Interlibrary loan
College and university libraries frequently loan materials to each other. Interlibrary loan is especially useful for books, recordings, and videos, but can also be used for journal articles. You can access thousands of library databases at once at WorldCat (www.worldcat.org) and use your library's interlibrary loan service to request any materials that you find.
Databases
A lot of important information today is available online on a paid subscription basis. Most college and university libraries subscribe to large database aggregators such as Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, and LexisNexis. These databases, in turn, often host smaller and more disciplinary specific databases that you can use.
At most schools, students can log in from remote sites to use the databases to which the school's library has subscribed. These electronic databases are usually the best place to find contemporary journal, newspaper, and magazine articles.
Reference works
Nearly all libraries have a section devoted to reference materials that do not circulate. Reference materials can be either in printed books or in online databases. They are good for giving an overview of a topic and pointing you to other, more specialized resources. Reference materials such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, almanacs, and bibliographies are often general—The New Encyclopedia Britannica is one example. Others are specialized works, such as the Dictionary of Literary Biography or the Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences, that provide in- depth information on a single field or topic.
Researching Online
General search engines
Most people conduct research online using search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Different search engines use different criteria to scan the entire internet and provide search results based on what other people searching for the same things have found to be most useful.
Search engines work best when you narrow the search by including several keywords in a single search; by using Boolian operators such as "and," "or," and "not" to show relationships between different keywords, or by placing multi-word phrases inside of quotation marks.
Specialized search engines
Some searches are best conducted by specialized search engines, such as Google Scholar, which searches only through scholarly sources; Google News, which searches only through contemporary news sources; and CiteSeerX, which searches scientific documents. You can also search the content of social media sites through specialized search engines such as Google Blogs and Twitter Search.
Government sites
Many governmental agencies and departments have websites where you can research government reports and statistics. USA.gov is where the U.S. government makes its data available.
Portals
Internet portals allow you to browse and search through information connected to a specific topic. The USA.gov portal, for example, connects to all of the documents produced by the different offices and departments of the U.S. government. The DPLA (Digital Public Library of America) portal connects to high-quality reference information across the internet.
Newspapers and magazines
Most major newspapers and magazines maintain online archives that can be searched for individual stories. Often, some portion of these archives are free, while other portions require a subscription or charge a per-item fee. These archives can be an excellent way to research things that happened in a specific area or to understand how important historical events were understood at the time that they happened.
Digital archives
Many libraries, museums, and research centers have digitized their special collections, making rare books, works of art, concert recordings, old films, and other hard-to-find sources easily available. The Library of Congress, for example, now contains millions of pages of material from its special collection. Other sources include the National Archives, the New York Public Library, and the Internet Archive.
EVALUATING SOURCES
Now that you've located potential sources, your next step is to decide which ones to use. This section will explain ways for you to choose reliable and useful sources.
Never rely on just one kind of source
A good research strategy for most topics will include information in books, journals, electronic databases, web archives, and publicly accessible websites. Good research means going wherever there is good information to be found.
Start with material that has already been evaluated
For each source you work with, begin with information that has already been evaluated by a professional academic librarian. All of the books in a college or university library have gone through such an evaluation, as have the electronic databases to which college libraries subscribe. These databases usually contain academic journals, reference materials, and even the full texts of books that have been reviewed by editors and librarians and found to be appropriate for academic research.
Research the source
Consider a source's author, date of publication, and publisher. Is the author affiliated with any organizations? Was the article published or written recently? If not, is the information it offers out of date? Who is the publisher—a government organization, a private business, a special interest group? Does the publisher have a vested interest in the information being presented? All these factors can affect the reliability of your source.
Read carefully
Another good way to check a source is simply to examine it very carefully. The other articles the source cites may give you important clues to its overall purposes and biases.
Cross-check facts
As a general rule, you should be able to verify whether a piece of information is factual by finding it in more than one source. If the piece of information is disputed, you may have to consult multiple sources and decide on the most accurate way to incorporate the information into your essay.
QUOTING, PARAPHRASING, AND SUMMARIZING
Once you have located and evaluated the sources you would like to use, the next step is incorporating them into your essay—to do so, you may quote, paraphrase, or summarize. Here are a few suggestions for working with quotations, paraphrases, and summaries. More specific suggestions on each kind of citation follow. As a general rule, these three methods help you to illustrate, establish, or support your own argument, but you should not allow quotations, paraphrases, and summaries to speak for you. Whenever you cite—that is, refer to—other people's ideas, your reader must be able to differentiate between those ideas and your own.