...professional associations

Some very high quality information comes from professional association websites. These websites are great places to find original research, reports and policy information. You can find professional association websites through Google.

International Reading Association

American Institutes of CPAs

Modern Languages Association

The domain is the last part of the main site URL, like .com., .gov, and .net. There are dozens of domain types, each one assigned for a particular use, and some are better than others for research.

In general, the best information for research on the web are .gov and .edu sites. These sites are published by the government and educational institutions that are generally held accountable for the content they post.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers provides a list of the types of domains, where they come from, and what they are (supposed) to be used for.

Web sources are any documents, articles, websites and multimedia sources that are findable through a search engine, like Google. This might seem like a no-brainer. While it's easy to spot a web source when you see one, there are some things you should know when searching the web for research purposes. See the box below for more information.

Anyone can publish on the web. It makes sense, then, that almost anything can be found on the web. Keep in mind...

• Web sources require close evaluation. Try using the CRAAP test on the first page of this guide.
• Google Scholar can help you locate citations for scholarly articles.
• Professional association websites, government sites and education sites contain useful reports, statistics and other information.
• Google only searches a tiny fraction of information published on the web. See the "deep web" sidebar for more details.

Some experts believe that the un-Google-able part of the web is 500 times bigger than what Google has indexed! Click on the link below to hear a librarian talk about this issue.