Currency: the timeliness of the information
Relevance: the importance of the information for your needs
Authority: the source of the information
Accuracy: the reliability, truthfulness, and correctness of the content
Purpose: the reason the information exists
Information on the Visible Net, or Free Web, can be easily found with a search engine, such as Google. Types of information on the Visible Net:
Information on the Invisible Net, or Deep Web, cannot be found, or is difficult to find, with a search engine. Types of information on the Invisible Net:
What’s a “Review Article?”
Not to be confused with a “peer reviewed journal,” Review articles are an attempt by one or more writers to sum up the current state of the research on a particular topic. Ideally, the writer searches for everything relevant to the topic, and then sorts it all out into a coherent view of the “state of the art” as it now stands. Review Articles will teach you about::
Review Articles are virtual gold mines if you want to find out what the key articles are for a given topic. If you read and thoroughly digest a good review article, you should be able to “talk the talk” about a given topic. Unlike research articles, review articles are good places to get a basic idea about a topic.
How to find Review Articles...
In most databases, such as PubMed and CINAHL, you can limit your search to include only review articles. Conduct your search and then limit to review articles.
Credit: UT Life Science Library
What’s a “research article”?
When scientists and other scholars want to make the results of their work public, they usually begin by publishing them in a scholarly journal with a title like New England Journal of Medicine, or Journal of Cell Biology.
What is and isn’t in a research article?
Research articles will usually contain:
Research articles are not good places to find:
They are the best way to access:
Examples:
Scholarly Journal Characteristics:
Magazine Characteristics: