The Essential Guide to Using the Web for Research

Nigel Ford

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780857023650, 9780857023643
• eBook ISBN: 9781446291535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book will be vital reading for anyone doing research, since using the web to find high quality information is a key research skill. It introduces beginners and experts alike to the most effective techniques for searching the web, assessing and organising information and using it in a range of scenarios from undergraduate essays and projects to PhD research.

Nigel Ford shows how using the web poses opportunities and challenges that impact on student research at every level, and he explains the skills needed to navigate the web and use it effectively to produce high quality work.

Ford connects online skills to the research process. He helps readers to understand research questions and how to answer them by constructing arguments and presenting evidence in ways that will enhance their impact and credibility.

The book includes clear and helpful coverage of beginner and advanced search tools and techniques, as well as the processes of:

@!critically evaluating online information

@!creating and presenting evidence-based arguments

@!organizing, storing and sharing information

@!referencing, copyright and plagiarism.

As well as providing all the basic techniques students need to find high quality information on the web, this book will help readers use this information effectively in their own research.

Nigel Ford is Professor in the University of Sheffield?s Information School.

ONE

Introduction

Why read this book?

To succeed at university you need to know how to produce high-quality academic work. This requires a number of key skills, which are not always obvious, or clearly explained to students. Nor do you necessarily need to have developed or used them to be successful at school. What is required at university level – and increasingly as you progress from your first year to more advanced levels of study – can differ significantly from what you have been used to at school.

At this level, using the web to find information is a vital and integral part of academic work. But the web offers both great potential and serious problems. As a potential source of high-quality, relevant and up-to-date information on almost any topic the web is unparalleled. But to translate this potential into reality you need to know how to pinpoint high-quality information amongst the vast mass of mediocre, inaccurate and downright misleading ‘information’ that can so easily hijack your search.

Web search engines such as Google are powerful tools. But they are neither the only nor necessarily the most appropriate tools for finding the type and level of information you need for academic work. As well as knowing how to make advanced use of them, you also need to be familiar with the range of scholarly search tools specifically designed to find the type of high-quality information that is required.

Some of these study and web skills may seem obvious at first sight, but delve a little deeper and you will realise that things are not quite so straight forward. This book is designed specifically to explain what these are and help you develop them.

• The first skill you need is to know what is required of you – what your lecturers expect to see in a good piece of work at university level, and what differentiates it from a less good piece of work. (Chapter 2)
• If an essay question asks you to describe, analyse or evaluate a topic, you need to know exactly what these words mean and how they differ. It’s no good producing a first-class description when your lecturer wants an analysis or an evaluation. In other words, you need to be able to accurately decode and interpret the specific instructions you are given for each piece of coursework. (Chapter 3)
• As your course progresses, you will increasingly be expected to develop and display skills in finding information for yourself – rather than relying on reading lists given to you by your lecturers. You’ll be expected to know what peer-reviewed information is, and to be able to find it. This is not just a case of using Google or your university library catalogue. There is a range of sophisticated tools available to you specifically designed to find high-quality information. This book will introduce these to you and show you how to use them to best effect. (Chapters 4–8)
• You will then be expected to use it to build an evidence-based response to your essay or research question – the hallmark of a high-quality piece of work. This will entail analysing, synthesising, evaluating and selecting information. You need to be able to present your argument in an academically convincing way – to convince the person marking your work that the evidence that you are putting forward to support your arguments is valid, reliable and unbiased. You must know exactly what these terms mean, and how you can make sure that your work meets these essential quality criteria. This book will clearly explain these terms and will take you through these processes step by step. (Chapter 9)
• It will be essential to show that your work is your own. You must avoid plagiarism at all costs. Plagiarism is passing off the ideas of other people as your own and it can be done unintentionally as well as deliberately. It is a serious offence, and there are many cases of students being given severe penalties when found guilty of it. However, to produce high-quality work, you do need to draw on and use the ideas of others – writers and experts in the field. The key skill enabling you to build on other people’s work whilst at the same time avoiding plagiarism is knowing how to correctly attribute your sources. This book takes you through this process, and gives many examples of how to correctly cite different types of source. (Chapter 10)
• Showing that you have made use of information that is not only suitably authoritative but also the latest available will greatly benefit your work. You need to keep up to date with what is being published on the topics you are working on in your courses. However, you do not need to constantly keep checking to see if anything new has been published. This would be a waste of your time, especially if nothing new has appeared since last time you checked. This book explains a number of techniques that will enable you to receive automatic updates straight to your computer whenever something new is published on your topics. (Chapter 11)
• You can also save time if you organise your information effectively. Your personal store of information sources will become increasingly large as you work your way through your university courses. Storing them in your own personalised online library, searchable by author, title, keyword and your own tags, can save a lot of time and effort – for example, if you are trying to link ideas and quotations in an essay or report back to where you originally found them. Reference management tools are designed to help you manage your information sources in this way. They can also enable you automatically to create and update bibliographies in your work – and to change the citation style at the click of a button. You can also share your references – and your comments and tags – with friends and fellow students over the web. (Chapter 12)

Figure 1.1 summarises the key questions this book is designed to answer.

Figure 1.1 Key questions answered in this book

The book’s underlying rationale

Teaching and learning place much less emphasis than hitherto on students’ ability to absorb information given to them by their teachers in the form of lectures and reading lists. Such didactic teaching still has a role in signposting the structure of and introducing basic concepts in a subject. But you are increasingly expected to become an autonomous evidence-based learner. Thus the ability to find information autonomously, and critically evaluate it in relation to the needs of the particular learning task on which you are engaged, are key skills for success.

You must be able to find and critically analyse evidence to support reasoned argument. This emphasis is seen in the increasing use within education at all levels of inquiry-based approaches, including essays, projects, and dissertations, in which you are expected to develop your own evidence-based critique of some topic or problem.

As a higher education student, you are required to engage in evidence-based study, and the web is a major source of evidence – or, more precisely, of information that can be turned into evidence by applying your own critical abilities. With appropriate information-seeking, filtering and critical evaluation skills, you can now realistically use the web as a major source of high-quality information to support rigorous academic work. Developing these skills is the principal focus of this book.

Many students arrive at university lacking key skills, particularly those relating to finding, critically evaluating and effectively using information. And you cannot assume that school will prepare you for them. You can often be highly successful at school without necessarily having had to develop and use them. A 2009 report by an independent Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience, in relation to the great range of resources available via new technology, noted:

…significant and strong reservations on the matter of the quality of analysis and critique students bring to bear on those resources, as well as on the extent to which they mine them. Students tend to go no further than the first page or so of a website and, if they don’t find what they’re looking for there, they move on to another. Not that this behaviour – scanning, ‘power browsing’ – is particular to students. CIBER’s Information Behaviour report for JISC and the British Library points out that, faced with the massive range of sources now available, academics are behaving in precisely the same way: ‘Everyone exhibits a bouncing/flicking behaviour … Power browsing and viewing is the norm for all’ … Unlike their students, however, experienced academics should have sufficiently developed evaluative, analytical and synthetical skills to work effectively in this way.¹

Yet the information universe available to you offers potential as never before to stimulate and support the development of evidence-based critical thinking. However, both the strength and the weakness of this information universe is the vastness of the information to which it provides access.

In 2008, Google reported that its indexing software was selecting from some 1,000,000,000,000 webpages and the number of webpages was growing by several billion per day.² At the beginning of August 2011, the indexed web contained at least 19.4 billion pages.³

The internet-based information universe is awash with gold – high-quality information on every topic, subject and discipline under the sun from astrophysics to zoology. The problem is, of course, the vastness of the mud that all too easily hides the gold from view. You need to develop the intellectual equivalent to ‘panning for gold’ – a metaphor used by Sylvia Edwards in her PhD on web-based information literacy.⁴

Finding the information you need within this information universe can be complex and problematic. You need to be familiar not only with the information universe itself (the different types and levels of information available via the web), but also with the range of search tools and search strategies available to help you in your task.

Many different types of information source are available on the web. These vary in terms of their quality and authority. However, even high-quality sources vary in the extent to which they are appropriate for different learning tasks. You need to be familiar not only with what is available, but also with what is and is not appropriate for the particular type of learning task you are working on at any given time.

There are also a great many different types of search tool that you can use to find these different types of information, of which general search engines like Google are only one. Each of these tools generally offers a range of advanced searching options which enable you to maximise the effectiveness of your searching, and you need to be competent in using them to your best advantage. You also need to be aware of their limitations, and of what techniques – and alternative tools – you can use to overcome these limitations.

Information-seeking tools can do a lot to help the information seeker, but the vital ingredient in finding appropriate information is your intimate understanding of your own learning and information needs. You must be able to find appropriate information and process it effectively. However, the processes of finding the right information and processing it in appropriate ways are closely intertwined. Both depend on having a good knowledge of the precise nature of your learning needs. Different types of learning task imply different learning needs, which in turn require different types of information and different ways of processing it. An essay may, for example, ask you to describe, explain, analyse or critically discuss a topic or problem. Each of these requires engagement in different intellectual processes, and the use of different levels and types of information to fuel these processes.

You should also be aware that different people may also approach the same learning task in very different – but equally valid – ways according to their particular learning style. You need to be familiar not only with the precise nature of your learning needs (precisely what type of information processing you are required to engage in), but also of your own individual style of learning. This can help you align the way in which you go about an essay or research project – including the way you seek information at the different stages of your learning – to play to your strengths.

Search tools covered in this book

This book is intended primarily for students registered on courses in universities and colleges. Such institutions are likely to offer access to commercial services such as SciVerse Scopus and Web of Knowledge, which are major web-based search tools designed specifically to support academic work. These are explored in some detail in the book.

However, the book also introduces Google Scholar, a major scholarly search tool that is freely available to anyone via the web. Other search tools covered in this book are also freely available to anyone on the web. Indeed, all the major themes of the book can be supported by freely available web-based tools, meaning that it can also be read to advantage by people who are interested in using the web for learning and research but who are outside the formal educational system.

This book is designed to present in one convenient package what I think you most readily need in order to produce high-quality academic work. But don’t forget that each system covered here also has its o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the author
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Learning & critical thinking: the essentials
• 3. Clarifying what is required of you
• 4. Finding high-quality information
• 5. How to do a literature review
• 6. Information sources and search tools
• 7. Mapping search approaches & techniques to information needs
• 8. Scholarly search tools in detail
• 9. Transforming information into evidence-based arguments
• 10. Presenting your evidence effectively
• 11. Keeping up to date
• 12. Organising & sharing your information
• Postscript
• Appendix: your learning style
• Index