How To Write Papers: Research Sites

A lot goes into writing a paper. One element is research.

Libraries have always been the best places to conduct research--that's where the books and databases are stored, after all.

But each August, the Los Angeles Times lists their top sites for online research, as a service to students returning to school.

Here are their top spots and comments, lifted from the article:

* www.crf-usa.org/links/research1.html: The Los Angeles-based, nonprofit Constitutional Rights Foundation, which sponsors youth programs to promote civic responsibility, also offers on its site hundreds of links to a variety of school subjects.

* http://www.ipl.org/: Started as a class project at the University of Michigan, the Internet Public Library provides a clickable index of research sites in numerous fields. It's now maintained by a consortium of colleges and universities.

* vos.ucsb.edu: The Voice of the Shuttle (the name refers to weaving on a loom) from UC Santa Barbara has been compiling links to academic topics for more than a decade.

* http://www.doaj.org/: More than 800 professional journals concerning science, education, the arts and other topics can be searched on this Directory of Open Access Journals site.

(end of quotes from LA TImes)

My Best Government Site:

Free Resources for Educational Excellence: Free.ed.gov lists all the US government sites that provide information helpful to students in many fields:

• Science: you can find everything from National Science Foundation-funded sites on astronomy to the Smithsonian Institutes' information on dinosaurs. There are math resources as well.
• History: Relocation Camps in World War 2? George Washington's Diary? The History of Jazz? It's all online!
• Literature: Grammar mechanics, as well as poetry and interviews with writers

To Find Magazine Articles:

• FindArticles.com: This is not an academic site, but a free spot where ten million articles from all sorts of magazines are archived. Type in a topic and explore the results
• MagPortal.com: Very similar to the above

To Find Newspaper Articles:

• News Archives lists papers by state, and gives you web addresses for their archives. (Many papers keep only a few weeks's worth of stories online, and put the rest in archives.) News Archives also reports what fees apply to getting stories from the archives.
• NewsWise: provides "stories behind the news"

For Science:

• LiveScience.com: Has all the latest news about Space, Animals, Health, Environment, Technology, History, and "Strange News"
• Biology: there are two excellent sites: InnerBody.com, and Biology-Online. Both are interactive, and the second (Biology-online) lets you post questions. (Both these and the ChemDex site came from the LA Times article; I know little about science)
• Chemistry:ChemDex, maintained by the Dept. of Chemistry at the University of Sheffield, Englad
• Don't forget HowStuff Works!

History and Archaeology (my favorites):

• Classical Greece and Rome only: Archaologist and scholar Shmulik Magal maintains Archaeological World, full of pictures and presentations.
• Arizona State University maintains ArchNet, a site devoted to archaeology. By topic,you can link to scholarly papers, museums, and other sites.
• HistoryNet archives well-researched articles from magazines like American History, Military History, and others. They're commercial mags, yes, but the authors are historians and the research is solid.
• Historical Texts has diaries, photos, and historical documents online, by topic.

If your report is on Geography or Current Events, check out NewsMap. You click on a place, and get the latest news.

If you need to get books (especially old books) and can't get to the library, try Gutenberg, which has 20,000 books online. Cliff Notes is also online.

Everyone will tell you not to use Wikipedia, and they're right--almost. Don't ever use a fact from Wiki without confirming it in other sources!

Why? Because anyone can put anything up there. The author could be a brilliant and insightful academic. . . . or a lunatic with a secret plan to conquer the world and feed us all to Zorg. Or, maybe just someone really biased who didn't check the facts before posting.

You don't know. If the facts are wrong, you'll take the hit. So don't use Wikipedia!

Except. . . except for this:

You can scroll to the end of any Wiki article and look for the sources and links. These could be very valuable. If there are URLs to universities or government sites (with .edu or .gov in the name), go to those sources for solid information! If there are books listed, see if your library has them.

Cutting and pasting sentences--or even phrases--from an article (or book) into your paper without marking them clearly as quotes is unethical. You will get caught, and your paper will get an F. Teachers are very unforgiving about plagiarism.

Many schools buy software that analyzes term papers and detects any copied wording from text all over the internet--kind of like Google on steroids. If you found a source and copied from it, someone else can find you out.

Get clear on the rules regarding this. Schools usually have policy statements defining plagiarism and its punishment. Ask a teacher or librarian, if you have any questions.

Find out what your professor's preference is, too. Some teachers allow you to quote extensively, as long as you use quotation marks and cite the source. Others don't. They want your own words, and think that a lot of quotes just pads the paper and boosts the word count.