Let's be honest: Most of us turn to Google to answer our regular, everyday questions. And Google is really good at finding answers to regular questions. But it's not a great resource for finding answers to research questions.
If I Google "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," for example, I can easily find the cast list, where to watch the series, and a link to the Wikipedia page. Those results all help me answer regular questions like who starred in the show, where to see it, and what it's about.
But none of those sources can help me answer research questions. And there are 10,600,000 search results -- Yikes! I would get frustrated pretty quickly trying to find scholarly sources in those results. And the previews of pages give me a little bit of information, but not a lot, about the reliability, perspective, and recentness of the source. I would probably end up just picking a review from the first couple of pages of results and hoping for the best.
Now you try. What happens when you do a Google search for your paper topic? How many results did you get? What kinds of questions can they answer?
Google is designed to answer regular questions, and it does that job really well. But it's not designed to answer research questions, so it can be frustrating, inefficient, and ineffective to use Google for research. It's always best to use the tools that were designed for the task you want to accomplish. That's why I recommend using library databases, which are designed for scholarly research, when you're asking research questions.
You've probably heard that Wikipedia is not a reliable source because it can be edited by anyone. And it's true! Anyone can edit a Wikipedia page: Most editors improve the pages they edit, but some vandalize pages, play tricks, or make jokes. For example, after Carli Lloyd scored 3 goals in quick succession in the US women's soccer team's 5-2 victory over Japan to win the Women's World Cup in 2015, she was briefly declared President of the United Sates on her Wikipedia page.
Still, you've probably turned to Wikipedia more than once to answer regular questions, or even read up on a research topic. That's OK! We all turn to Wikipedia from time to time. But it's important to understand what Wikipedia is and how information is constructed on Wikipedia to use it responsibly.
Try going to a Wikipedia page -- for the film you're writing about, for example. If you look at the top of the page, you'll see five tabs. On the left, you'll see "Article" and "Talk." The "Article" tab (which is the default) shows the content of the page -- the part most of us read -- but the "Talk" tab shows the conversation that Wikipedia editors are having about the content. Try toggling to the "Talk" page. What debates are the editors having?
Toggle back to the Article and look at the tabs on the right: "Read," "Edit," and "View History." Usually when we're reading Wikipedia, we're just interested in, well, reading the content. But as you've heard, anyone can edit it -- even you! By toggling to "Edit," you can edit the page (but don't -- Wikipedia has established standards and policies that you should familiarize yourself with first if you're interested in becoming an editor). By toggling to "View History," you can see all the edits that have been made to the page since it was created. This is how editors identify and remove vandalism.
One of Wikipedia's content policies is verifiability, meaning that editors should cite sources and not rely on original research. If you look at a Wikipedia page, you'll see that almost every sentence has at least one footnote -- that's the bracketed number that links to a reference in the References section at the bottom of the page. This means that (barring acts of vandalism) pretty much anything written on Wikipedia was written somewhere else first, and, using the References, you can find out where it was first written.
Does that mean it's reliable? Usually.
Doest that mean it's scholarly? No.
Wikipedia is an online, crowdsourced encyclopedia, not a publisher of original thought. When you write an academic paper, your job is to produce original, interesting ideas that engage with the original, interesting ideas of other scholars. That is, you are joining a scholarly conversation. And you can't do that without finding articles that are written by scholars who are contributing original ideas to the scholarly conversation.
Tl;dr -- Wikipedia is a great place to get acquainted with a topic, and the References list can give you a sense of where to look to learn more. But it's not a scholarly source, so it's not a good place to conduct scholarly research.
While Google and Wikipedia are designed to help you find answers to "regular" questions, library resources are designed to help you answer research questions. When you search one of the library database, you'll get far fewer search results than you'd get searching Google, but they will be more relevant, meaning that you can conduct research more effectively and efficiently. And because these databases are designed with the needs of scholarly researchers in mind, they make it easy to quickly evaluate sources by prominently showing the article's publication date, type of publication (peer-reviewed -- that is, scholarly -- or popular periodical), and associated subjects. The title and abstract tell you what the article is about, so you can decide whether or not it's worth your time to read the whole article. Many of the databases focus on specific subjects or academic disciplines, so you can easily find articles that are appropriate to your research and participating in the same scholarly conversation. MLA International Bibliography, for example, is a great database for finding articles related to literature. We'll go over how to use these databases effectively, and how to evaluate sources, in the next few sections of this guide.
