This week I will discuss tips to help make searching and researching more effective and efficient. As a college student, you can become overwhelmed with a task or an assignment; however, using these tips will help alleviate some of that stress. First, it is necessary to list the goals of your research. This can be based off the prompt of your paper or the questions you must address. It is also important to understand all the tools the internet provides to help assist your research. For example Google allows you to make an advanced search where it will limit your search results by date, website type, and language. By putting a phrase in quotations it limits your search to those exact words; placing “AND” in-between two words guarantees it will produces results with both words. These tips or “Boolean logic” help eliminate useless information and sites. In other words, you get more precise results. The following video explains “Boolean Logic”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sQCBT0lfH-o
Now for the topic of sources. My favorite site to use in helping to understand research papers and citing sources is: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/658/01/ . It is important to evaluate your sources by examining three categories: reliability, quality, and utility. The E-Learning Companion explains these categories fully posing questions to help guide in your analysis of the source (pg. 67-72). If you are writing an academic paper that needs to cite scholarly and peer reviewed sources, I suggest university libraries and Google scholar. I also suggest you again refer to Purdue Owl on how to cite sources. Many articles will have an export citation link allowing you to load the information to sites such as http://www.easybib.com/. By applying these tips, your research will become more focused yielding reliable, high quality sources; all of which help create a research paper that will make you proud!