Searching

Posted on April 14, 2012 by egonzalez

I’ve often wondered how Google’s results were ordered, as I’ve sometime notice that the results at top aren’t necessarily the most relevant to my search and sometimes results towards the middle or bottom of the page are. Now that I know of Google’s system called page rank, it makes sense and now I know that the search results at the top of the page are there because they got the most links back to them and not because there the most relevant. Before last week’s class I had never heard of a “Google bomb” or its uses, once again explaining the random results we sometimes get.

When searching I’ve learned that sometimes less is more. When searching in a database or in an library catalog too many words may lead to possible results being eliminated.

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Tips and Troubleshooting for Developing a Good Research Paper

Posted on April 12, 2012 by cj

One thing that i have learned about writing a good research paper is that it is important to have an outline to help you develop a good paper. In high school i never knew that it was important when i had to write essay’s for my English classes at the time, my teachers would always tell us to write an outline in order to help us write and develop a very good paper. I always think about this every time i have to write a paper on something being that i am a college student now, it really can help me focus more with a proper structure for my paper that can take me from a question to a conclusion clearly and faithfully as badke book states. I also understand that it is very good to also have causes and effects in your paper to persuade something or someone that this might have caused the event or situation to happen in the first place. It is also the main reason that made you write your paper in the beginning. Writing a good paper in my opinion takes a lot of time, and concentration because you have to come up with good ideas, reasons, and sources to help you back up your question that you are asking in your research paper. But as long as you are finding good information and sources for your paper, and have a very good outline then you should have no problem on developing a great paper to write about.

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Notes from today, and reading/blogging for Monday, April 16

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Anne Leonard

Today we discussed some research writing strategies, and then moved on to discussion of the Grimmelmann and Fister articles, and why to evaluate information in all types of media. Slides from today are available here. I’ll be close to email for much of Spring Break, so that’s the best way to get in touch with your questions about the research paper draft, due Wednesday, 4/18.

On Monday, April 16, we’ll spend some more time on writing an academic research paper and play the evaluation game based on the evaluation criteria that you crowdsourced on Monday. Please read Badke Ch. 10 and Appendix 1 (pp. 196-203 in 3rd ed.; 235-238 in 4th ed.) and write one reading response blog post; see prompt below:

Last week we read about and worked on the following:
1.advanced internet searching
2.searching library catalogs
3.searching article databases.
•What have you learned in these classes that’s new to you?
•How do you see yourself using your new skills outside of our course?

Enjoy Spring Break!

~Prof. Leonard

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Research Journal Library Database vs Search Engine

Posted on April 2, 2012 by egonzalez

 

One immediate and obvious difference between an internet search engine and a library database is the “so called” amount of results. When I searched “e-book academic usage” on Google 210,000,000 hits came up, much too many for me to ever sift through. A search on ACM Digital Library resulted in 150 results. Though these results were more manageable after skimming through them I found that not many pertained to what I intended on researching, about less than a handful did. Many of the results came up because my search had the term “e-book” in it, so the results were actual e-books and not articles on e-books. My Google search on the other hand gave me many more relevant results. 

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Notes from today, and reading & homework for Wednesday, April 4

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Anne Leonard

Today we discussed how to evaluate information and crowdsourced evaluation criteria for web content; here is the proof. The final criteria we determined in class are the following:

  • authenticity
  • objectivity
  • scholarly merit
  • date of publication

Your research paper outline is due as an email attachment to me before the start of class on Wednesday, April 4. Remember, the format I provided is an option; your goal is to produce an outline that actually helps you write a good first draft, so if you have a more effective way to organize your arguments, please use it.

On Wednesday, April 4, we’ll be discussing why to evaluate information. For Wednesday, please read Fister, “The devil in the details: Media representation of ritual abuse and evaluation of sources” and Grimmelman, “The Google Dilemma.” Time permitting, we’ll use the information evaluation criteria in a research game in class.

Slides from today are available here.

~Prof. L.

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searching keywords

Posted on April 2, 2012 by David R

Looking up sources for the research paper, I initially would check google and major search engines.  However as it turns out, when it comes to research material for a paper, you have to use a scholarly journal database search engine. When I looked up the key words “gatekeepers of Wikipedia” in both types or search engines, than the results were very different.  Google gave very broad results and maybe only one of them was of scholarly quality that I could utilize.  Everything else was quite far from what I needed. With google I would get history of gatekeeping to the ask.com definition of gatekeeping.  The  scholarly journal search engine, ebsco, would also give broad results but offered may ways of narrowing and filtering the results. You were able to choose by subject, title, author, and several other options.

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Search Engines. You choose.

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Michael.M

Ok so when it comes to me researching a topic; I automatically type in google.com and start from there. I usually try to stick to the first page of results because I find those to actually be the best results to choose from; why else would they be on the first page. But I seemed to have a problem however, using the google scholar. I could not find a good handful of sources that are good for me to work with when it comes to my topic and it frustrated me very much. The library database helped a lot more than google scholar and I even picked a couple of the results to add to my bibliography since they will be very useful.

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research journal

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Ian Pei

It has been difficult to develop this research outline. For some reason, average teenagers now a days have difficultly creating an adequate intro for their paper which can lead to difficulties in their body paragraphs. It can be because they don’t know how to word it properly, the structure is improper, or it’s vague and drags off the topic. And what most students will probably do is search for an example of an outline for their research topic and take some, if not the whole intro, as their own. I believe the reason why the average teen has problems is because they don’t read books enough nor do they practice writing and revising their work.

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The search goes on.

Posted on April 2, 2012 by evortega

 

I first used google to search my research topic and I used the schools library database and the New York public library database to search for my topic. The results were really different from each other. I get more results for my topic just a search engine rather then using a library database. On my first search I used the phrase “Internet privacy.” After a few minutes after looking at the sear h results I later type in “online privacy,” and end up with almost similar results. For example, Wikipedia came up first in both searches with the topic “Internet Privacy.”

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Creature of habit

Posted on April 2, 2012 by darren732

Many of us will go to what is normal to use in our searches. I am no different in that aspect as I went to Google for my search and found as usual a plethora of articles, wiki, newscasts and blogs on different variations of my question. I used the keywords of Piracy, streaming media, China, copyright and the results came back with many pages. Whereas when I used the EBSCO Host, the results I came back with were only four. Google Scholar was a second finisher as it also returned a good amount of sources yet they were mostly papers you would have to purchase to see, giving only tantalizing amounts of information before reaching the scholarly pay wall.

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