Internet Research Workstation by Jay Brandes

~ Internet Research Workstation ~ by Jay Brandes.� Copyright notice.

SEARCH ENGINES:

AltaVista * Excite * HotBot * InfoSeek * Lycos * WWW Worm * WebCrawler * Yahoo
MetaCrawler (Multi-engine) * DogPile (Multi-engine)
COLLECTION (All-In-One) * COLLECTION (RiceInfo) * COLLECTION (Ashland U.)

JOURNAL AND DOCUMENT INDEXES:
Uncover Web - indexing to 17,000+ journals. FREE
AULIMP - Air University Library Index to Military Periodicals. Indexes nearly 100 journals. FREE
ERIC - Education Resources Information Center - indexes journals and documents in education FREE.
HealthGate - Access to Medline, an index to journals and documents in the field of medicine. FREE Anthropological Index ONLINE - Index to anthropology journals. FREE

JOURNALS:
Style manual for citing the Internet. Citing the WWW in Style.
Journal links from New Jour Electronic Journals and Newsletters.
Journal links from E-ZINE-LIST by John Labovitz.
Compiled journal links from the Yahoo search engine. Go to journal listings for:
Art * Business * Computers * Education * Entertainment * Government *
Health * Reference * Regional * Science * Social Science * Society & Culture

NAVIGATION:
Your BROWSER, e.g. Netscape or Internet Explorer, allows you to navigate effectively among web sites. SEARCH ENGINES are indexes to web sites. Key Word search engines search on words that you enter. An example of a key word search engine is AltaVista http://www.altavista.digital.com . Menu search engines search from a series of menus. An example of a menu search engine is Yahoo http://www.yahoo.com. Meta search engines search several search engines simultaneously. An example of a meta search engine is DogPile http://www.dogpile.com. A COLLECTION OF SEARCH ENGINES can be accessed above.

CITING THE INTERNET:
Record the Universal Resource Locator (URL) of WWW sites in order to find them again readily if need be and in order to cite them properly. For articles obtained from proprietary databases record the name of the database and the date you accesses it. A guide to Modern Language Association and American Psychological Association style is Citing the World Wide Web in Style....

DOWNLOADING: When downloading save your file as filename.txt, i.e. nafta1.txt. If you do not you may have large amounts of unwanted characters in your file. These characters are the code which works behind the scenes to make WWW links operate. You should be able to retrieve text files using any word processor or electronic note pad.

EVALUATING DOCUMENTS:
When evaluating information on the WWW--be skeptical! Availability on the Internet does not guarantee reliability. Some steps for evaluating a site are determining who the authors are; if the document has a title; what type of site is providing the information; when the information was updated; and if the document provides references or links to other information that might clarify its content.

Hint: Common extensions found prior to the first single slash in U.S. URLs are .com (commercial) .edu (educational) .gov (government) .mil (military) .org (organization). CAUTION: Schools (.edu) may let students create personal web pages. Other evaluation criteria are available at: http://www.bowdoin.edu/dept/library/internet/eval/.

PROPRIETARY DATABASES:
These commercial, non-profit, or subscription services typically provide indexing to journals, documents, books, and Internet sites. They may provide abstracting and full text. A COLLECTION OF PROPRIETARY DATABASES can be accessed above. They include Air University Library Index to Military Periodicals, ERIC, Medline, Uncover, and Anthropological Index. More information regarding databases is presented below...

GENERAL INFORMATION on PROPRIETARY DATABASES

Several proprietary databases can be accessed this web page. It is important not to confuse a database (content) with the company that provides it or the search interface used to access the database. Database titles appear in bold on this page. The following is some brief information on these services.

Most databases allow searches using the boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT. Use AND to limit search results (e.g. dog and fleas), use OR to broaden a search (e.g. cat or dog or bird), use NOT to exclude results which include a particular term (e.g. food additives NOT pet). Use NOT with caution or you may exclude useful items. Most databases default the AND operator when you enter terms (e.g. if you enter the terms federal automotive laws the system will search on federal and automotive and laws).

Generally, databases are not case sensitive, i.e. they do not care whether or not you capitalize. The safest choice is not to capitalize. If a database is case sensitive, a lower-case search will look for both upper and lower case, but an upper-case search will search for an exact case match.