Finding
high-quality Web sources for academic papers
College-level
research assignments usually require that students find academic
sources. Such sources typically have at least some of the following
characteristics:
**They
are written by people with special expertise on the subject,
such as academics.
**They have been meticulously researched
and thought out.
**They have been reviewed by individuals
who are also knowledgeable about the subject.
**They are written for an educated
audience rather than for the man on the street.
**They are generally lengthy and
substantive.
**They have bibliographies of additional
sources on the topic and a profile of the author(s).
Finding
these sources on the Web is particularly challenging because information
on the Web is not evaluated before it is published, and nobody
oversees this publishing medium. There is a great deal of high-quality
material on the Web, and this section of the tutorial will describe
strategies for finding it. Begin by searching the Web-based databases
to which Moravian subscribes
(see
Section 5 of the tutorial to learn how
to do this) because the material you'll find on databases has
already been reviewed. Learn strategies for evaluating information
on the free Web by clicking on next.
