- The good: academic publishing on the Internet
- The bad: time wasting on Internet searches
- The ugly: Internet hoaxes, scams and legends
In the academic world it is considered very important that new research builds upon past research and that the quality of information is assured. There are formal processes to facilitate this, and it's essential you understand these if you are to succeed at university.
Let's look at some of the information sources that are traditionally used to support academic research and at how these are increasingly available online...
The Academic publishing process
Academics usually publish their research in formal publications such as journal papers and articles or reports. These follow formal procedures designed to quality-assure the work.
Peer review / refereeing
Peer review is what characterises academic research. If a publication is peer reviewed it means it has been read, checked and authenticated (reviewed) by independent, third party academics (peers). Peer review has been the quality-control system of academic publishing for hundreds of years.
Scholarly journals
Peer reviewed articles are often collated into scholarly journals, which are usually published by academic publishing houses, professional societies or university press. Journals will be a key source of information you at university - you will be expected to reference articles from them in your work.
Electronic journals
A university library may have shelves full of journals, but nowadays many are also available in electronic form over the Internet. Ask your lecturers or librarians how to find and use the key journals for your subject - the sooner you do this the quicker you will succeed in your research.
Library eJournal services
Access to eJournals is not usually free – a subscription has to be paid. However, a university library will have paid some subscriptions for its users – who can then get free access to these journals via their library web services, using a special password (check with your library for details).
eJournal publishers
If you can't get access to eJournals from your library you may be able to via the publisher's web services. Some offer “pay-per-view” which means you pay a small fee for each article you view.
ePrints
Increasingly academics are choosing to publish their articles on the Internet themselves and by-pass the journal route. Universities and research communities are building online archives of these papers that are free for anyone to access online.
Bibliographic databases
Most academics rely on specialist databases to access details of past research. The databases draw together details of scholarly publications from a wide range of sources including academic publishers, journals, archives and sometimes books, and so enable you to search a large body of the scholarly literature in one go.
Academic web directories
Of course a lot of information on the web can be useful for research even if it hasn't come from the traditional sources. Academic web directories, such as Intute, guide you to the best online resources for research – and each resource has been selected and reviewed by a subject specialist.
Library web sites
The library web site for your university or college will be an important source of information for you, as it will quickly guide you to the key electronic journals, bibliographic databases and archives that you should be using for your research.
Ask your lecturers and librarians for advice on which sources you should be using.
The Bad
The bad news is that the Internet also leads to a lot of information that is completely inappropriate for your research, and it takes time and skill to weed this out.
The quality of information on the Internet
As things stand the Internet has no standard system of quality control so it's important to be careful about which information you use and not to trust everything you read.
Think about it - the Internet links millions of computers:
- Anyone can put something on the Internet - an amateur or an expert
- From anywhere in the World - be it the United Kingdom or Uruguay
- They can say anything they like - be it true or false
- And leave it there as long as they like - even if it goes out of date
- Or change it without warning - perhaps even remove it completely
There is a danger that the information you find on the Internet will:
- Be from a source that is unreliable, lacking in authority or credibility
- Have content that is invalid, inaccurate, out-of-date
- Not be what it seems!
Weeding out poor quality information takes time
Most people use very simple search techniques when they want to find information on the Internet using a search engine such as Google.
These can produce thousands if not millions of web sites to explore: some information will be useful, some will be useless – it’s up to you to discern which is which!
It can take considerable time and skill to sift through search engine results and evaluate which are the best sources.
Although it may seem a quick and easy option to turn to a search engine for your research, it might be more effective to turn to web services designed specifically for university and college research such as your library web site.
It’s easy to miss key information
If you want to find something on the Internet, you go to a search engine, as they contain everything that is available online, right? Wrong!
Search engines only cover a proportion of what is available online, a lot of information is hidden or invisible to them. For example, some of the databases of research literature that we discussed earlier will not appear in search engine results, especially if they require a subscription or password to get access.
It’s also worth remembering that search engines only search information that is online, and of course a huge body of research literature is still only available in print form in books and journals.
If you try doing the same search in different search engines you will get a different set of results on each search engine – which reveals that none of them index the whole Internet.
Try this to compare search engines
Try a search in Metacrawler [ http://www.metacrawler.com ] to see how the results differ across search engines ...
Notice how they list some of the same sites but not all - and in a slightly different order?
The Ugly
At worst the Internet can lead you to misinformation that could land you in real trouble.
Unfortunately there are a lot of sharks on the Internet - people who want to trick you, misinform you, deceive you and defraud you. Some web sites and emails can be real crime scenes.
Be sceptical, not paranoid!
This page will highlight some classic cases of misinformation on the Internet: Internet hoaxes, urban legends, scams and hate sites.
You need to develop some healthy scepticism when using the Internet for research but there's no need to get paranoid - we've already seen that there's plenty of good stuff out there too. OK, let's get ugly ...
Internet hoaxes
Some web sites are fakes designed to be spoofs, parodies or jokes. This is fine as long as you realise it's a fake and don't take it at face value!
Hoaxes are often about famous people, politics, products or organisations. Their content is humorous and the fact that they are not ‘real' sites can be easy to spot. Some sites even include a disclaimer, just in case you don't get the joke, freely admitting that the web site is a hoax.
Source of Information : Place, E., Kendall, M., Hiom, D., Booth, H., Ayres, P., Manuel, A., Smith,P. (2006) "Internet Detective: Wise up to the Web", 3rd edition, Intute
Virtual Training Suite, [online]. Available from:
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk
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