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National History Day 2024: Turning Points in History: Web Search Strategies

Using websites for research

Websites can be reliable information sources, but you must evaluate their credibility before citing them for an assignment. For every website, consider:

  • Currency (look for a date)
  • Relevance (appropriate for academic work)
  • Authority (purpose or organization with expertise)
  • Accuracy (fact based)
  • Purpose (educational, commercial)

 

Google Scholar

Google

Google Scholar is a subset of Google that is designed to search for scholarly articles and books online. 

Advantages

  • It's free.
  • It uses a simple, familiar interface that works much like regular Google.
  • It finds scholarly books, articles, and conference papers from a wide range of disciplines.

Disadvantages

  • Results are not always full-text like regular Google. Books and many articles are not available full-text and online.
  • Criteria used for selecting "scholarly" materials is not given. Search results can be a mixture of articles and books as well as unpublished manuscripts, course syllabi, and high school term papers, so you must critically evaluate what you find.

 

Google Search Tips

  • When you do your search, enter your topic followed by words like PERSONAL NARRATIVES, DIARIES, CORRESPONDENCE, JOURNALS, ARCHIVES, HISTORICAL SOCIETY.​ This will improve your ability to find PRIMARY SOURCES.
  • Improve your Google searches by incorporating the following operators to refine your searches. 
OPERATOR DESCRIPTION EXAMPLE
site: To search for results from certain sites and domains.

site:.uk american revolution
related: To search for sites that are similar to a designated site or domain. related:https://blogs.chapman.edu/holocaust-education/
link: To search for pages that link to a certain page.
 		 link:darwin-online.org.uk
filetype:
To search for a specific type of file.
 Lech Walesa filetype:pdf

 

Important domains

 

These top level domains help you identify web information that is more likely to be authoritative

DOMAIN DESCRIPTION
.gov United States government websites
.edu United States affiliated institutions of higher education.
.org Commonly used by schools, open-source projects, and communities, as well as by for-profit entities..
.mil United States military
country domains To find information published in other countries, look for information under the country's domain