Being college students we know how hard it can be when we need to find reliable and relevant information for a research paper. We usually turn to the internet as our first step in the researching process and for most people it’s the only resource they have access to due to its convenience. Since most college students are usually working full time or part time jobs, have young children, or other commitments it can be difficult to find the time to go to a library or another academic institution. Even having access to the school’s databases doesn’t guarantee finding quality information if you don’t how to use a database properly. That is how we came up with the idea of creating a new type of research tool that anyone can use. If you know how to do a search on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing, then you already know how to use our research tool.
Search engines have become a vital part of our everyday life. If you want to find something on the internet all you need to do is a simple search on any search engine and you get instant results. However, this can be both a disadvantage and an advantage. For non-scholarly searches a search engine can be very good for getting general knowledge on any subject but if you need to find accurate and scholarly sources then a search engine might not be so good.
We started by first checking out Google, Yahoo!, and Bing since they are the most used search engines. Finding scholarly sources proved to be difficult on those search engines because they produce so many results and it’s hard to fish through all the information to find the relevant sources. We thought about why it was so hard to find reliable information on search engines and how they could be improved to yield better results for students who need to do research for a paper. Students were our main priority when we were thinking of what a research tool needs to be to be useful for us but we realized that anyone who wanted to find better reliable information without all the useless and irrelevant information can use our tool as well.
In Badke’s book “Research Strategies” we read about alternative searching tools like Quintura. Since information is a hierarchy with many different levels or subtopics search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing fail at distinguishing one type of information from another because they do flat searches. They work by only finding the keywords that you entered and present you with all the different sites where those keywords were used. Quintura works by clustering similar information together that belongs to its hierarchy. We also liked how they used a tag cloud which makes it visually engaging when doing a search so we decided to go with the tag cloud concept with our tool as well.
Next we tried to think about how our search tool was going to function in order to cluster the information like Quintura does. What came to mind was the concept of how a thesaurus works. A thesaurus lists words that are similar or have the same meaning as the word you search. We thought this concept would be advantageous when it comes to choosing a topic to write a paper on. Students often struggle to find a topic that is specific enough and not too broad to write about. Our tool is able to yield a tag cloud with words that are under the same hierarchy as the word you first searched. You can then click another word from the tag cloud which will yield more results that fall under that new word. This way our tool is able to help you choose and narrow down your topic to one that isn’t so broad.
Since we also have to do actual research to find the sources that support our chosen topic our tool will also be able to assist in the researching process. With every word or topic you search our tool also yields links to relevant sources around the internet. Our tool will only produce results from reliable and relevant sources that have expertise in that topic and not from websites where they might have a blog post about the topic. You can be assured that the information you receive comes from scholarly or official sources.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mZ-jOr4IGN1gbTY9tGVh3zc5xd_BaRvE99j5eXFOvjk/edit?pli=1
