RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

244 INTERNET-BASED RESEARCH AND COMPUTER USAGE
Bath Information and Data Services (BIDS):
http://www.bids.ac.uk
EBSCO: http://www.ebsco.com
Elsevier: http://www.elsevier.com
Emerald: http://www.emeraldinsight.com
FirstSearch: http://www.oclc.org
Ingenta: http://www.ingenta.com
JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org
Kluweronline: http://www.kluweronline.com
Northern Light: http://www.northernlight.com
ProQuest: http://www.proquest.com and http://www.
bellhowell,infolearning.com.proquest
ProQuest Digital Dissertations: http://www.bib.umi.
com/dissertations
Science Direct: http://www.sciencedirect.com
Swets: http://www.swetsnet.nl and http://www.
swetsnet.com
Uncover Web: http://www.Uncweb.carl.org
Web of Science: http://www.isinet.com
For theses, Aslib Index to Theses is useful
(http://www.theses.com) and the Networked
Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations can
be located at http://www.theses.org. Some major
government web sites also have a free alerting
service (e.g. Ofsted).
Researchers who do not know a web site address
have at their disposal a variety of search engines
to locate it. At the time of writing some widely
used engines are:
Google: http://www.google.com
MSN Search: http://www.msn.com
AOL Search: http://www.search.aol.com
Netscape Navigator: http://www.netscape.com
Fast Search: http://www.alltheweb.com
Internet Explorer: http://www.microsoft.com
AltaVista: http://www.altavista.com
Direct Hit: http://www.directhit.com
Excite: http://www.Excite.com
Ask Jeeves: http://www.askjeeves.com
Lycos: http://www.Lycos.com
Go To: http://www.go2.com
Yahoo: http://www.yahoo.com
HotBot: http://www.hotbot.com
Northern Light: http://www.northernlight.com
Metacrawler: http://www.metacrawler.com.
There are very many more. All of these search
engines enable researchers to conduct searches by
keywords. Some of these are parallel search engines
(which will search several single search engines at
a time) and some are file search engines (which
will search files across the world).
Finding research information, where not
available from databases and indices on CD-
Roms, is often done through the Internet by
trial-and-error and serendipity, identifying the key
words singly or in combination (between double
inverted commas). The system of ‘bookmarking’
web sites enables rapid retrieval of these web
sites for future reference; this is perhaps essential,
as some Internet connections are slow, and
a vast amount of material on it is, at best,
unhelpful!
http://www.nap.edu/category.html
id=ed (the web site of the National Academies Press,
Education section, providing free online materials)
http://www.educationindex.com/ and http://www.
shawmultimedia.com/links2.html (centres for the
provision of free educational materials and related
web sites)
http://lii.org/ (the librarians’indextotheInternet)
http://www.ncrel.org/ (the web site of the North
Central Regional Educational Laboratories, an
organization providing a range of educational
resources)
http://www.sedl.org/ (the web site of the Southwest
Educational Development Laboratory, an organization
providing a range of educational resources).
Evaluating web sites
The use of the Internet for educational research
will require an ability to evaluate web sites. The
Internet is a vast store of disorganized and largely
unvetted material, and researchers will need to be
able to ascertain quite quickly how far the webbased
material is appropriate. There are several
criteria for evaluating web sites, including the
following (e.g. Tweddle et al.1998;Rodriguesand
Rodrigues, 2000):
the purpose of the site, as this will enable users
to establish its relevance and appropriateness