Scholarly Search Engines
Library book collections, peer-reviewed journals and online databases provide quality access to scholarly information, but the Internet also offers some reliable resources for academic research, including search engines tailored to scholars, as well as searchable directories of digital collections. Check out the following sites to supplement the scholarly material you have found in the library. See Website Evaluation 101 below for more help on using information from the web.
|
Google Scholar |
A good starting point for citations, abstracts and some full text, including journal articles, theses and dissertations, books and meeting abstracts. Includes linked citation statistics for some works and preferences can be set to show items that may be available in the UR collection. Advanced search function retrieves by author, publication source, date or specific subject areas. |
|
Google Books |
Search previews of books and some full text of out-of-copyright titles. Search terms are highlighted in results. |
|
INFOMINE |
Over 35,000 Internet resources suitable for scholarly research, compiled by librarians. |
|
Librarians' Internet Index |
A searchable, annotated subject directory to more than 20,000 web resources selected and evaluated by librarians. |
|
A Guide to Digital Collections |
University of New Hampshire searchable directory to over 500 collections, annotated and organized by subject. |
|
OAIster |
Catalog created by the University of Michigan with links to full text, image, audio, video and dataset digital collections. Sorts results by data contributor. |
|
Digital Collections Online |
Links to digital collections worldwide from the University of Connecticut. |
|
UNESCO/IFLA Directory of Digitized Collections |
Guide to ongoing worldwide digitization projects and over 200 digital collections on subjects from art to World War II. |
|
Digital Collections Registry |
Includes the option to browse by a variety of groupings, from the Digital Library Federation and the University of Illinois. |
|
Million Book Collection, Universal Digital Library |
Ongoing global book-digitization project from Carnegie Mellon University, with advanced search options. |
Website Evaluation
On the World Wide Web, scholarly researchers face the challenge of navigating and extracting useable information from over 100 million indexed sites and over 46 billion pages. Here are some signs of a good scholarly web resource:
|
Trusted URLs |
.edu, .gov, .mil contain the most reliable and unbiased info |
|
Authority |
Look for the author's name, credentials and affiliation to give clues to the contents' quality and objectivity. You should expect the same information quality from a web page as you would from a scholarly print or database source. For pages authored by organizations, look for the site's "About Us" section. |
|
Currency |
When was the page created or last updated? |
|
Bibliography |
Sources used for the page should be cited and working links provided for more information on the topic. |
|
Accuracy |
Trustworthy sites should not have spelling, grammatical or factual errors. |
For more information, see:
Wake Forest University - http://zsr.wfu.edu/research/guides/web/eval.html
UC Berkeley - http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html
