Find Good Academic Sources
- Some questions to ask:
- Is anyone citing it? (Google Scholar has a count. Take into account age.)
- Is it recent enough (philosophy and engineering articles age at different speeds)
- How good is the source?
- Access and paywalls
- You might need to be AT UNIVERSITY (or use a VPN) for some things
- Check Google Scholar “all versions”
- To get books
- Check your own library OPAC
- Download a sample chapter from Google Books or Amazon Kindle
- Find copies in nearby libraries: http://ci.nii.ac.jp/books/
- Google Scholar is main search engine for journal articles
- http://scholar.google.com
- To find more articles, check “cited by” (e.g. “ 引用元”) or related article (関連記事)
- To check quality, check citation count: “引用元 6893”, not “引用元 1”
- Academic alternatives to Google
- Eric (academic) http://www.eric.ed.gov/
- Ethos (British Dissertations) http://ethos.bl.uk/
- ARDR (Japanese dissertations) https://dbr.nii.ac.jp
- Reading lists prepared by experts e.g. http://www.readinglists.manchester.ac.uk/index.html
- Browse top journals on your topic: http://www.journalindicators.com/indicators
- Quality articles/books are usually published by:
- Large university publishers like www.cambridge.org
- Large academic organisations like www.apa.org
- Large open-source projects like www.plosone.org/
- Large academic publishing companies: Ingenta/Sciencedirect, Degruyter, Ingenta, Wiley
- High impact factor journals e.g. www.journalindicators.com/indicators
- Bad sources are more likely to be on
- Self published books http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/Pay-to-publish
- Individual websites, blogs
- Single topic conspiracy groups: creation dot com, inconvenient history dot com (links spelled out because I don’t want to link to them)
- However, it depends. Some small groups are good, some big ones are bad, some researchers have good quality blogs to share their research.
- Learn the names of quality sources for your area.