Where can a person learn to use the internet for academic research.
Where would be the best place on-line (remotely) to learn how to do on-line research that will return meaningful results that the Google Search Engine does not find? Are there any free resources to learn the skills needed to find technical answers within areas such as science or engineering?
Answers ( 3 )
If I understand your question, you are in search of education on methodologies for doing online research - things like finding primary sources, cross-referencing citations, and building an gestalt of knowledge from disparate information.
I haven't seen a good place online that is explicitly there to teach these skills, but that doesn't mean one doesn't exist, of course. As Jess observes, in technical areas of science and engineering, there is plenty of free information out there, but you have to have the discipline to learn the fundamentals that allow you to understand the higher-order information that you might want to learn.
Could you comment with a particular question or more specific example?
A lot of what I think of as "graduate-level" humanities education is geared to provide people with research skills, and that's kind of what you're looking for, at least as I read it. An assignment might be: "read these five articles, all on the same subject, from diverse authors with various degrees of connection to the thing they are writing about, and articulate your understanding of what happened." Then you get together with your colleagues and your teachers to discuss what you each learned, and what you might have missed, and what each individual author was aiming to accomplish with their writing, etc. Do enough of that and you'll learn to read things not just from a "what information is contained here" perspective, but also to question the author's agenda, place the information in conversation with other readings on the subject, adjust your understanding of the material based on the known biases of the publication source / authors other work, etc.
And when you can do that, then you get a lot more value out of the information you DO find via google - as Jess observes, the problem isn't having information, its knowing what to do with it.
I think both of the answers already provided are solid, so I will only add one thing: Google (yahoo, excite, duckduckgo, bing) the following:"scholarly articles <whatever subject you are researching>"
This will provide you with actual scholarly research instead of some guy said articles which, face it, can so rarely be trusted to provide evidence of any conclusions.
Give it a try.
Google will find almost everything. Your problem will never be a lack of information; only a lack of means for deciding which of it is (a) true; or (b) worth knowing.
In science and engineering, there are lots of online educational sites, many of which (like mine at https://jick.net/skept ) are free. You could spend several lifetimes using these to educate yourself on myriad subjects. If you are looking for specifics, WikipediA is usually pretty reliable, thanks to generations of nitpicking revisionists.
If you want to go all the way to the published literature, many scientific journals are now "Open Access", meaning free to peruse. However, the top journals tend to charge authors a steep fee for this, and the articles they reject will always be submitted to lesser journals... and lesser still... until eventually ever sort of nonsense and gibberish is eventually "published" in the vast industry of "vanity presses". In the process, the significance of "peer review" (the best we've been able to do so far) also dwindles.
So how can you decide what (or whom) to trust? I have a proposal at https://oPeer.org but it hasn't gone anywhere yet. (Maybe sage will implement it! ;-)