The Modified Research Paper Part Three: Doing the Research

How to Do the Research In this essay, you should have a minimum of five substantive and credible sources:

Informal Research What is informal research? – For this assignment, it’s research you find on the Internet, by using a popular browser like Google or Yahoo! Why is it called “informal”? – The Internet is completely open and unedited, which means that anybody can publish anything, no matter how stupid, poorly done, or erroneous Why are we even using the Internet if it’s such an academically poor source of information? – Everybody uses the Internet, and it’s important to learn how to judge whether or not a source on the Internet is credible and worth using.

How to do Informal Research Choose a search engine – It’s a good idea to do the same search using different search engines – Different search engines return different results

Informal Research: Choose a Search Engine General – Google – Ask.com – Live Search – Yahoo Metasearch ( search multiple search engines from same website) – Dogpile Dogpile – Excite – Mamma – Metacrawler – WebCrawler – Clusty Clusty Use These for More Formal Research – Intute—education and research sources Intute – Infomine—scholarly Internet resource collections Infomine – Librarians Internet Index— selected by librarians Librarians Internet Index – Google Scholar—uses Google to search scholarly documents Google Scholar – Scirus—scientific journals Scirus

It’s a good idea to be as specific as possible when you enter your search term. Compare the results between the general “claymation” on the next page...

...with the more specific results from “how to do claymation” as a search term on the next page.

If the intention of the search is to learn how to do claymation, the more specific search term yields better results.

How to do Informal Research Choose a search engine – It’s a good idea to do the same search using different search engines – Different search engines return different results Assess your sources to see if they’re credible – Anybody can publish anything on the Internet, so you have to make sure that your sources are good ones

What Defines a Credible Internet Source? Is there a named author with credentials? – If there’s no author, is it published by a credible source, i.e., The American Cancer Society? Who published the article? – Is the article published by a reputable source or is it a personal page published by an individual? What’s the bias of the information? – Does this document reside on the Web server of an organization that has a political or philosophical agenda? Is the author knowledgeable? – Does the article include a bibliography or otherwise indicate knowledge of other people’s work on the subject? Is the data verifiable? – If you see the same information on more than one webpage, it’s probably accurate Is the information current? – Are there dates on the page indicating when it was written or last updated? Does the page contain a lot of information with links to other information?

As you come across informal sources that you want to use Save them to your favorites, bookmark them, and/or print them out so that you can refer to them later; Make sure that you have the following information, if it exists – The author’s name; – The name of the article – The publisher – The date the article was published or updated or the copyright date of the article – The article’s URL You’ll need all of this information for your works cited page