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College Writing: Official Guide

Starting Points

You are already an experienced researcher! We find information everyday using Google (or other search engines), crowd sourcing our friends, or catching up on news on social media. It's easy to make the the jump to use these and other tools to search for information for a research assignment. Understanding where to start, what the tool is searching, and what it will find is an important skill you'll hone for your assignment.

For example, you might already know Google Scholar has one search box and searches across many scholarly disciplines and resources, but only skims the top of the web. Did you also know the library has over 950 databases, each one unique to finding specific types of information on specific subjects? Exploring how each tool works and what it searches will help you target the types of information you're seeking. 

Find out more about what you're searching (and what you're missing!) by clicking this picture:

Google vs. The Deep Web 

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Google vs Deep web illustration.