If you’re about to start an important paper or assignment, you’ll want to do your due diligence and thorough research before talking about a certain topic. It’s crucial that you get your information from credible sources, as there is a lot of misinformation and lazy wording on the internet that can truly ruin a good research paper.

Luckily, there are a wide variety of techniques and resources that you can use today that will enable you to only see credible articles and papers while doing research and browsing the web.

Content Curation

A great online resource you can use are content curation websites. The purpose of these sites is to organize online content based on categories or other traits, so that the reader can more easily access and view them.

Flipboard is a fantastic content curation website that organizes various articles, like this one, based on category. So, if you wanted to write a paper on climate change, you could go on Flipboard and only view scholarly articles on the topic of climate change.

Online Databases

These are similar to sites like Flipboard, but are typically run by an educational institution and will only contain the most scholarly and credible articles and papers. This is an important resource to use when writing about a topic that isn’t well known.

It isn’t necessary to use these scholarly databases when writing about more generalized issues and topics apart from fact-checking information you get from other sources. In addition to this, these databases often don’t contain recently published articles as they have to be manually updated.

Go Old School

It is A LOT easier to publish an article or paper of poor quality on the internet than it is to publish it on actual paper. Take advantage of this fact, and do your research through published books and articles.

Going to the library and picking up books may seem like a lot of work, but the result is credible information that you can use for your own paper.

Don’t Rely on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is often the first link that pops up when using Google to conduct research. It can be very tempting to use Wikipedia for all your information, but it is a very risky game to play. Anyone on the internet can edit Wikipedia. Fortunately, there are online moderators to remove misinformation from Wikipedia, but it can take some time for these edits to be caught.

For this reason, you should fact-check any information you take from a Wikipedia article, as there is a slim chance it could have been recently edited into the article.

Conclusion

Remember to always fact-check anything you come across that you want to include in your own paper or article. We recommend using scholarly online databases, as they are easy to access and also contain purely credible sources. Getting information from other online sources is okay, as long as you do proper research into who published the article you are reading. The library is also a great place to do research as it also only contains published, credible sources.