Be careful about the following two things:
While much of the “basic” information on most research-oriented
websites is not going to radically change from day to day, that is
certainly not true of all sites. Just as the identical keyword search
may yield radically different results if run on two separate days (or on
two different search engines), you may find material you need deleted
the next time you look for it. So if you find something really good,
download it, save it to your hard drive, or print a hard copy.
Online bookstores (amazon.com, bn.com and, if you’re Canadian,
chapters.indigo.ca) will list many books even before they’re published,
and almost always before your local library has ordered, cataloged,
and shelved them. Amazon’s recently added feature of including
searchable pages from many titles—from a table of contents and
a short excerpt to 50 pages of text or more—should help you get
a feel for whether the book or a portion of it is pertinent to your
topic.
Amazon in particular offers a “People who bought this book also
bought” feature, which is a good way to locate related resources
(especially since none of the online bookstores make searches by
subject easy or accurate).
An Approach to Online Research
I am indebted to Robin Rowland, author of The Creative Guide to
Research (Career Press, 2001) for the following suggestions on how
to maximize your time online:
■ Long before a paper is due, choose four search engines—one
a metasearch engine (which searches other search engines),
the other three regular. Robin’s recommendations: Copernic
(meta), Google, Hotbot, AltaVista, Northern Light, Dogpile
(meta).130 How to Study