Contextualized Online Search and Research Skills 

Searching for answers to questions you have for your projects requires more than just a simple Google search. You need to have proper skills that will enable you to gather useful and credible information online. According to Scholastic, the following are the online research skills students need (Hudson, 2017).

CHECK YOUR SOURCES

• Evaluate the information you gather from your sources, whether they are from books, online articles, news sites, or websites. Consider the benchmarks for evaluating a website: currency ( is it up to date?), security (does it ask for too much private information from you?), scope (is the content in-depth or too shallow?), and authority (who wrote the content? Is he an expert?).

ASK GOOD QUESTIONS

• Be specific when entering queries into search engines. It gives the search engine proper context regarding what you are looking for, therefore enabling the engine to give you better search results.

GO BEYOND THE SURFACE

• Be persistent in looking for more information regarding your topic . One common lapse of student researchers is that they only look for information in the first search result they find on search engines. There are times when information in the 10th result is more useful that the information in the first one you see. Try looking for other sources rather than sticking to one.

BE PATIENT

• There are times when the Internet does not provide the information you are looking for. You may not find the exact answer to your query, but bits of data are scattered all over the Internet. You just need to think critically and synthesize the data you have gathered until you yourself can formulate your own conclusion.

RESPECT OWNERSHIP

• Remember that everything on the Internet, be it text, images, ideas, audio, or any other form of information, has its own respective owner. Illegal acquisition, distribution, or reuse of any these may result in copyright infringement. These will be discussed in further detail in the succeeding topics.

USE YOUR NETWORKS

• Social media and other information tools like Wikipedia and online forums are useful when doing research. Social media can provide various and nuanced perspectives on the information you need. Social media and other information tools like Wikipedia and online forums are useful when doing research.  We will discuss other good sources of information in the succeeding topics.

As stated earlier, it is strongly advised not to limit yourself to the top level result provided to you by your search engine. The following are websites, webtools, and online documents that may provide you with better access to the information you are looking for.

GOOGLE SEARCH

• By far, Google Search is the most popular and powerful search engine in the 21st century. Owned by the multinational technology company Google, this search engine has evolved from a simple search engine into a smart one, which is capable of searching the web through voice input and filtering the results according to your behavioral data gathered by the search engine.

GOOGLE SCHOLAR

• Google Scholar, another product from Google, gives users, especially researchers, a simpler way to search for scholarly literature on the Internet. Using Google Scholar, yo can search for research papers, articles, books, court rulings, and other sources of information. This is a great tool when looking for contents for the Related Literature section of your research paper.

BING

• Bing is the best alternative search engine to Google. Bing is Microsoft’s attempt to challenge Google in search, but despite their efforts, they still did not manage to convince users that their search engine can be as reliable as Google. Bing originated from Microsoft’s previous search engines (MSN Search, Windows Live Search, Live Search). Bing’s search engine share is between 2.55% and 12.61%. 

ONLINE JOURNALS

• A journal is a periodical publication that contains scholarly articles relating to a particular discipline or field of study. These are often published by academic or scientific institutions (including universities), and the contributors are researchers, professors, doctors, and other professional in their respective fields. Articles in journals are different from newspapers. Newspapers are intended for general readers while journal articles are intended for academics and people who are engage in specialized fields of study. These kind of articles, most of the time, are the most useful as primary information sources for research.

• Online Journals, in turn, are scholarly publications released in a format accessible via the internet. In other words, the journals that are kept in your schools libraries and other libraries in the world are kept in the Cloud or Internet in digital format. Oxford University Press is example on an online journal repository.

You can also add CC Search to your list of search engines. 

CC SEARCH

• CC Search searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It goes beyond simple search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution. 

Wikipedia is a common starting point when conducting research. However, the content that you are going to use when writing your paper must be taken from the cited references for the Wikipedia article and not the article itself. The primary source is not only a more reliable source, it may also contain information that you can use to support your claims.

There are many academic websites and libraries that provide electronic copies of papers, journals, books, videos, and audio recordings that may aid you in the research process. The following are some of the most

INTERNET ARCHIVE

• The internet archive is a non-profit electronic library that has a free-to-access collection of digitized material ranging from websites, multimedia files, and academic materials. A large number of books, including modern ones, can also be borrowed from the Open library, also run by the Internet Archive.

EBSCOhost

• EBSCO is another digital library that offers premium fee-based access to mainly academic materials that are normally not available for public use. It runs a service called EBSCOhost that provides an online research database with full-text digital copies of books, medical references, and historical archives.

JSTOR

• is another digital library that is primarily licensed to academic, scientific, and other research and educational institutions. Like EBSCOhost, it provides full-text searches of books, primary sources, and other reference and scholarly materials.  JSTOR is a part of ITHAKA, a non-profit organization and teaching in the academe via digital technologies.

The biggest issue surrounding ICT concerns the violation of intellectual property rights (IPR), which is the act of stealing other people works and ideas, whether knowingly or unknowingly. For example, when your buy a book, the author or publisher earns money, but if you borrow a book and photocopy it, you technically do not pay for it - the author or publisher of the book does not get anything in return for the use of the book. The latter is one form of IPR infringement, no matter how subtle.

Another common form of IPR infringement is when you use other people's work, such as images, movies, or music, and alter them or combine them into a different work, such as those used in YouTube fan created videos and images modifications. There may be no intention on profiting from such work but it is still considered as IPR infringement.

Intellectual property laws (IPL) protect the rights of people to  maintain legal ownership of their works and ideas. It covers their right to control how their work can be consumed by the general public, including whether their work can be acquired or used for a cost. Someone who takes the work or idea of another person and claims it as his own may be accused of theft. But IPR is not a given right: they have to be applied for and granted to the applicant by the proper authorities. Otherwise, the contents of a book that you have written or the blueprint for an invention you have made may be claimed freely or used by others for profit without claim ownership of the material.

Granting ownership of an idea to a  person is not an easy thing to do. There are instances when an idea must be elaborated and organized properly before the petitioner can be granted exclusive rights to it. On the other hand, a copyright can also be automatically claimed by the originator of an idea without the need to apply for rights if he already has a record of what he has produced.

Artworks, novels, short stories, poems, music, and movies are only some of the copyrighted things that are available on the Internet. These can be copied without a single centavo given to the authors of the works. The Internet is only one of many platforms where they are distributed. Other instruments used for piracy include digital video cameras, MP3 recorders, and optical disc burners for CDs and DVDs. In order to minimize the incidence of illegal copying of intellectual material, manufacturers have been cautioned about making and designing products that allows easy and multiple duplication of media files.

In your project and in other research papers, you will always be asked to add information about your paper by citing information taken from other research materials. This is very risky especially if you might fall into the plagiarism trap. To avoid that, try to follow Write Check's 6 Way to Avoid Plagiarism in Research Papers (Write Check, 2017).

Six Ways to Avoid Plagiarism

1. Paraphrase - Read the material you wish to use and rephrase it in your own words. Using two words consecutively must be avoided. However, a situation wherein it cannot be avoided, quotation marks must be used.

2. Cite - Proper citation must be observe when referencing existing material. Several guidelines are observed when writing research papers and reports depending on the industry standard. Example are the guidelines established by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Psychological Association (APA), the Associated Press (AP), and the Chicago Manual on Style. citation often requires the name of the author of the material you intend to reference and the publication date.

3. Quoting - Directly quoting the source material is recommended in order to avoid misquotation of misinterpretation. However, many institution generally discourage to use of "block quotes." Block quotes are direct quotations that are 40 or more words long and are usually separated from the main text. It is still best to paraphrase your source materials and avoid quoting directly as much as possible.

4. Citing Quotes - The methods of citing quotes and citing the paraphrase material generally differ. The former often includes the page number written after the name of the author if the source material is a book, magazine, or a newspaper, among several others sources.

5. Citing Your Own Material - Although the reference you may want to use is your own work, it is still necessary to cite yourself as you would the work the another person. Failure to provide citations for your own material is known as "self-plagiarism."

6. Referencing - Apart from citing direct quotes and paraphrased text, it is also important to provide a page for references and other material used at the end of your work. Information such as the title of the work (as well as the title of the publication or website, in certain cases), the name of the author(s), the publication date and place, and the universal resource locator of the source (for websites) are among the details that must be provided. The format for your references will depend also on the standard required by the institution or industry you will present your work to.