Understanding Research (23 page)

Increased reliance on the big search engines provides a large part of the explanation for a rapid rise in student use of poor quality and unreliable sources in recent years.

(Ó Dochartaigh 2009: 1; see UCL 2008)

Setting out to search the
whole
web is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. It also assumes that all references are of equal weight, value, quality, and relevance to your needs. As this is academic work you’re engaged in, starting with traditional ‘print’ publications, as they are available online, in part or as e-publications, is as good a start as anywhere. You can branch out later.

• Whilst the border between the humanities and social sciences, let alone the points at which they intersect, differ from place to place, isolate now the broad domain in which your topic or interests currently reside.
  
• Then proceed with a more focused rather than a generalized search through these standard disciplinary fences to locate the pertinent databases; for example, humanities for visual cultures, or social sciences for political science topics. Start there with a keyword search relevant to your current topic.
  
  • (a) No luck? Now consider either narrowing your search terms further or widening them.
    
  • (b) No luck? Now consider visiting other disciplinary databases: for example, internet-related researchers in both the humanities and social sciences cover topics so look in both zones.
    
  • (c) No luck? Take another look at your keywords; whilst they may be your key concepts and make sense to your topic, perhaps you need to look at possible synonyms, or close relatives; for example, sustainability may emerge by looking at ‘climate change’ or ‘carbon emissions’ or ‘global warming’.
    

Despite ongoing predictions to the contrary and advent of hand-held digital devices such as the Kindle reader, books and other printed matter are still the core business of academic publishers, who are also branching out into various forms of e-publishing. Here, the reference to
print publications
refers to those publications (printed or electronic) that have gone through the academic review and editing process.

These publications – books, journals, and encyclopaedias – are all readily available on the web in publishing house catalogues, and university and online databases. Again, use a snowball technique and dedicated database rather than head straight to general reference web-sources.

• Why not start with the university’s e-resources – databases by which the university has access to journals and book abstracts, and thereby you too? There is more than enough information there to get you going before diving into the depths of the open web.
  
• If using the open web, apart from the various offshoots of Google Scholar (for example,
  http://scholar.google.co.uk/
  ) there are other academic databases worth checking out. For instance:
  
  • www.britannica.com/
    ; Harvard University, or Stanford and other reference services from major academic institutions;
    
  • various publishers’ online catalogues – a very valuable resource for the latest publications;
    
  • other library catalogues e.g.
    www.worldcat.org/
    .
    

It is not uncommon for research students to overlook the knock-on benefits of assigned texts, or one important to you, and its references. From these sources you can then head out into the open web. With one foot firmly on the terra firma of print publications, finding parts of or whole books online, and for free, often follows more quickly than an aimless keyword search in a generic search engine.

• Do not underestimate the goldmine of information, already cross-referenced and sometimes even annotated by your lecturers, that is your course reading-lists; those you already have access to as well as from online syllabi from other universities, or departments that work in the areas of interest to you.
  
• An often overlooked and under-rated source of help is your department or faculty specialist librarian: highly educated and trained staff whose knowledge of databases, and desire to impart that knowledge, is hard to match.
  
• And then there are the references listed at the end of most entries in Wikipedia, a runaway success in online encyclopaedia projects at
  www.wikipedia.org/
  . As with all encyclopaedias, the best way to approach this resource, and eventually cite from it (under advisement and with care) Wikipedia entries work best as an initial source; the more developed pages provide extensive literature lists which stand on their own merit. Many academics look askance at Wikipedia, not just because, rightly or wrongly, they have doubts about the do-it-yourself aspects of its peer-to-peer working-model, but because of the uncritical way many students use this
  resource. An increasing over-reliance on citations from general reference material,i.e. dictionaries or encyclopaedias, along with the indiscriminate use of the ‘cutand-paste’ function in student essays, compound the problem.
  

For journals, the terrain is even more convoluted as there are many, many journals available. The quantity, quality, and scholarly standing of online peer-reviewed academic journals have all been on the up in recent years;
First Monday
which specializes in social sciences approaches to the internet (
http://firstmonday.org/
) is a pioneering example. For cultural studies and related fields,
Transformations
is another one (
www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/index.shtml
).

Journals reside in databases; bibliographical reference/abstracts only or full-text ones. More and more these are becoming linked as libraries and commercial search engines both collaborate as well as try and stake out their respective claims to be gatekeepers of an ever-expanding cyberspace for scholarly and related resources and sources.
⁸

• To get off on the right foot, ask your supervisor, tutors, lecturers, and subject librarians for their ideas on where to locate online access to books and journals in your topic area.
  
• If the web is your preferred ecosystem, then you will find quite quickly various sorts of university library-based e-resource portals. These have gradations of open-web or enrolled student ID access, so trial and error will establish these limits for anyone accessing from outside the respective infrastructures.
  
• There are several useful online access points for academic books and journals that link up national and disciplinary geographies developed by library services.
  
• JSTOR (Journal Storage) at
  www.jstor.org/
  , is another useful, US-based not-forprofit resource for scholarly research where you can go for back issues (more than three years old) of many journals; it is linked to many university library e-resources, some of which can be accessed from outside the university system and depending on which journal subscriptions your library has.
  
• INTUTE, at
  www.intute.ac.uk/
  , a free online database made available through library e-resources, has been an important way for universities with lower budgets to provide online literature for their students. Mid-2011 this valuable resource lost its funding; however, it has been archived, i.e. it is still available but will no longer be updated.
  
• However, in its place two other online, academic-based resources on the web are available as supporting organizations which embrace the open-access principle of many web-based activities; first is the Directory of Open-Access Journals at
  www.doaj.org/
  ; second is the Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN), an online library and publication platform at
  www.oapen.org/home
  .
  
• To get further look for the OpenURL links – for example, SFX or MetaLib – within the database entry you are on (for example, the Goldsmiths online library catalogue). These will take you to online copies if your institution has it. If not, then where else can you go? This is where Google Scholar or Windows’ latest vehicle, Bing, may come in handy; but now you know what exactly you’re looking for!
  
• Are you looking for the full article or trying to get a sense of what is out there? If the latter, where abstracts of articles are also provided, then if you know which journal, head to its website, where abstracts and sometimes full articles are available. If looking for articles generally, then try
  indexing
  databases, for example, library catalogues, or citation indexes like
  
  • ISI Web of Science: Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts and Humanities Index.
    
  • The Virtual Library at
    www.vlib.org/
    .
    
  • BUBL Information Service at
    www.bubl.ac.uk/
    .
    

The arrival of web-publishing, do-it-yourself knowledge-exchange and the way in which computer-mediated communications have created opportunities for creative artists, authors, and scholars to cut out the middle person (record companies, publishers, and editorial boards respectively) means that there is an enormous amount of good, well-researched material available in purely online, or non-traditionally academic nodes online. This is where personal home pages, blogs, webzines, and a plethora of research hubs run by NGOs, international organizations and funding organizations come into their own. A lot of earlier drafts, older editions of classic articles, and conference papers where you can find out about the latest research have now been uploaded to various websites, personal, professional, and institutional. Some find their way into the top ten if not the top twenty hits of a general keyword search. Some you may come across through links provided by friends and colleagues, or newspaper articles, specialist online publications in a given areas, or in blogs.

There is no reason for these to be dismissed outright because they have not passed the ‘acid test’ of external review processes or academic publishing. Nonetheless, like
the printed book, there is as much good material as there is sub-standard material. Double-check and cross-check, as in cyberspace the foundational hyperlink can also facilitate iterations of spelling errors, misrepresentations, and lots of baloney masquerading as ‘true facts’; the power of dominant search engines to define the terrain has no small role to play in this respect.

A keyword search for terms at the start of a research project with these services will always throw out something for you to follow. At present Google dominates this part of the internet. However, the diversity, quality, and depth of your search results will be variable; a search engine is not infallible. For academic research and particularly when your research question and literature review need to be refined, commercial internet search engines, along with
meta-search engines
, open-web databases, and general subject guides are rather blunt instruments (see Ó Dochartaigh 2009). At worst they are time-wasters and divert you from really getting to grips with what is out there in scholarly terms, online and in print.

This is not to condemn browsing per se, or to imply that any material you come across by chance, or via another unrelated browsing-session is suspect. More to the point, consider making a
distinction between everyday browsing/surfing of the web and conscious researching
. The former can support the latter but it is neither a substitute for doing the legwork, figuratively speaking, nor is it a shortcut to instant research findings; online literature searches are time-consuming and, as many students discover, demand patience.

There are ways of browsing the web and ways of searching it in a more focused way. In both instances we make use of two closely connected sorts of software applications designed for the internet:
internet browsers
and their variously integrated
search engines
; for example, Microsoft Internet Explorer and its Bing search engine; the partnership between Mozilla Firefox and Google (by far the most popular), the various browser and search services provided by Yahoo!, Safari, and others.

Based on the principle that these services are ‘free’ albeit tied to their service provider in various ways, both these applications are needed to navigate the web. The key difference between them is that a browser locates and displays web-pages. Search engines on the other hand, particularly those developed for the internet as a whole, are programs that automatically search the web or a specific document for a combination of terms and phrases as specified by the re/searcher. The ‘top ten’ search hits list is where most everyday users, and researchers for that matter, begin and end their search. As search engines, and their browser-based goods and services, increase in sophistication and marketing savvy, the effectiveness of this initial search has been also increasing. To date, Google leads this hit parade.

If searching the web is more than simply browsing, or surfing it, and assuming that there is more to be gained than relying on a Google search for a particular core concept, big name, or issue area central to your research project, then what else do we need to bear in mind? The pointers below pertain to how the aforementioned computer literacy and everyday know-how that budding or experienced researchers bring to their work when setting out to research in web-based settings, can be both a hindrance and a blessing.

1. In response to many a student’s frustration at not being able to find anything useful when first conducting a literature search on the web, the basic rule of thumb when starting out is to try and develop focus earlier rather than later; start with a narrower set of criteria for your initial search. You can branch out as you go. Ironically it is only after achieving greater focus that our success rate when searching improves; as your research question, aims and objectives become more refined so do your searches.
   
2. In response to the truism that states ‘if it isn’t on Google it doesn’t exist’, in other words that no other search engine is worth bothering with, I would like to suggest that this is not necessarily so. There are generalized search engines and respective searches, and there are more specialized ones; Google Scholar is, again, a specific service designed for academics as is its would-be nemesis, Microsoft’s Bing, launched in 2009. Whilst the former is to date the most powerful and most successful program around for providing an instant overview of which websites, documents, or other sorts of web-content are most prominent based on a (still top-secret) calculation of how your terms crop up in any web-page along with how
   frequently it has been visited by others, it is not a ‘true’ representation of what is out there on the web.
   
3. No search engine is fully ‘live’; all are selective and the web they search is cached (a just-in-time archive stored in huge server-bays); if for no other reason than the web itself changes continually as do the algorithms governing how the software works. For example, the frequency your words/phrases appear against how often that website is accessed against how much some website owners pay for ‘preferred placement’, versus how ad-tracking intermediaries facilitate the above as they piggy-back on millions of searches a second.
   
4. When starting out on a web-search, particularly if you are looking for easy-access literature (where you don’t need to leave home, use the library, or pay) about your research topic, there are several things to bear in mind:
   
   • (a) A
     simple search
     will provide you with a swathe of information; more than you can deal with. Alternatively it can result in a list of commercial products and services rather than substantive information or sources. For academic sources, use academic tools.
     
   • (b) So, here, why not start with those websites that you already know are useful: your library online catalogue, publishers or online book vendors, the ubiquitous Wikipedia, or international organizations. Why start with the open web when you know already that your topic is about one of the United Nations organizations, an NGO, or corporation? Start there and move outwards.
     
   • (c) If an initial search is disappointing, try other terms. Even if they are not the exact terms you want to use, crucial links and information may well be contained under other ones; for example, ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’, ‘greenhouse effect’, ‘carbon credits’ are overlapping phrases. Stubbornly persisting with the same phrase or combination of terms despite disappointing results (no hits at worst) is not recommended. That said, sometimes the same search on another day throws up different results.
     
   • (d) This is when an ‘advanced search’ comes in handy. Look for this option at the top of the web address window in your search engine/browser window. Here you will have a set of options for refining your search. Like fishing, it sometimes helps to bait the hook in certain ways to attract the fish you want; for example, restrict or open up the dates between which you want to look, include or exclude certain items that get in the way of creating diversity in a simple search. Here big names or global brands can be excluded if they are not what you’re looking for.
     
   • (e) As search engine designers look to make searching easier and easier, if not predict where we want to go by providing us with previous search terms as a matter of course, finding the right phrases to ensure the best results for your purposes is an art as well as a science. As you become more familiar with your field, your topic and how certain terms and phrases characterize your literature base, your ability to search (when you need to) will improve.
     
   • (f) So the golden rule is not to get too reliant on one search engine, one web-service provider when researching. Given the commercial stakes alone, it never hurts to see what you can find using two or three search engines; if nothing
     else you will get a sense of which websites, personalities, and articles feature prominently.
     
   • (g) There is a time-honoured set of search principles when combining search terms:
     Boolean search terms
     . See
     Box 5.3
     below for more information. Sometimes it works better to eliminate terms from our search parameters rather than attempt to add to them. The line between too broad and too narrow is a fine one. All the more reason to try different ways before giving up and going to the pub!
     

• (h) Finally,
  nothing
  works? You keep getting a ‘404 not found’ message when searching for your research topic? No-one out there in cyberspace is interested in what you are? Your key terms don’t exist in a Google context? First, check your spelling! Second, try ano ther day, try another combination of search terms, try another tool, ask someone for advice.
  
• (i) Or, overwhelmed with too much information? Or, on looking closer you realize that this over-abundance of information is actually the same website, product, or article reiterated in the top ten/top twenty hits? At the end of the day, dedicated databases and their search engines such as library catalogues, mature research
  hubs, and many inter-governmental organizations’ websites will provide you with more than enough without having to venture into the open web or use generic search engines. Literature lists, print and digital, are a mine of information.