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The Internet research handbook : a practical guide for students and researchers in the social sciences / Niall Ó Dochartaigh.
LIBRA ZA4228 .O3 2002
Available from offsite location
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Ó Dochartaigh, Niall.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Internet research.
- Internet searching.
- Social sciences--Research.
- Social sciences.
- Social sciences--Computer network resources.
- Physical Description:
- xx, 274 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
- Place of Publication:
- London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif. : SAGE Publications, 2002.
- Summary:
- This much-needed book provides clear but detailed advice in all of the main areas of Internet research. It sets out, in clear and simple terms, the best practice in the use of the Internet as a mainstream research resource and deals with the Internet as a thread which runs through the entire research process, from formulating a research question to publishing the results of your research.
- Ideal as a course textbook at undergraduate and graduate level in a range of social science disciplines where doing a research project is an integral part of the course. It is of great use to undergraduate and graduate students working on research projects, and for experienced academic researchers who are trying to incorporate the Internet into their research practice.
- Contents:
- 1 Research and the Internet 6
- Why bother with the Internet? 6
- Transforming academic research 7
- Information overload 7
- Microspecialization 7
- Ending marginalization 8
- Internationalization of research 8
- Mentoring/supervision 9
- The Research Process 9
- The research question 10
- The literature search 10
- Collecting citation details 11
- Contact 11
- Collecting data 11
- Evaluation and citation 12
- Publication 12
- Understanding the Internet 13
- The Internet is a fact 13
- The Internet only took off in 1994 13
- The World-Wide-Web 14
- Online databases 14
- What the Internet is good for 15
- The new (events which took place after 1993) 15
- The old 15
- The academic (within limits) 16
- The far-away 16
- The activist 17
- The not-for-profit 17
- Government and officialdom 17
- The marginal 17
- News and business 18
- Archives 18
- Statistics 18
- The lonely, the deluded, the obsessive 18
- 2 Research Tools 19
- Your local set-up 19
- Memory 19
- Terminology 20
- Basic computer skills 21
- Switching between programs 21
- File structure: understanding how your computer is organized 22
- Finding files 24
- Understanding the Internet by understanding your own computer 25
- Copy and paste 25
- Moving within windows 25
- Moving through files and folders 26
- Dealing with 'OK' 26
- Working with images 27
- Copying the screen 28
- Escape sequences 28
- Shareware and freeware 29
- Software for uncompressing files 30
- Internet software 30
- Email 31
- About email addresses 32
- Software 32
- Connecting to your email remotely 33
- Email: basic functions 34
- Sending an email 34
- Reply and forward 35
- Saving outgoing mail 35
- Mailboxes/mail folders 35
- Filtering 36
- Address books/distributions lists 36
- Signature 36
- Attachments 36
- Web browsers 37
- Understanding your Web browser 37
- Customizing your Web browser 38
- Basic navigation 38
- Hyperlinks 38
- Home 39
- Back and forward 39
- History/Go 39
- Bookmarks/Favorites 39
- Open 40
- Stop and reload/refresh 40
- Find 41
- Saving and viewing documents 41
- Printing 42
- Other tools 43
- Telnet 43
- FTP 44
- Gopher 45
- Newsgroups 45
- Keeping up with changing research tools 46
- 3 Searching for Books and Articles 47
- Starting in the real world 47
- People 47
- Journals 49
- Searching for books 49
- Online library catalogues 49
- Online bookstores 53
- Old books 53
- New books 54
- Book reviews 55
- Searching for articles 56
- Understanding academic articles 56
- Understanding databases of articles 56
- Searching article databases 58
- The major article services 60
- Looking for old articles 64
- The big commercial databases 64
- Electronic journals 65
- Government publications 68
- US government 69
- US government search engines 70
- Other governments 71
- Theses and dissertations 72
- News 73
- Current news 74
- News archives 76
- Think-tank policy papers 77
- 4 Making Contact 78
- Human contact: the Internet at its best 78
- The dream of a never-ending world-wide conversation 78
- Email mailing lists as a research resource 79
- Making the most of lists 80
- Guidelines for good practice 81
- Being careful out there 82
- Flames, trolls and pigs 82
- Online harassment 83
- Spam 83
- Viruses 84
- Mailing lists 85
- Issues of authority 85
- Moderated discussion lists 86
- Unmoderated discussion lists 87
- Distribution lists 87
- Listserv, listproc and majordomo
- understanding mailing lists 88
- Trouble with unsubscribing 89
- Searching for mailing lists 92
- Mailing list search engines 92
- Lists to avoid 94
- Searching list archives by email 95
- Discussion groups 96
- Newsgroups 96
- Understanding the newsgroups 97
- Usenet II 99
- Finding a newsgroup 100
- Searching the newsgroups 100
- Behaviour in newsgroups 102
- Bulletin board services 102
- AOL and CompuServe discussion forums 102
- Web forums 103
- Making contact with other researchers 104
- Departments, research centres and individuals 104
- Scholarly societies/professional associations 105
- Conferences and current events 106
- Contacting postgraduate students 107
- Other ways to search for people 107
- Collaboration 107
- Simple collaboration 108
- Advanced collaboration 108
- Collaboratories 109
- Human contact: a last word 110
- 5 The Web 111
- Out on the open Web 111
- Before you start 111
- Chaos 113
- Shifting chaos 114
- 'I've got no memory...' 115
- Understanding Web addresses 116
- Protocol 116
- Domain name 117
- Top-level domains 118
- The path 119
- Understanding Websites 120
- Defining site 120
- Site and URLs 121
- Searching by site 123
- Site-mining 123
- Keeping up with a site 123
- Identifying useful sites 124
- Monster sites 125
- Masquerade sites 126
- Link sites 126
- Web browsers: advanced skills 127
- Contents lists 127
- When 'back' doesn't work 127
- Automatic spawning of new windows 128
- New windows 128
- Frame nightmares 129
- Ticker tape nightmares 129
- Java and ActiveX 130
- Parasite frames 130
- Link tracking/dimmed links 131
- How browsers deal with URLs 131
- Bookmarks/Favorites 132
- History/Go 132
- The cache 133
- Privacy, censorship and the researcher 134
- You've got a history 135
- Access logs 135
- Surveillance on the Net 136
- Cookies good and bad 137
- Further measures to secure your privacy 139
- Censorship 139
- Government 140
- Blocking and filtering 141
- Rating 142
- Censorship and privacy 143
- Bringing order to the chaos 143
- XML 143
- Dublin CORE 144
- Closing doors on the open Web 145
- 6 Searching by Subject 147
- Subject classification on the Web 148
- Cataloguing the Web 148
- Understanding subject guides 149
- Using subject guides effectively 151
- Finding subject guides 152
- The Argus Clearinghouse 152
- The Virtual Library 152
- About.com 153
- Guides to social science resources 154
- Scout Report Archives 154
- SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway) 155
- Guides provided by university libraries 156
- Other guides catering to academic researchers 157
- Universal subject guides 157
- Classification and the universal guides 158
- The blurred boundary between subject guides and search engines 160
- Yahoo! 161
- Other universal subject guides 165
- National versions of universal subject guides 167
- Crude catalogues: where subject guides meet keyword search engines 167
- Novelty items 167
- Webrings 168
- Portals 168
- Intelligent agents 169
- Push technology 170
- The future of subject searching 170
- 7 Searching the Keyword Search Engines 172
- Search engine fever 172
- Searching the search engines 173
- Use distinctive words and phrases 174
- Look before you leap 175
- Don't look beyond the second screen of hits 178
- Use the simplified display option 178
- Group hits by site 179
- Don't be distracted 179
- Refine your search on one search engine; mop up on the others 179
- Bookmark queries 180
- Use a keyword search chart 180
- Use the special search options domain: and link 180
- Ignore the 'channels' and 'guides' 180
- Search options 181
- Boolean searching 181
- Math searching 182
- If you don't use the search terms 182
- Capitalization 183
- Power searching 183
- Other search options 185
- Understanding how the search engines work 187
- What the search engines actually search 187
- Ranking: how the search engines order your results 189
- Profiling the search engines 190
- AltaVista 191
- AOL Search 191
- Direct Hit 192
- Excite 192
- Fast Search 192
- Google 192
- Go To 193
- HotBot 193
- Northern Light 193
- Webtop 194
- Keeping up to date 195
- The meta search engines 196
- Internet dinosaurs? A premature announcement of the demise of the big search engines 197
- 8 Classification, Evaluation and Citation 199
- Reviving the lost
- art of scepticism 199
- Classification 200
- The purpose of classification 200
- Why bother with non-academic documents? 200
- Advocacy documents 201
- Academic documents 202
- Official documents 204
- News documents 205
- Personal Web pages 206
- Business/marketing pages 207
- Entertainment sites 207
- Classification, crude but useful 208
- Evaluation 208
- Authority 208
- Accuracy 209
- Objectivity 209
- Currency 210
- Evaluating email messages 211
- Citation 212
- The purpose of citation 212
- The particular need for good Internet citation 212
- Emerging citation standards 213
- Internet citation: the main elements 213
- Citing email messages 217
- Citing newsgroup/Web forum postings 218
- Citing articles located through online databases 218
- The Internet: calling into question the basic principles of citation 218
- 9 Archives and Statistics (Patricia Sleeman) 220
- Archives 220
- Understanding archives: organization and context 221
- Using online archives 222
- Major online archives 223
- Guides to online archives 224
- Opening up the archives 225
- Statistics 225
- Data archives 227
- 10 Publishing on the internet 228
- Internet publication versus print publication 228
- What to publish 229
- Documents which belong on the Internet 229
- Online bibliographies 229
- Subject guides 229
- Guidelines for creating a subject guide 230
- Updating 231
- Publicity 232
- On the Internet publicity is distribution 232
- Thinking about the user 232
- A publicity strategy 232
- Understanding usage of your Web pages 236
- Writing Web documents 237
- It's easy 237
- Understanding html 238
- Basic html 238
- Html which is a little more advanced 241
- More about html 243
- Putting your documents on the Net 244
- Html editors 245
- Good design practice 246
- Site structure 246
- Page design 247
- Be careful of copyright 248
- Copy and paste: Internet plagiarism 248
- A last positive word on Internet publishing 249
- Appendix 1 Top-level domain names 251
- Appendix 2 Subject guides 255
- Appendix 3 A brief history of the Internet 258
- Appendix 4 Netscape 6 commands 260.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages [261]-265) and index.
- ISBN:
- 0761964398
- 0761964401
- OCLC:
- 59549461
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