Wikipedia is one of the main sources of information on the internet, however it’s not necessarily the

most reliable source. Anyone can go on and put together the information, even if it’s false. You

shouldn’t take information straight from Wikipedia, but you can check the Notes and References

section for possible sources.

Booleans are specific words (such as ‘AND’, ‘NOT’, and ‘OR’) to narrow the information

and websites that your search engine provides you with. For example, if you type ‘restaurants AND

Dubai’ into the search bar, the results you will get will only be for restaurants that are in Dubai.

Similarly, if you type in ‘restaurants Manhattan NOT Brooklyn’, you will get results of restaurants

in only Manhattan, not in Brooklyn. This can be useful when researching as you can get results which

are more specific to your area of interest by using these commands.

There are also other ways in which you can streamline your results. Firstly, you can put

quotation marks around your search so that the search engine finds exactly that, rather than something

related - but ultimately, irrelevant - to your search. If you are trying to find a specific type of website, you

can put in what the site would end in. For example, if you want to get results ONLY from schools, you would

type what you want into the search bar, and then add an ‘.edu’ after it. You can do this for organisations (.org),

newspapers (e.g. nytimes.com), and several other websites.

Google Scholar is a section in Google which provides you with academic articles and studies which

have been done in the past. It can be helpful when researching because the results are often quite reliable

sources done by experts in that particular field. Similar to this, Questia is an online library in which you can

search up any articles, journals, or books and access them.

Britannica Schools is an online encyclopaedia for students which provides information, educational

games, and other forms of media to support students with their research. It can be accessed through a school

account and you can make your own account within that.

Finally, WebPath Express is a site which provides students with reliable websites to do their research

with. It proofs all the websites and splits them up into different subject categories to make them easier to find.

There is monitoring of all the websites to ensure that they are still safe, accurate and reliable.

All of these different resources can help to make sure that your research is safe, reliable and valid.
References:

Beal, V. (n.d.). Boolean Search. [online] Webopedia. Available at:

https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/Boolean_search.html [Accessed 24 Sep. 2019].

Cindy, J. (2019). 20 Google Search Tips to Use Google More Efficiently. [online] Lifehack. Available at:
https://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/20-tips-use-google-search-efficiently.html [Accessed 25 Sep.
2019].

School.eb.com. (2019). Britannica School. [online] Available at: https://school.eb.com [Accessed 25 Sep.
2019].

FollettLearning (2015). An Overview of WebPath Express. [video] Available at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjh39QGSQw0 [Accessed 25 Sep. 2019].

Questia.com. (2019). Write better papers, faster! |Online Research Library: Questia. [online] Available at:
https://www.questia.com [Accessed 25 Sep. 2019].