 |
This video from McMaster University Libraries explains the differences between search and research. Watch to find out more about developing a search strategy, exploring a variety of sources and thinking critically about the information you have found.
 |
| Welcome to Search Home, on these pages you will find search engines, paid and free databases as well as links to other libraries, newspapers, journals and magazines. |
 |
CLICK HERE TO ACCESS |
Click on LibAuth and enter your network credentials.
When you start to look for information on a topic, where do you start? Google?
Many students do. Google is a great place to start and you will find a lot of useful information there. But finding information using Google has some limitations. When you search using Google, you cannot be certain that all the results returned are reliable as there are no measures of control on the internet...anyone can publish.
It is OK to use Google to find background or general information - WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE questions. But for scholarly research, you need to find authoritative information on your topic from a variety of sources, not just websites retrieved by Google.
Scholarly information is in-depth, accurate, well researched and written by academics and researchers. Scholarly information is found in sources such as books and journals. Some scholarly information, such as journal articles, may have gone through a peer-review process as well.
Articles published in journals have been through a formal approval process. This means that an editor and subject specialists have reviewed the article before it has been accepted for publication. This guarantees the quality of the research.
When you are researching a topic, non-scholarly information sources can also provide valuable information. Reliable non-scholarly information is usually produced by professionals who have specialist knowledge in a field, or by people with a special interest in a topic.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t collect or store any of your personal information.
Dogpile is a metasearch engine that fetches results from Google, Yahoo!, Yandex, and results from other popular search engines.
Wolfram|Alpha is a computational search engine. Using expert-level knowledge, this search engine doesn’t just find links; it answers questions, does analysis, and generates reports.
Some of these academic search engines will take you to open access research papers.