3 Researching effectively There are several different ways of finding out information about a certain topic. Research offline • Go to your school library or your local library. • Collect material from books, newspapers and magazines. • Talk to someone who knows a lot about the subject, e.g. English/American friends or exchange students at your school. • Write to an organisation or an agency that might be able to send you brochures, posters or information sheets, e.g. tourist offices, museums, government agencies, NGOs (= non-government organisations) or political parties. Research online There are two ways of doing this: 1. Use a subject guide or directory, e.g. Yahoo. Choose a category, sub-category, etc. This is helpful if you are researching a broad subject. 2. Use a search engine, e.g. Google, and enter the expression you are looking for, e.g. solar energy projects in Austria. It is better if you have a specific topic and clearly defined keywords. Checking results Do not believe everything you read! Anyone can publish anything on the internet. Some sources are more reliable than others, so always check how trustworthy the source is. • You can find out whether a website is reliable by looking at the URL1. Government sources (.gov) or university sites (.ac or .edu) are generally more reliable than private sites. • Check the country code top-level domain (e.g. .at = Austria, .uk = United Kingdom, .us = United States of America) in the URL. Do not use English pages from countries where English is not the first language. • Try to find out when the information was last updated. • Always cross-check your website information with other sources. Even if the source itself is not very trustworthy, it might have links to other websites that are reliable. Dealing with results • Always note down your sources so that you know where the information came from. • Always add the date and time when you have found the information on the internet. Tip A few search tips for search engines • Use inverted commas to search for a longer term (words in the exact order), e.g. searching for “United Nations Conference” will show results for “United Nations Conference” but not for “United” only. • Use the + sign to look for two or more words in the same document but not necessarily in the same order, e.g. searching for United + Nations will show you all documents containing the two words in any order: United Nations, Nations … United, United … Nations, etc. • Use the - sign to exclude words from your search. Searching for United -Nations (no space after the - sign!) will show results for United only, but will not show documents containing United AND Nations. • Describe what you need with as few words as possible. • If you get too many results, try to choose more specific keywords. • If you do not get the results that you are looking for, try a different search word. Think of other ways to describe the subject. T 1 URL: Uniform Resource Locator (address of a webpage) 42 Saving the planet Research skills Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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