Internet searches

Ross Woods, rev. 2020-23

Internet searches are compulsory for serious work nowadays. Some excellent material is only available on the Internet. An Internet search could also stimulate your thinking on possible topics.

The Internet has so much information that an ordinary search will flood you with stuff. But don’t accept everything that comes onto your screen—many websites contain material that is little more than advertising, poorly edited articles by amateurs and cranks, or material that isn’t valuable enough to sell for money.

It is much more difficult to find the right needles in the haystack. The most obvious way is to use a search engine to find items for you. Google is now the most popular, but consider others as well.

Google Advanced Search

Google has an advanced search feature that allows you to specify what you want quite precisely with all sorts of parameters. (google.com > Settings > Advanced search). Type in a phrase that will identify the exact topic and see what you get. You can also search your results if you want. If you don’t like the results, type another variation into one of the search boxes.

It is a Boolean search, where you specific exactly what you want, using parameters like these:
• All the following …
• But none of the following …
• This exact text (sequence of characters) …
• from this website …

Advanced search has two other particular advantages:

Websites of legitimate educational institutions usually have suffixes like .edu .edu.au .edu.ca or ac.uk depending on the country of location. They usually have better information on any serious academic topic. You might also consider government websites (e.g. .gov the US, .gov.au Australia). Google’s advanced search allows you to search these specifically by providing a box to type in a website but you only provde the suffix.
If you find an item but getting a copy requires payment, try searching for it on Advanced Search. (Some authors also post their research on other sites where it is available for free.)

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a specialised search engine that searches only legitimate academic sources. Link opens new window: scholar.google.com.

Which other journal databases will you use?

You might be able to find enough information on the free databases and repositories, such as ERIC, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Core, JSTOR, Researchgate, and Academia. However, many “free” journals have limits on free content. For example, they might allow only free electronic access to the abstract or to older issues. If the content is not free, they usually charge a fee to download a soft copy in .pdf, and always charge fees for hard copies. If the item is directly relevant to your topic, you might need to pay for a copy or get your libarian to get it for you.

Many institutions gain access through online systems such as LIRN and EBSCO. These provide access to non-free resources. Typically, the student’s institution pays a subscription fee so that its students have access and pay no extra fee.

Book repositories

The internet has only one repository of current copyrighted books: Google Books. It is free to use, but the record for a book normally has only a limited number of pages. The internet also has many repositories of old books and items that are out of copyright, but they will generally not be helpful to researchers needing current information.

Dissertation repositories

The internet has many respositories of dissertations and they are free to download even though they are normally copyrighted. Many universities have their own repositories but a search engine is the only way to find them on the university website. These repositories sometimes also contain the research of the university's academic staff.

How search engines display results

Many internet searches produce thousands of hits. To make your reading time efficient, notice that many search engines list papers in a particular order:

In commercial search engines, the items are the top of the list are just advertisements. Ignore them.
The next group in commercial search engines are hits that people have paid to have higher on the list. They might be useful.
The next group are the most valuable; they represent all or most of your keywords.
Items in the next group after that are much less valuable; they represent fewer key words. You can quickly check the titles, because you might find some that are useful.
The last group represent fewer of your keywords, and any connection to your topic becomes increasingy oblique. Items in this group might be useless.

Searching

Here's how to select only the most relevant papers:

Based on what you know of your topic or area of interest so far, choose 5 or 6 key words that represent it.
Go to your search engine (e.g., Google Scholar) and type in those key words. Hit return. It will give a list of article titles.
Look though the topics and find titles of articles that interest you. Titles normally represent the topic contents very well, so a title will give you a good idea of the whole article. You might find that some titles will not be relevant to your topic.
Click on the articles that you like best.
Read the abstract next. It is a summary placed at the beginning of each article, and will tell you more what the paper is about.
If the abstract shows that it is useful, read the introduction and then the findings. If that is all good, you have a source. You should also skim-read the rest of the article; it will usually have a series of section headings that represent the outline.
If it is not relevant to your purpose, don't waste time on it, even if it's interesting. Move on quickly.
If it could be relevant, keep a record of it so you can find it again. Download a copy if copyright allows it, even if it is not useful now.
If it is relevant:

Download a copy if copyright allows it.
Decide exactly how it is relevant, that is, to which particular aspect of your task it relates.
Read the whole article carefully and make notes of your thoughts and comments in whole sentences, so you will understand them later on. (You don't want to go back to them later on and think “What did I mean by that?”) if you make notes on a scrap of paper, put them into your word processor document. Perhaps most of your time should be spent thinking about the significant matters relevant to your topic, not in the mechanical procedure of searching.
Put the bibliographic details into your word processor document. This is often just a copy and paste because many journals have it ready to go.
Check for assumptions. Do you want to make the same assumptions?
Check for references to other publications; you might get some good leads.
Check the methodology, which should be described in enough detail for someone else to replicate it. It is especially useful when researchers have adapted a methodology for a specific set of circumstances.

Take initiative

Take initiative beyond simple searches. For example:

Try again with different key words, or the same key words in different order. Your searches so far might also indicate other key words or concepts.
Try advanced searches with different key words, different combinations of search words, and different selection criteria.
Bibliographies of the most helpful articles will give you specific titles to search for and enough information to find them.
You might also notice that some names keep appearing many times, so search them too.
Look in different places. Search relevant databases on the Internet, not just the Internet itself. (It is usually a mistake to think that one search engine will cover everything.)
Follow up networks of links.
Do further searches of items mentioned in websites.
Search Wikipedia. Don't use the Wikipedia article, but look in the footnotes for references. They frequently have hyperlinks to the original source.

When you think you have finished, make sure that you have covered all main local websites, all sites recommended by the institution, and a representative sample of international websites.