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Identifying Scholarly Sources: Find Scholarly Web sites

Differentiate between mass market, trade, and scholarly books and Distinguish between magazines, journals, scholarly journals and peer reviewed/refereed journals.

Internet Search Engines

Search Engines ...
 
•Are most useful when a specific site is wanted (e.g. Lord of the Rings, Lakers, CNN).

•There is only a 40% overlap among the various search engines available, therefore, it may be needful to use more than one.

•Search Engines vary in purpose and scope of content.  Selecting the best search engine for your information need will give you more useful results.

•There is NO quality control.

•They use robots, web crawlers, spiders, etc. to match characters in specific fields.

•Hit lists are ranked based on paid inclusion programs although some, like Google, have a separate sponsor list.

 

Try these other Search Engines that work differently than Google.:

Yippy: https://www.yippy.com/

Yahoo: https://www.yahoo.com/

Bing: https://www.bing.com/

Dogpile: https://www.dogpile.com/

DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/

 

Last updated August, 2019.

Scholarly Internet Search Engines

Some search engines are especially designed for academic research.  These will help you find relevant, reputable, scholarly sources of information.

BASE https://www.base-search.net/

CORE https://core.ac.uk/

Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) https://eric.ed.gov/

Google Books https://books.google.com/

Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/

Internet Archive https://archive.org/

Infotopia https://infotopia.info/index.html

Open Editions (international) https://www.openedition.org/

Open Library https://openlibrary.org/

PubMed Central https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

Refseek https://www.refseek.com/

ResearchGate https://www.researchgate.net/search

Science.gov https://www.science.gov/

Semantic Scholar https://www.semanticscholar.org/

Virtual Learning Resources Center (VLRC) https://virtuallrc.com/index.html

Last updated June 2025.

Evaluating Websites

  1. Who owns the domain?  Look it up in WHOIS https://lookup.icann.org/
  2. What type of domain is it? com/net; org; edu; gov/mil/us; non-US.
  3. Is "About" information provided?
  4. Is an author/creator of the page identified? Verify authority to speak on the topic
  5. Are sources documented? If linked, do the links work?
  6. Is there evidence of strong bias?
  7. Why was the page put on the Web?  Inform, Persuade, Sell, Satire or Parody, Other
  8. Are advertisements embedded in the Web site?
  9. Is the Web page appropriate for your purpose?