Science Resources - Finding the best
While using a search engine like Google may seem super easy, it's often had to tell fact from fiction, especially when science is involved.
Consider these two Web sites: Which one do you think is a fake and which is real? What criteria did you use to decide?
There are a number of things you must consider when you do a Web search:
- Who hosts the site? One way to determine this is to use easywhois, which lets you trace the IP address of the site's owner.
- Does URL end with .com .edu or .org? Just because a site ends .edu or .org does not mean it's valid. (Check out Republic of Molossia)
- Is the page regularly kept up to date?
- Are the many broken links?
- Who is the author? Is he or she pushing a particular point of view?
To make things a bit easier, start with some of the resources below:
- Encyclopedia Britannica - An encyclopedia is a good place to get an overview of a topic.
- Environmental Studies and Policy - Use this database to find current information on the environment and on environmental policies.
- Science in Context - This database is a collection of resources covering science news, research and experiments.
- Research in Context - Like Science in Context, though this database covers more topics.
- Newspapers - For current issues in science, a major newspaper is a good place to look. This database contains full-text articles that you can search by headline, date, newspaper section and more.