Using the Internet for Research Angela Benson, Assistant Professor University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign March 17, 2005

2 Agenda Searching Researching Citing Information Collecting Data

3 Searching Activity How tall was the World Trade Center? What percent of Illinois residents fell below the poverty level in 2000? Was President Clinton impeached? How is breast cancer treated? Your question--

4 Search Strategy Questions What do you want to know? What are the key concepts or topics? What keywords define those concepts/topics? (include synonyms) What is the relationship between the keywords? How does the search tool you’re using require you to specify that relationship?

5 Searching  Google:  Askjeeves: Evaluating sites  Purpose  Author, Publisher  Intended Audience  Perspective  Currency  Accuracy  Links

6 Researching Invisible Web at web.net/ web.net/ Librarians at Infomine: UI Library Online at

7 Citing Information Style Guides  APA at  Georgetown at  Dartmouth at ml ml Citation Managers  EndNote at  RefWorks at  Article about the two

8 Citing Information Plagiarism  Using ideas and expressions without citing the source Why it’s easier on the Web  Copy-and-paste  Buying papers online Identifying it  Plagiarism at HTML (p. 7,8) More information  Duke U. at

9 Collecting Data Ethical and Legal Aspects of Human Subjects Research in Cyberspace  Surveys  UIUC Web Services  Survey Monkey Interviews, Focus groups, Journals  Blogger  , bulletin board, mailing lists

10 Tutorials for further study Berkeley at uides/Internet/FindInfo.html uides/Internet/FindInfo.html Albany at