HOW TO REVIEW THE LITERATURE AND CONDUCT ETHICAL STUDIESspans rather than the slow, deliberative, careful
reading and study of content (see Expansion Box
3, Websites: Surfer Beware).
2.Many excellent sources and some critical
resource materials arenot available on the Inter-
net.Contrary to popular belief, the Internet has not
made all information free and accessible to every-
one. Often what is free is limited, and fuller infor-
mation is available only to those who pay.
3.Finding sources on the Internet can be time
consuming.It is not easy to locate specific source
materials. The several search engines (e.g., Google,
Bing, Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, AskJeeves.com)
work somewhat differently and can produce very
different results. I searched for the same term,voter
disenfranchisement,using four different search
engines, all within 5 minutes. I looked at the first
three results for each engine. Each search engine
produced one or more sites that the others missed.
Only two Web sites appeared in more than one
search engine; all of the others were unique. Of the
two Web sites that were among the top three “hits”
more than once, one of them was a broken link.
Obviously, you want to use multiple search engines
and go beyond the first page of results. Most search
engines simply look for specific words in a short
description of the Web page. Search engines can
come up with tens of thousands of sources, far toomany for anyone to examine. The ones at the “top”
may be there because their short description had
several versions of the search word. Your “best”
Web source might be buried as the 150th item found
in a search.
4.Internet sources can be “unstable” and dif-
ficult to document.You can conduct a Web search
and find Web pages with useful information. You
can return a week later and find that several of them
have disappeared. Be sure to note the specific uni-
form resource locator (url) or “address” (usually
starts http://) where the Web page resides. The
address refers to an electronic file sitting in a com-
puter somewhere. Unlike a journal article that will
be stored on a shelf or on microfiche in hundreds
of libraries for many decades to come and are avail-
able for anyone to read,Web pages can quickly
vanish. This can make it impossible to easily check
someone’s Web references, verify a quote in a
document, or go back to original materials. Also, it
is easy to copy, modify, or distort a source and then
reproduce copies of it. For example, a person could
alter a text passage or a photo image and then create
a new Web page to disseminate the false informa-
tion. This raises issues about copyright protection
and the authenticity of source material.
Understanding the Internet, its jargon, and ways
to identify a worthwhile site takes time and practice.EXPANSION BOX 3
Web Sites: Surfer BewareThe rapid diffusion of Internet access and increased
reliance on the Internet for information have pro-
vided many benefits. The Internet is unregulated, so
almost anyone can create a Web site saying almost
anything. In 2000, over 60 million U.S. residents went
online in search of health information. Among those
who use the Internet, more than 70 percent report
the health information they find will influence a deci-
sion about treatment. A study (Berland et al., 2001)
on health information available on the Internet found
that health information is often incomplete or inac-
curate. The researchers used ten English and four
Spanish search engines looking for four search terms:
breast cancer, childhood asthma, depression, and
obesity. They found that less than one-fourth of the
linked background information on health Web pages
provided valid, relevant information.
Thirty-four physicians evaluated the quality of
25 health Web sites. They concluded that less than
one-half more than minimally covered a topic and
were completely accurate. The researchers found
that, more than half the time, information in one part
of a site contradicted information elsewhere on the
same site and same topic. They also found wide vari-
ation in whether the site provided full source docu-
mentation. On average, only 65 percent of the site
provided accurate documentation of the author and
date of its sources.