We were one of the first families in the neighborhood to get Internet, and one of the last to give up dial-up, so I’ve long ago grown accustomed to getting results in as few steps as possible. For every page I had to wait to load, I wasted at least a minute of computer time, so I had to quickly figure out all the little tricks of the search engine- the minus button, the quotations around phrases, the “site:” option… This is nothing novel now, but I remember, nearly a decade ago, showing this to my friends and amazing them with my “Internet savvy.” Now, of course, we have Wi-Fi in our home and I’ve managed to string routers through the house so that even our shoddy ones give us high-speed Internet, but the tricks I’ve learned over time have become so habitual that I’m more likely to use Google to search a site than to use the offered search bar on the actual website.

I’ll admit, when it comes to research, that I take the layman’s route instead of the student’s. I don’t use EBSCOhost or J-STOR or even Google scholar. Instead, the first place I’ll look when gathering information is Wikipedia. I know that it can be inaccurate, but I’m not going there to quote information. I go there because information there is clear, readable, and well-organized. Wikipedia gives me the outline that I need, the important elements to my research topic that I might have to investigate and, perhaps most importantly, a series of links in each article’s bibliography that lead me to various articles and websites devoted to my topic matter. Once I have that, I have more than enough information.

Interestingly, in one of my classes, we’ve been divided into groups to research the same topics, and today, while collaborating with other groups, I met a girl who was researching the same topic as I was. She searched the typical databases and found very little on the relationship between IQ and depression. I just Googled the same thing and found countless articles. The tricky part is ensuring that the articles are legitimate and usable- it isn’t easy to falsify information so well that it’s not clearly false, but it’s possible. So for each article I found, I had to make sure that the information was reliable. A program from a conference of the “International Society for Intelligence Research” looks alright, but first I had to check and see if the ISIR really existed, and if it was a legitimate scientific source. So I went to their website and looked at their list of members and websites. Bingo- the American Psychological Association is one of their affiliates, and I trust the APA. Of course, even that can be falsified, but at this point, enough proof points in the direction of the link being legitimate that I can use it as a source.

Another link led me to Bill Allin’s scribd page, so for that, I went to his website and researched him and the book he’s written. For this one, I couldn’t find as many details that would prove that he wasn’t just a sociologist with aspirations to propagate his own personal ideas, so I pushed it to the back of the list. Even an official-looking website can be made by a phony, after all. If his book had been published by a publisher I recognized, instead of “Writers’ Collective,” a self-publisher, I would have readily moved his articles and books toward the forefront of my list. Sadly, this wasn’t so, and I had to select a different source on which to focus.

I think that, despite the fact that my searches don’t go through the classic academic circuits, I actually gain more from them than I would from the student search methods. It’s far simpler to find an article and follow applicable links, or to read a simple summary of an article written by a non-professional before going on to the article. Database resources might have handy articles, but the selection is much more limited. The Internet is there for us to benefit from shared knowledge, and so many excellent analyses are skipped out on because they aren’t the original documents. So I’ll continue counting on my fellow students online to help me find and collect sources and information.