Hi!

I'm currently attempting to help a friend do some research for a class debate project on animal rights. It entails preparing a short paper defending her side (in her case, pro-animal rights), as well as having a mock, in-class debate. She is, admittedly, not a Case student, so she doesn't have access to either the Case online resources, or Case's libraries themselves. It's been a while since I've done research in the context of completing an academic assignment, and this is her first college-level class, so we're both a bit in the dark as to how best to go about researching a topic such as this to find citable sources (my default answer is to Google everything, but I have a feeling that there are better publicly available resources than that for research like this).

Do you have any suggestions on doing research for this topic, or advice in general on good starting points for academic research using publicly available content?

Thank You,
Vince



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit was june 17, 08:02pm by Vincent Torre.

Hi Vince-

Excellent question!

First off, KSL- the building and physical collection- IS available to outside researchers, so if your friend wanted to, she could come in, ask for help from the reference desk, look up books in our collection, and even use our public access computers to use our online databases.

However, there ARE a lot of ways to conduct some pretty darned good research using publicly available resources. One is to saunter into a public library :-) Remember that Cleveland Public Library's downtown branch is an excellent research library. Also, if your friend has a public library card- Cleveland Public Library system, Cuyahoga County, or wherever she lives, many times those systems have online database/journal access for their users- she can even use these sources from home with her library card number. Your tax dollars at work, so USE IT!

If you want non-library, publicly available stuff, remember to look at WHATEVER information you find with a critical eye. So if you and your friend surf Google or Wikipedia and find web pages with information, think about AUTHORITY of the source, BIAS of the source, CURRENCY of the source, etc. (This isn't just for web sources, of course!)

If you want academic research, remember Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) which will point to academic publications, both books and articles (though not all will be available freely via the web, sometimes you'll be limited to abstracts). Google Books will search through full text of hundreds of thousands of books, both new and old (though most of the new ones will only show you snippets- at which point, pull out that library card!)

These are just a few ideas. If you want more ideas specific to the topic, I'd be glad to give you more, but perhaps with the above pointers the two of you can give it a go and see what you find.

Hi William,

Thanks! Those are some great suggestions to get us started. I appreciate the help!

-Vince