Free Web vs. Fee Web: A Guide To Using Internet Sources Responsibly

You've got a research paper due for your writing-intensive course, and your professor says you can't use Internet sources. Now what? You need to collect some supplementary material for your English 50 paper, but you're not sure how to find a reputable source. Now what? Your instructor told you to find "scholarly sources" for your paper, but you tried Google and Ask.com, and you aren't sure if what you found is "scholarly." Now what?

Sometimes it's hard to know how and where to find acceptable information for college-level research papers. In high school, many students rely on mainstream search engines to find information for research papers. When they get to college, however, students are often unpleasantly surprised to learn that such sources are not acceptable for most papers. So, how do you find appropriate materials for a college research paper?

Here's the short answer:

FREE WEB = QUESTIONABLE AND DISCOURAGED
FEE WEB = ACCEPTABLE AND ENCOURAGED

Read on to find out the differences between free web sources and fee web sources, and why you should limit yourself to materials from the fee web when writing academic papers.

FREE WEB: Free web sources are open to anybody with an Internet connection. All the major search engines (Google, Ask.com, Yahoo!, AOL Search, MSN Search, etc.) are considered "free web" searches. They only look for materials that are available to anyone. In The Craft of Research, Wayne Booth, Joseph Williams, and Gregory Colomb note that entering your topic into a search engine "can be a good way to find material out of which you can formulate a research question, but it is a very bad way to find reliable sources" (79).

• Because just about anybody can post information on the free web, websites found through search engines aren't very reliable. There isn't really any way to make sure that these sources are (1) current, (2) scholarly, (3) peer-reviewed, or (4) unbiased.
  
• Despite the possible unreliability of free web resources, there are some legitimate and useful research materials out there. If you must use free web resources, try to restrict yourself to sites with non-business domains: those that end in .org, .edu, or .gov. You can also try Google's "Scholar" tool, which will limit your search to educational sites.
  
• Even if you retrieve information from a .org, .edu, or .gov site, there is no guarantee that it's correct, up-to-date, or unbiased. If you are going to use a source from the free web, make sure that you evaluate the source's reliability before incorporating it into your argument.
  
• Professors who don't allow you to use "Internet sources" mean free web sources.

FEE WEB: Every year, Temple University's library pays millions of dollars for specialized search engines that cover academic books and articles, as well as major newspapers and magazines. These proprietary databases ensure that all the results will come from legitimate, scholarly books and journals. When your professors ask for scholarly or peer-reviewed sources, they expect you to use these databases.

• Temple (and other universities and organizations) pay these database companies to collect current and historical bibliographic information from thousands of scholarly books and journals in hundreds of disciplines. No matter what your major is, Temple's library databases can find articles about it.
  
• Because Temple pays so much money for these resources, they are only available to current Temple students, faculty, and staff. If you are on campus, you can access these articles from any networked computer. If you are off campus, you can access these articles through the TUPortal.
  
• Most of the databases search only peer-reviewed materials. That means that every article had to be read and approved by leading scholars in the field; in other words, every article in the databases is a legitimate and respected source of information.
  
• Many of the databases offer full-text copies of articles. If you need something right away, start with Academic Search Premier, a full-text database that covers all academic fields.
  
• Even "scholarly" sources aren't infallible. Don't assume that the author(s) of an academic article are automatically right - read critically and question their methodology and conclusions.
  
• Fee web sources (as well as the library's catalog, which is hosted online) are allowed even when professors forbid "Internet sources."

If you have additional questions about using the library databases or catalog, contact the Research Librarians (at the Reference Desk in Paley Library or at http://library.temple.edu/help/numbers/index.jsp?bhcp=1 ).

If you have additional questions about evaluating source materials, check out the Writing Center's other online resources.