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ENC 1102 - Nolasco (Ybor City): Smart Googling

Resources for your research paper.

Google tips and specialized searching

Google Web Search

Here are tips for how to Search on Google. 

Google pages for advanced search, videos, and images are linked below:

Website Evaluation tools

Think carefully about the sources you are finding and using. Here are some tools that can help:

C for Currency

Currency - How recent is the information?

R for Reliability

Reliability - What kind of information is included in the resource? Is it balanced? Does the creator provide references or sources for data or quotations?

A for Authority

Authority - Who is the creator or author? Who is the publisher or sponsor? What is the author's or publisher's interest (if any) in this information?

A for Accuracy

Accuracy - Is the content readable? Is the content truthful? Is the content correct?

P for Purpose/Point of View

  • Purpose/Point of View - Is this fact or opinion? Is the creator/author trying to sell you something; persuade you about something?

What about Wikipedia?

Wikipedia... helpful, but not perfect!  

Cohen, Noah. (2021, November).   A war of one's own.  WIRED.  "Ksenia Coffman made it her mission to fix how Nazi history is told on Wikipedia. She soon faced a blitzkrieg of opposition"  
 

 

A research article about Wikipedia and disinformation: 

  • Kumar, Srijan, Robert West, and Jure Leskovec. "Disinformation on the Web: Impact, Characteristics, and Detection of Wikipedia Hoaxes." Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 2016. [Available at http://cs.umd.edu/~srijan/pubs/hoax-www16.pdf]

What about Wikipedia?

Wikipedia can give you quick background for your own knowledge and help you orient yourself to a topic if you know nothing about it

You may get ideas for search terms and key words to use in library tools.

While in most cases professors will not accept a Wikipedia entry as a cited source, the links at the end of it (pointing to sources that editors used) may lead you to citable sources.