ONLINE RESARCHES on the

net

SEARCH ENGINES:

Bing Search: Microsoft's search engine

Google: The world's most popular search engine.

Yahoo!: The 2nd largest search engine on the web

TOPIC

IDENTIFY DEFINITION

Find the instruction words

Task words – these tell you what you need to do e.g. affect, young children

TOPIC AND KEYWORDS

Find words that limit the topic

Identify the key concepts

What are the limits or aspects you need to concentrate on:

What is the focus of the assignment? What do you need to research?

SEARCH WORDS

Work out the search words. Select the key words that you need to search by using a dictionary or thesaurus. Enter these words into a data base or search engine.

For example: Topic: How does television violence affect children?

Keywords Synonyms television TV violence aggression, crime children young people, teenagers, adolescents

In the search bar….

Use the keywords that you have identified. Work out your search words to search for resources that are relevant for our sample essay topic, for example;

television AND violence AND children

Enter your search terms (keywords) in the search box. You can use AND, OR & NOT always in upper case. These are called Boolean operators.

SEARCHING:

Type in the word or phrase you'd like to search e.g. medieval history

Browse your options Click on an option that suits you If you don't see anything that fits your needs,

refine your search If a set of words belongs together in a phrase,

you should put quotes around those words or dashes in between them. This is great for when you know a few lyrics to a song and want to search them to find the song's name.

GOOGLE SEARCH BARRun your search through other parts of Google. You can make your search more

specific depending on whether you want to search Google's images, news, or maps. You can just click on the option on the top left hand side of the Google search bar.

Images

Web search

Maps

News

Connecting keywords Retrieving too many results can be a common problem when searching

databases. To narrow your search use AND to combine terms. This tells the database to look for only articles that contain all the search words you enter.

Example: Television AND Violence AND Society

Sometimes you may not get enough results. This could be because the keywords you are using are not the words the author has used in the article. To broaden your search, think of synonyms for your keywords and use OR to combine them.

Example: Television OR TV OR Media

Some words have different endings e.g. child, childhood, children. You can add an asterisk * to the end of the word if the ending of the word is varied.

Example: child*

SELECTING RESULTS: When you are satisfied with your search results, scroll through the list of

records to select the most appropriate 2-3 websites. Check the title.

Look for the URL (Uniform (or universal) resource locator)

The URL path is where the file is located. http//:www.(Hypertext Transfer (or Transport) Protocol)

This is also called the domain name: .net is the network provider providing services to subscribers .gov is government agencies .org is non profit organisations .com are commercial enterprise trying to sell or endorse products.

It is very important that you read a few websites and see if this enable you to select the 2-3 most recent and relevant websites .

EVALUATING WEBSITES:

When you have found some articles ask yourself the following questions to help you determine whether they will be useful for your assignment.

Relevance: Is this article relevant to your topic?

Does the information verify or back up what you need to know?

Credibility of author: Are the author's credentials listed. E.g. degrees; institution?

Currency: Is the article current? Is that important? Why?

References: Are there references/bibliography?

Type of resource: What sort of information is covered: research, news, literature review; discussion of latest trends; information about a specific topic. Is this sort of information appropriate for the assignment?

COPYRIGHT:MOST IMAGES AND TEXT ARE COPYRIGHTED. You can put information into your own words. You can then reference the information you

write down as an acknowledgement of whose ideas and thoughts you are expressing

REFERENCING

Why do we reference?

To refer to different sources for information.

To acknowledge the author/creator.

To avoid plagarising.

To let other people see where you accessed your information.

To make your work credible…believable…trustworthy…reliable.

Referencing

Referencing is also called CITING. Reference details can be written at the end

of an assignment or essay. The reference should include: Author Year Title Place of publication Publisher Where it was retrieved from if it is a website

REFERENCE EXAMPLES:

BOOKS: Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (2000). Title

of book: Subtitle. Location: Publisher.

WEBSITES: Author, A. A. (2000). Title of work.

Retrieved from http://www.xxx.xxx