In addition to what you find in the library's databases, you might also locate information from a Google search. This information can be useful to you, as long as you know why you're using it and and recognize the limits of this content. Below we briefly describe two sources of content on the Web, Wikipedia and blogs.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the top 10 most utilized web sources in the United States. It can be very useful for quickly locating facts and gathering context, and is relatively reliable for these uses. It is a secondary source.

However, Wikipedia itself notes that a wiki article should not be cited directly as a source. Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is a pointer to other sources more than a source itself. Keep this in mind as you do your research, and use Wikipedia as a launching pad rather than your final destination.

Blogs

Blogs -- short for web logs -- are frequently updated web pages. They are primary sources. Organized as posts in which the most recent post appears first, blogs are a way to keep abreast of a topic or research interest more quickly than waiting for an article to appear in a scholarly journal. Because anyone can publish a blog, you must use discretion when evaluating them. Blogs are not a substitute, but a supplement, to the scholarly journal. (As we will describe in Module III, scholarly journals have their own limits.) One useful source for keeping up with research in many fields is Research Blogging.