Unit 4 Concepts

Because such an astonishing number of sites exist, it's easy to search the Web and get a huge, unfocused surplus of information. There are ways, though, to narrow your search. You can start by narrowing your topic--something that often needs to be done anyway.

Let's say your instructor has asked you to do a paper on the environment.

"Environment" is such a huge subject area that if you ask an engine to search for it, you'll need to set aside a day just to read the results. Maybe recycling has always interested you, though, so you might try that as a key word.

But what about recycling? Of what? Where? By whom? For what purpose? Obviously, if you try to write everything there is to know about recycling, your paper will have no focus, no purpose, and no boundaries. To limit your topic to something more meaningful and manageable, use a search engine. While finding potential sources, the engine will also reveal many different aspects of your general subject--one of which may turn into a specific, focused topic for your paper.

Click here to practice narrowing a search and discovering a topic.

Before you settle on a topic, though, suppose you heard your instructor mention a renowned environmentalist named Carson--renowned to your instructor, maybe, but not to you. If you do a search for that name, you may get everything from to a restaurant called Carson's Ribs in Chicago, to Johnny Carson, to the soccer program at Carson-Newman College.

One easy way to refine your search is with Boolean operators: AND, OR, NOT, and NEAR. Putting AND in between key words tells the engine to look for documents where both terms appear. OR, of course, asks for either one term or the other or both--useful when you're not sure which keyword will bring results (like "prejudice" and "discrimination"). NOT eliminates a term, and NEAR asks that the terms appear within ten or so words of one another.

You might try searching Carson AND NOT Johnny to eliminate at least one famous name. You might try Carson AND environment. Sooner or later, you'll find the woman you're looking for--Rachel Carson--and some of her work. (Note: You can also use these operators in combination: Bud AND Abbott AND NOT Costello, or Jackie AND Kennedy AND NOT John.)

If her best-known book, Silent Spring, interests you, try searching for Rachel Carson AND "Silent Spring." In this case, you're not using the quotation marks because Silent Spring is a title; you're using them because quotation marks tell the engine that these words need to appear together in this order.

Without the quotation marks, you may get documents containing silent and documents containing spring, probably mixed in with true references to Carson's book. Similarly, if you typed in body building, you'd get many bodies and many buildings; but if you searched for "body building," your search would be much more fruitful.

More tips:

- Not all search engines recognize the same search strategies, although most do. Check the engine's help menu if in doubt.

- Don't type keywords in UPPER CASE unless that is how they would be likely to appear in searched documents.

- If possible, use a singular term instead of a plural one. If you search for library, you'll get sites that mention libraries, as well as sites that reference a particular library, but it won't work the other way around.

- Use a wildcard--a common symbol for which is the asterisk--when you're interested in more than one form of a word. For example, assassin* might lead to documents with assassin, assassinate, assassination, and so forth. This strategy may also work if you aren't sure of the spelling of a word, but know how it begins.

- If you know what Web site you need but don't know its URL, you can get the address by typing, for example, URL: Wall Street Journal.

Note, too, that there are other ways to search the Web than with search engines. Educators, librarians, or energetic volunteers have put together various Web sites that index source material according to a subject or category. Some of these Web editors have evaluated the quality of the material prior to including it, thus saving you some time.

ftp://ftp.std.com/obi

Business News

Reuters News Media http://www.reuters.com

(Business news from newspapers, journals, financial reports, etc.)

Conferences (sophisticated chat rooms)

http://www.ForumOne.com

The Free Internet Encyclopedia http://www.clever.net/cam/encyclopedia.html

Information Please http://www.infoplease.com

U.S. Government Today gopher://wiretap.spies.com

United States Federal Web Locator http://www.census.gov/

Welcome to the White House http://www.whitehouse.gov

Congressional Record, Government Printing Office http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aces150.html

Government Resources on the Web   http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Documents.center/federal.html

National Institutes of Health http://www.nih.gov

The Electric Library http://wwws.elibrary.com

Internet Public Library http://www.ipl.org

Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov

The World Wide Web Virtual Library http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/by Subject/Overview.html

Virtual Library http://w3.org/vl

DejaNews http://www.dejanews.com/

Ecola Newsstand http://www.ecola.com

Electronic Newsstand http://www.enews.com

Editor and Publisher Online http://www.mediainfo.com

Newspaper Association of America (NAA)Web Site for U.S. papers http://www.Infi.Net

Advertising Age http://www.adage.com

Business Week http://www.businessweek.com

Internet World http://www.internetworld.com

Wall Street Journal http://www.wsj.com

Wired http://www.wired.com/wired/current.html

Byte http:// www.byte.com

iWorld http://www.internet.com/home-d.html

ZD Net http://www.zdnet.com

Purdue Online Writing Laboratory http://owl.english.purdue.edu/

My Virtual Reference Desk http://www.refdesk.com/main.html

Argus Clearinghouse http://www.clearinghouse.net

BUBL Link http://bubl.ac.uk/link (academic subject areas catalogued according to the Dewey Decimal System)

Carl Uncover  http://www.carl.org (at the homepage search uncover)

Clinical Psychology Resources http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/rrs/classes/clinicalpsych.html

Commercenet http://www.commerce.net

Humanities Hub http://www.spaceless.com/hub/

Infomine http://infomine.ucr.edu

Lycos Invisible Web Catalog http://dir.lycos.com/Reference/Searchable Databases
(accesses databases search engines cannot)

Science Hypermedia http://www.scimedia.com/index.htm

Yanoff's Internet Services List http://sirius.we.lc.ehu.es/internet/inet.services.html

Virtual Computer Library http://www.utexas.edu/computer/vcl/journals.html

Unit 4 Assignment: In a sentence or two, state as specifically as possible what your research topic will be, to what audience you'll be writing, and for what purpose. Use sites appropriate to your research topic under "Researching Additional Web Sources" to specifically identify three possible resources for your paper. Describe how each will be of use. E-mail this information to your instructor, and keep a copy for yourself for future reference.

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