.” You may have noticed this behavior in yourself in attempts to skip past the hordes of optimized articles slathered in ads in hopes of finding a simple answer to your question. This is also a way for people to arrive at a subreddit rather than going to reddit.com.

Of course, this isn’t the only reason for the huge bump in traffic. This report doesn’t comment on it, but Google has also recently begun to elevate Reddit and other forums in searches. The “expanded partnership” with Reddit was announced in February of 2024, raising visibility with “content-forward displays of Reddit information.” At the time, Google praised Reddit as playing “a unique role on the open internet” and for offering an “incredible breadth of authentic, human conversations and experiences.”

Shortly after, it became clear that Reddit posts were being moved up and highly ranked, often above firsthand sources and reputable sites. Reddit also recently blocked out other search engines from crawling its site, only approving paying partners like Google. Suffice to say, Reddit and Google are more interlinked than ever, and that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon.

Now, you might be thinking that Google Search doesn’t constitute the internet as a whole, which you’d certainly be right about. But if you consider AI the next evolution of search, Reddit is playing an even bigger role there.

The goal of AI chatbots is to sound as much like a human as possible, and to do that, it needs records of conversations. Lots of them. Meta has Facebook and Instagram data to train from for its open-source Llama models, while Grok is pulling from X (formerly Twitter). But the two biggest players in the game, OpenAI and Google, don’t have those same treasure troves of human interaction to train with.

That’s where Reddit comes in.

In February, reports indicated that Google was paying $60 million to train its Gemini models on Reddit data. In direct proof of this, when Google rolled out its sloppy introduction of AI Overviews , it sometimes directly quoted Reddit posts — to sometimes hilarious results. OpenAI followed that up just a couple of months later with its own deal with Reddit, cementing its role in the two primary chatbots. It’s worth noting that OpenAI is also working on its own search engine, which will most certainly use Reddit as an important barometer.

As a third-party source of recorded human conversations, the conversations on Reddit are certainly being baked into the pie of AI language models. Connecting the dots, it’s not a reach to assume that Google has some ulterior motives by propping up Reddit across Search.

Of course, I can’t say for sure that the need to train Gemini is the sole reason for Google to favor it in search results. For now, at least, Google Search, remains the backbone of the company for now. And I can see the value in elevating user-based forums in some instances, especially since Google has data to imply that people trust it as a source of information.

But I can say this: as much as Google wants us to believe it makes algorithm changes for the benefit of users and individual websites, it’s undeniable that its AI model is benefitting by pushing more traffic to Reddit. In theory, the more traffic it feeds to Reddit, the more data it will have to train Gemini with.

Google needs Reddit to keep thriving, and it just so happens to have the power to do just that.

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Google has struck a deal worth $60 million that will allow it to use Reddit content to train its generative-AI models, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing three people familiar with the matter.

The claim follows a Bloomberg report earlier in the week that said Reddit had inked such a deal, though at the time, the name of the other party remained unclear.

Google is introducing a new AI-enabled tier of Google One, shortly after announcing a rebrand of its Bard AI chatbot.

The chatbot is now called Gemini, following the sequence of its base large language model (LLM). Google has also recently announced several other service updates, including Gemini Advanced, a paid tier of Gemini based on the new Ultra 1.0 language model.

Tired of hearing about AI? Well, get ready. Google is now adding generative AI built right into its Chrome web browser.

In a new announcement, the company revealed that Chrome is set to receive three new additions that will leverage artificial intelligence to simplify tab organization, enable personalized theming, and, most significantly, even assist users in drafting content on the web anywhere an empty text field exists. AI-powered writing assistance

How Google's huge defeat in antitrust case could change how you search the internet

In the most significant legal ruling against a major technology giant in more than two decades, a federal judge says Google illegally monopolized online search and advertising by paying companies like Apple and Samsung billions of dollars a year to install Google as the default search engine on smartphones and web browsers.

By monopolizing search queries on smartphones and browsers, Google abused its dominance in the search market, throttling competition and harming consumers, U.S. District Judge  Amit P. Mehta  said in his 286-page decision. Google owes much of its more than $300 billion in annual revenue to search ads.

“ Google is a monopolist , and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote.

The massive win for the Department of Justice could fundamentally reshape how Google does business . It also could change how we use the internet and search for information. 

The DOJ filed antitrust charges during the final weeks of the Trump administration, making good on Donald Trump’s pledge to challenge the runaway power of Big Tech. That mission continued during the Biden administration, which has been aggressive in pursuing antitrust cases.

“This victory against Google is an historic win for the American people,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “No company – no matter how large or influential – is above the law.”

The case is the most significant victory for the DOJ in a monopoly case in decades, said Notre Dame Law School professor Roger Alford, who served in the DOJ’s antitrust division. “Not since Microsoft lost in the 1990s have we seen a case of this magnitude.”

Google said it would appeal the decision. “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” Kent Walker, president of global affairs, said in a statement.

Shares in Google's parent company Alphabet slipped following the judge's ruling. They closed down nearly 5% Monday, part of a broader tech stock selloff .

If upheld, the decision will be a “major boost” for other antitrust cases pending against Google as well as other major tech players like Amazon, Apple and Meta, said Loyola University Chicago School of Law professor Spencer Weber Waller.

Monday’s ruling did not include remedies. Remedies will be decided separately, likely after an appeal. One remedy could see Google losing its ability to strike device deals that have helped make its search engine so ubiquitous.

Devising the right remedy is critical to restoring competition to the marketplace, Waller said.

“There are no fines or monetary penalties in these types of cases, but the court will have to decide whether Google should be broken up in some way. More likely, it will order Google to eliminate the exclusive contracts and licensing restrictions that have reinforced its monopoly position for years,” he said.

Google has argued that its distribution deals are common in the business world. It pays for its search engine to be on phones the way a food manufacturer pays to promote its products at eye level in a grocery store aisle. 

The way Google sees it, if you don’t like Google, you can switch the default search engine on your device. But people don’t switch, Google says, because they prefer Google. 

If Google was not the default search engine on so many devices, would consumers still use it for 90% of web searches?

During the 10-week trial, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that Google’s unchallenged dominance created a “Google web.”

“You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth and you search on Google,” Nadella said at one point in his testimony. “Everybody talks about the open web, but there is really the Google web.”

Nadella has expressed concern that Microsoft’s disadvantage would increase as artificial intelligence becomes a major component of search.

In a research note Monday, Baird Equity Research senior analyst Colin Sebastian pointed to a range of tactics Google's arch-competitor Microsoft has used to grow the market share of its Bing search engine over the years, from paying users to use its search engine to embedding it in Office.

“People clearly prefer Google to Bing,” Sebastian said.

Chamber of Progress CEO Adam Kovacevich said Monday's ruling hands Microsoft an unearned boost.

“The biggest winner from today's ruling isn't consumers or little tech, it’s Microsoft,” Kovacevich said in a statement. “Microsoft has underinvested in search for decades, but today’s ruling opens the door to a court mandate of default deals for Bing. That’s a slap in the face to consumers who chose Google because they think it’s the best.”