Setting the scene.
You're looking for something to read about a particular topic. You want to find resources that are scholarly, up-to-date and relevant to your topic... but where is the best place to search for them?
Each of the sections below describes a different place to search for relevant resources.
The Internet - Google
It is possible to find useful, relevant resources on the Internet, through the Google search engine, but you will need to perform some pretty sophisticated searches to eliminate irrelevant material from your results. Often, like many search engines, Google will return some relevant results amongst many irrelevant ones, and it takes time to investigate those that might be relevant, because Google does not provide descriptions of resources in its results, just text from the resources themselves. Since Google does not have descriptions of resources, you cannot search accurately for features such as authors of resources or by year of publication.
Google is useful, but is not always the best place to look for resources. There are other places to look for resources on the Internet.
The Internet - Other sources
There are many specialist Internet gateway and portal services available, which will provide you with search facilities and descriptions of resources that were selected by subject specialists for their quality and relevance to a particular community. The RDN Virtual Training Suite is a great place to start learning about these services.
However, only some of the resources that will be relevant to your search are to be found on the Internet. A great many relevant, peer reviewed, scholarly and authoritative resources are not published on the Internet. So where can they be found?
|
