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English 102: College Writing (Prof. Moran)

Full Research@UWW Search Box

Research@UWW

Best Places to Search Based on Your Needs

Where you search the most effectively and efficiently is determined by what type of information you are looking for:

  • Search the Internet for Jackie Chan's birthday
  • Search library databases for research on martial arts moves used in American and Chinese feature films
  • Search Research@UWW for a book on the history of American martial arts movies

Search Tools & Their Uses:

  • Internet Search Engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.).
    • Verify a quick fact
    • Find a general introduction to a topic
  • Course Guides
    • Find custom search tools, sources, and other guidance for your specific course
  • Research@UWW 
    • Search within multiple subject areas simultaneously
    • Find a variety of sources (e.g., books, scholarly articles, popular articles, government documents, etc.) with one search.
    • Find sources that UW-Whitewater owns or subscribes to
    • Find and borrow books from other libraries
  • Library Databases
    • Find the most relevant sources in a focused collection of materials:
      • Scholarly articles and books in one subject area
      • Types of sources in one place (news, data, or streaming media)
  • Google Scholar.
  • Search after Research@UWW and library databases to see what other scholarly materials might have been published on your topic. There is some overlap with what the libraries have.

Source Type Choice: Timeliness vs. Depth of Analysis

The below chart will help you answer questions like these:

  • What type of source would be best for you to use to find the information you need?
  • Is the currency of a source important to your topic?
  • Does the date of a source need to be close to the time the event you are researching occurred?
  • Is in-depth coverage of your topic important?

On the same topic is a terrific video about the Information Life Cycle (2:34) from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. 

Information Chart: Timeliness vs. Depth of Analysis with three stacked boxes. First box: Timeline from today to the distant past: Day of. Week of. Weeks after. Months after. A year after. Years after. Second box: Timeliness triangle with larger end to left over depth of analysis triangle with larger end to right. Meant to visualize that newer events have less available depth of analysis than events that happened in the increasingly distant past. Third box: Timeline of information types and formats. Breaking news found on the internet, radio, social media, tv. News stories found in newspapers, government releases, or magazines. Scholarly Articles and Books found in academic journals, government reports, books, reference works, documentaries or textbooks.