Online tools

You can find a variety of reliable resources using online tools such as directories, digital archives, government and news sites, blogs, and wikis.

Directories

If you want to find good resources on topics too broad for a search engine, try a directory. Unlike search engines, directories are put together by information specialists who choose reputable sites and arrange them by topic: education, health, politics, and so on. Try the following directories for scholarly research.

Internet Scout Project: http://scout.wisc.edu/Archives

Librarian’s Internet Index: http://www.lii.org

Open Directory Project: http://dmoz.org

WWW Virtual Library: http://www.vlib.org

Digital archives

Archives are a good place to find primary sources: the texts of poems, books, speeches, and historically significant documents; photographs; and political cartoons. The materials in these sites are usually limited to official documents and older works because of copyright laws.

American Memory: http://memory.loc.gov

Avalon Project: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/default.asp

Eurodocs: http://eudocs.lib.byu.edu

Google Books: http://books.google.com

Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com

The Making of America: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moagrp

The New York Public Library Digital Collections: http://www.nypl.org/digital

Online Books Page: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books

Government sites

Many government agencies at every level provide online information. Government-maintained sites include resources such as legal texts, facts and statistics, government reports, and searchable reference databases. Here are just a few government sites.

Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov

Fedstats: http://fedstats.sites.usa.gov/

GPO Access: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/

United Nations: http://www.un.org

University of Michigan Documents Center:http://www.lib.umich.edu/m/moagrp

News sites

Many news organizations offer up-to-date information on the Web. Some require registration and may charge fees for some articles (your library may provide access at no charge). The following news sites offer many free resources.

BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk

Google News: http://news.google.com

New York Times: http://nytimes.com

Reuters: http://www.reuters.com

Blogs

The following Web sites can lead you to a wide range of blogs.

Academic Blog Portal: http://academicblogs.org

Google Blog Search: http://www.google.com/blogsearch

Science Blogs: http://scienceblogs.com

Technorati: http://technorati.com

Wikis

A wiki is a collaborative Web site with many contributors and with content that may change frequently. Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org), the collaborative online encyclopedia, is one of the most frequently consulted wikis. Though Wikipedia articles are not typically cited as sources in college-level papers, they can be a useful starting place. In addition to laying out basic background information, most Wikipedia articles cite references that may be worth pursuing for your research and give suggestions for further reading and external links.

Databases

Libraries subscribe to a variety of electronic databases (sometimes called periodical or article databases) that give students access to articles and other materials without charge. Your library has access to databases that can lead you to articles in periodicals such as newspapers, magazines, and scholarly or technical journals. General databases cover several subject areas; subject-specific databases cover one subject area in depth.

Your library might subscribe to some of the databases listed below.

General databases

The information in general databases is not restricted to a specific discipline or subject area. You may find searching a general database helpful in the early stages of your research process.

Academic Search Premier: An interdisciplinary database that indexes thousands of popular and scholarly journals on all subjects.

Expanded Academic ASAP: An interdisciplinary database that indexes the contents of magazines, newspapers, and scholarly journals in all subject areas.

JSTOR: A full-text archive of scholarly journals from many disciplines; unlike most databases, it includes articles published decades ago but does not include articles from the most recent issues of publications.

LexisNexis: A database that is particularly strong in coverage of news, business, legal, and political topics.

ProQuest: A database of periodical articles, many in full text. Through ProQuest, your library may subscribe to databases in subjects such as nursing, biology, and psychology.

Subject-specific databases

Libraries have access to dozens of specialized databases, each of which covers a specific area of research. To find out what’s available, consult your library’s Web site or ask your reference librarian. The following are examples of subject-specific databases.

ERIC: A database offering education-related documents and abstracts of articles published in education journals.

MLA Bibliography: A database of literary criticism, with citations to help researchers find articles, books, and dissertations.

PsycINFO: A comprehensive database of psychology research, including abstracts of articles in journals and books.

Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS): A database that indexes books, journals, government documents, statistical directories, and research reports in the social sciences.

PubMed: A database offering millions of abstracts of medical research studies.