Evaluating web pages skillfully requires you to do two things at once:

1. Train your eye and your fingers to employ a series of techniques that help you quickly find what you need to know about web pages;
2. Train your mind to think critically, even suspiciously, by asking a series of questions that will help you decide how much a web page is to be trusted.

• Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask
• Evaluating Web Pages Checklist

Choose a topic.  

Do a brain dump: Note down what you already know about your topic, including

• Names of people, organizations, companies, time period you are interested in, places of interest [countries, regions, cities]

Fill in the gaps in your knowlege: get background information from encyclopedias or other secondary sources.  Wikipedia can be good here.

Select the best places/ databases to find information on your topic.  Look under the History Databases tab of this guide for article database suggestions. Or use a catalog like Oskicat or Melvyl to search for books and other resources.

Use nouns from your brain dump as search terms.

Evaluate what you find.  Change search terms to get closer to what you really want.

Refine Your Topic - Using the information you have gathered, determine if your research topic should be narrower or broader. You may need to search basic resources again using your new, focused topics and keywords. 

Take a look this short tutorial on beginning your research for more ideas.

"I'm writing a paper on World War II." 

Often students start their research with a very general topic, even though they may realize the topic is too large to deal with in a 10-15 page paper.  Faculty and librarians tell them, "You have to narrow this down."  But how do you narrow a topic?

Ask yourself--

• What discipline am I working in?  If you are in a sociology class, ask a sociological question about World War II, like "How did WWII affect women?"  If it's a political science class, your question might be something like "How did WWII affect presidential elections in the US?"

• What are some subsets or aspects of your topic.  Some good aspects are:
  • by place, such as a country or region
  • by time period, such as a century, decade or year 
  • by population, such as men, women, ethnic group, youth, children or elderly

You can combine these ideas, "What were the major impacts of WWII on women in France, in the decade after the war?"

More ideas in our brief tutorial on topic selection and narrowing. 

"It's all free on the Internet, right?"  "Why should I go through the library's website to find sources for my paper?" 

The Web is a great source for free, publicly available information, but not for thousands of electronic books, journal articles, and scholarly resources that are available only to the campus community.  Resources like Lexis-Nexis, Web of Science, Academic Search Complete, and ARTstor are "invisible" to Google.  You will not see results from these databases in the results of a Google search.*

Through the Library website, you can access hundreds of different licensed databases containing journal articles, electronic books, maps, images, government and legal information, current and historical newspapers, digitized primary sources, and more. 

Want to find out more? Get started exploring the Library's electronic resources, or find out how to get access to licensed resources from off-campus.

To use library databases from off campus you have to set up the proxy server: this changes your browser settings.

• Different browsers [Firefox, Chrome, Safari...] have different instructions- they are all here.
• You can set it up on multiple devices
• You log in with your CalNet ID
• There's an alternative: the VPN

• Academic Search Complete
  articles in more than 10,900 journals - scholarly and general articles
  
• Project MUSE
  articles from 250 scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences.
  
• ArticleFirst
  articles from 11,000 popular magazines and scholarly journals
  
• JSTOR
  Includes over 1000 scholarly journals - scholarly -- not current
  

Your instructor wants you to use scholarly [or 'peer reviewed'] sources.  What does she mean?

• Authoritative- written by a recognized expert in the field.  How do you know?  The PhD is one sign; employment by a university is another.
• Peer reviewed- before publishing, the article was vetted by other scholars in the field. How do you know? Try searching the journal title in Google and read the publisher's blurb.
• Audience- written for scholars and experts in the field. How do you know?  The level of the language is usually a give away.  It will be technical and formal.
• Includes a bibliography and/or footnotes with citations of sources used.

Scholarship is always changing. Try to find the most recent scholarly sources you can.

Other features of the 'best' research

• Has been cited by other scholars.  This can take time, so the newest articles might not be heavily cited yet.  How do you know?  Try searching the article citation in Google Scholar, which indicates the number of citations in Google Scholar [not comprehensive however]
• Proves the point with sufficient evidence, rather than opinion statements.

Want to know more? Here's our tutorial on scholarly sources.

---

• Music Index
  Indexes over 650 international music journals and magazines covering every aspect of the classical and popular world of music including historiographic, ethnographic, and theoretical topics. Included are book reviews, record reviews, first performances, and obituaries.
  
• International Index to Music Periodicals (IIMP)
  Indexes over 350 international music periodicals from over 20 countries, and also indexes feature music articles and obituaries appearing in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Covers nearly all aspects of the world of music, from scholarly studies to the latest crazes.
  
• International Index to Performing Arts (IIPA)
  Indexes over 200 scholarly and popular performing arts periodicals, documents, biographical profiles, conference papers, obituaries, interviews, discographies, and reviews. Covers a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry including dance, film, television, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, broadcast arts, circus performance, comedy, storytelling, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic and more.
  
• RILM (Abstracts of Music Literature)
  Indexes journals, books, bibliographies, catalogues, dissertations, Festschriften, films and videos, iconographies, critical commentaries, ethnographic recordings, and conference proceedings in the field of music, including historical musicology, ethnomusicology, instruments, voice, performance practice and notation, theory and analysis, pedagogy, liturgy, criticism, dance, and music therapy. Items are included in the database from other fields as they relate to music, such as literature, dramatic arts, visual arts, acoustics, aesthetics, linguistics, mathematics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and physics. RILM has international coverage, with records in over 200 languages. Platform change: All NISC databases have switched to the EBSCOhost interface.
  
• RIPM: Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals and Online Archive
  Indexes selected 19th century music journals published in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the US. Offers a cumulative index to chronologies and authors appearing in over 65 volumes of the print version. Platform change: All NISC databases have switched to the EBSCOhost interface.
  

Your instructor may want you to use "peer reviewed" articles as sources for your paper. Or you may be asked to find "academic," "scholarly," or "refereed" articles. What do these terms mean?

Let's start with the terms academic and scholarly, which are synonyms. An academic or scholarly journal is one intended for a specialized or expert audience. Journals like this exist in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Examples include Nature, Journal of Sociology, and Journal of American Studies. Scholarly/academic journals exist to help scholars communicate their latest research and ideas to each other; they are written "by experts for experts."

Most scholarly/academic journals are peer reviewed; another synonym for peer reviewed is refereed. Before an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal, it's evaluated for quality and significance by several specialists in the same field, who are "peers" of the author. The article may go through several revisions before it finally reaches publication.

Magazines like Time or Scientific American, newspapers, (most) books, government documents, and websites are not peer-reviewed, though they may be thoroughly edited and fact-checked. Articles in scholarly journals (in printed format or online) usually ARE peer-reviewed.

How can you tell if an article is both scholarly and peer-reviewed?

• Sociological Abstracts
  First choice for sociology topics
  
• Sociology: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
  Also good, but smaller than Sociological Abstracts
  
• Social Theory
  Features major texts by major social theorists
  
• Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of Knowledge)
  Large and very multidisciplinary.
  

Before you can access Library resources from off campus make sure you have configured your computer with proxy server settings.

After you make a one-time change in your web browser settings, the proxy server will ask you to log in with a CalNet ID or Library PIN when you click on the link to a licensed resource.

• Academic Search Complete
  You can choose to search only within specific magazines in this database, for instance: Time, Life, Ebony, National Geographic, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly
  
• AP Images
  4.6 million photographs from the Associated Press dating back to 1826 to the present. Historical photos date from 1996 to 1826. Also includes tens of thousands of graphics, over 4,500 hours of audio files dating from the 1920s, and news stories and headlines dating from 1997. Search by keyword to search all the images in the photo collection or do an advanced search to limit results.
  
• Alternative Press Index
  Includes more than 450 alternative, radical, and left magazines, newsletters, and journals in North America which report and analyze issues of cultural, economic, political, and social change. Approximately 90% of publications included are not indexed elsewhere. Indexes editorials, regular columns, essays, fiction; speeches, interviews, statistics, reprints; bibliographies, biographies, obituaries, memoirs; and reviews. Interfaces available for French, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. Alternative Press Index Archive provides coverage of materials from 1969 to 1990.
  

• LexisNexis Academic
  International news- full text.
  
• Access World News
  Strong regional coverage, including Contra Costa Times, Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, and San Jose Mercury News.
  
• World News Connection
  Translated transcripts and summaries of radio and television broadcasts, newspaper articles, and more from nearly every country in the world.
  
• Alt-Press Watch
  Alternative, radical, and independent magazines, newspapers, and journals in North America.
  

Use OskiCat to locate materials related to your topic, including books, government publications, and audio and video recordings, in the libraries of UC Berkeley. OskiCat will show you the location and availability of the items that we own. 

Use Melvyl to locate materials related to your topic located at other campuses in the UC system. Next Generation Melvyl also allows you to expand your search to libraries worldwide. Clicking on the REQUEST button in the detailed view of a catalog record prompt you to fill out a form to request the item through our Interlibrary Loan office.

A large part of the library's collection is stored off campus in an environmentally secure building called the Northern Regional Library Facility [NRLF].

Submit online requests via the REQUEST button in OskiCat to borrow material shelved at NRLF. To receive electronic or paper copies of book chapters or journal articles, submit an online request via the "Request an article from NRLF (photocopy or web delivery)" link that appears in eligible titles in OskiCat. Staff at public service desks of any campus library can assist you with further questions. 

Log in to Request with your Calnet ID and fill out the screens.  Choose the volume you want, for periodicals:

Citing a website

 The complete citation should look like this:

 Anti-slavery International. "Anti-slavery: today’s fight for tomorrow’s freedom." 4/12/2002. http://www.antislavery.org/ (4 Dec. 2003).

 The components of the citation are [in this order]:

•        Author's name, last name first (if known), or organizational author

•        Title of the page, in quotation marks

•        Title of the complete website (if applicable), in italics

•        Date of the webpage or last revision (if available)

•        Full URL including protocol (e.g., "http")

•        Date you read it, in parentheses

• Citing Your Sources - a brief online guide to the main citation styles and a brief discussion on what constitutes plagiarism.
  
• MLA handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th edition. New York : Modern Language Association of America, 2009.
  Doe Reference Reference Hall LB2369 .G53 2009
  Main Gardner Stacks LB2369 .G53 2009
  Many older editions available throughout the UCB libraries.
• The Chicago Manual of Style (UCB-only access)
  15th ed. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003. Searchable, online version of the Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition).
  Many print editions available throughout the UCB Libraries.
• Cite Right: A Quick Guide to Citation Styles--MLA, APA, Chicago, the Sciences, Professions, and More (UCB-only access) Charles Lipson. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006.
  Many print editions throughout the libraries.
• Columbia Guide to Online Style (UCB-only access)
  Janice R. Walker and Todd Taylor. 2nd ed. NY: Columbia Univ. Press. 2006.
  Many print editions throughout the UCB libraries.

Citation management tools help you manage your research, collect and cite sources, and create bibliographies in a variety of citation styles.  Each one has its strengths and weaknesses, but any are easier than doing it by hand!

1. Zotero: A free plug-in that works exclusively with the Firefox browser: keeps copies of what you find on the web, permits tagging, notation, full text searching of your library of resources, works with Word, and has a free web backup service.
2. RefWorks - free for UC Berkeley users. It allows you to create your own database by importing references and using them for footnotes and bibliographies. Use the RefWorks New User Form to sign up.

It's always good to double check the formatting -- sometimes the software doesn't get it quite right.

Other ways to get help:  in person, by e-mail, using specialized chat services

"There are no dumb questions!" 

That's the philosophy of reference librarians, who are here to save you time and trouble. If you get stuck, you can talk to a reference librarian at any campus library. 

More questions?  Our FAQs may help. 

• Library Subject Guides
• Library Course Guides