Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
Try this search term: "organic food"
Try this search term too: GMO
Try being more specific: GMO and corn
Limit your search to academic websites: "organic food" site:.edu
Limit your search to government websites: "organic food" site:.gov
How to Search with Google
Google is a database on the open web.
We all use Google to look for information.
The video below provides a demonstration of how to effectively search Google for information sources.
How to Search with Twitter
Social media is sometimes considered a controversial resource for information but it can provide a wealth of access to people with expertise and experience sharing information and ideas in an informal, open-web setting.
When considering social media as a resource, it's useful to make distinctions between the different platforms.
Twitter can be a useful way to access people's special experience and expertise. You don't need to have an account to look for information on Twitter.
This video below demonstrates how to search for information using Twitter.
When should you use Wikipedia?
Students are often told NOT to use Wikipedia in their search for information when in fact, Wikipedia can be an extremely useful tool that is readily available to you.
Wikipedia is great for background research on a specific topic, understanding context for that topic, and finding additional sources related to that topic.
The video below demonstrates some of the ways it can be helpful to use Wikipedia in your research.
Investigating Web Sources
It's very important to investigate the web sources you find to determine if and how you want to use them.
The video below shows what this investigation process looks like in practice and highlights strategies you can (and should!) use to investigate open web sources.