Finding good information online: A Biologist’s perspective

It is fairly easy to find information on the internet, but how can we find good information on the web?  A blogger for Scientific American provides several tips for finding high quality content on the web.  Among his recommendations are to use specialized search engines and databases as well as to fact check everything you find.  His first piece of advice, “don’t be scared of scientific papers” might be particularly interesting to many students at UB when they find themselves needing to find scholarly journal articles.  First, the article explains what these are, and then provides some tips for how to find citations for scientific articles.  Before you get discouraged by his list of options for actually getting a copy of the articles you find, know that you can get almost all of these items through Langsdale Library.

Many of these articles will be on of Langsdale’s online databases.  But which one should you check?  You you can use the library’s “journal finder” to look for a journal title and see which databases have it. If we don’t have it available online, you can get the article in 2-3 business days by completing an Interlibrary Loan request. 

And of course, you can search the library databases directly, which gives you many more options for good websites with which to start your search.  So the article provides some good tips to anyone who wants to find good information online, but for folks at UB, it is a whole lot easier.

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