Online Research Help

High School Research Guide: Reliable Sources and Effective Tools for Students and Educators 

For decades, teachers and students have searched libraries and the internet for reliable, trustworthy sources of information. Welcome to the 21st century! While Google can sometimes be controversial regarding bias, my experience has shown that it remains a reliable and trustworthy tool for meeting basic high school research standards. The Google search engine serves as a one-stop shop for most high school research needs, providing current, relevant, and meaningful results. The challenge with databases is that they are often limited unless you pay for access. However, Academia.edu is an excellent free resource that allows users to log in with their Google account to print, save, and annotate articles, making it worth exploring. JSTOR is similar, but without a paid subscription, users can neither print nor annotate. Both Academia.edu and JSTOR are ideal for students who are more advanced in their research process and can also be accessed using a Google login. The Gale Databases are free and come with many helpful features, but finding the right information can be challenging. If you find what you need, great—but be prepared to spend some time searching! Additionally, many Gale resources are three to five years old, whereas Google search results are typically updated within 4-24 hours. Google also now offers an AI feature that provides basic tertiary source information.

Chat.openai isn't appropriate for high school students as it is an unreliable, tertiary source. However, if you have a student interested in learning how to prompt and engage in a dialogue with a machine, feel free to send them to me. They can explore Chat 4o under supervision.

Stick to the Google search engine, and you can be confident that the sources are reliable and robust. Students can quickly build a working bibliography in about ten minutes by copying a URL into the Google citation maker, which automatically generates an MLA citation. It may sound too good to be true, but Google has made it incredibly easy for anyone to gather the most up-to-date, reliable information they need.

Mock topic: The Impact of Social Media on Teen Mental Health

Type this topic word-for-word into the Google search engine, and here’s what your students will find:

• Scholarly articles will appear in the search results, and you can also use Google Scholar (accessible with a Google login), which is a specialized search engine for academic articles, theses, books, conference papers, and patents. This is ideal for finding peer-reviewed and scholarly sources.

• Many .org and .gov sites will show up quickly, as well as reputable media sources. You won’t need to look beyond the first couple of pages to find multiple reliable sources.

• Every Google search includes the “People also ask…” feature, which provides dropdown menus that allow you to cross-reference your search.

• Don’t forget to use the Google Docs citation maker when creating a bibliography, works consulted, or works cited page. All you need is an ISBN number or URL to easily generate a citation.

• Google also features a “Discussions and Forums” section. When students are logged into their Google accounts, they can enter discussion questions to receive answers or engage in a dialogue.

• The “People also search for…” feature helps students broaden their research.

• At the top of the search results, students can access News, Images, and Videos, allowing them to find a variety of source types.

• Students should also utilize YouTube as a source, and citing a YouTube video is easy using the Google Docs citation maker.

If you require students to use a book for their research project, I'll do my best. Our non-fiction collection is limited, but I'm adding new titles each year. Students can also use the downtown library and the CW-MARS catalog, where they can request books to be delivered to the downtown library for pickup.

If you’d like me to go over this with your students, sign up for a time to bring your class down to the media center. You can do this via the website:
Meet with the Librarian.

If a student needs one-on-one help with the research process, have them contact me, and I'll work with them individually.

By Jim Freel