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STEM Capstone: Websites

Use this guide to help you locate information from the open web and databases to support your STEM project.

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
  • authorship
  • purpose
  • objectivity
  • writing style

Most websites do not provide ciations.

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

 

Google Search Tips

Improve your Google searches by incorporating operators to refine your searches.

OPERATOR DESCRIPTION EXAMPLE
site: To search for results from certain sites and domains.

site:.gov gun statistics

site:.uk government

site:bullis.org parking
related: To search for sites that are similar to a designated site or domain.
 		 related:science.gov
link: To search for pages that link to a certain page.
 		 link:maryland.gov
filetype:
To search for a specific type of file.
 solar energy filetype:pdf

 

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 Search results can be a mixture of articles and books as well as unpublished manuscripts, course syllabi, and high school term papers, so you must critically evaluate what you find.