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to Using Your Research
Educational
Sites
".edu" These addresses include elementary, middle school, and high school material as well as college and university material,
and you need to be sure to use appropriately sophisticated material. When visiting a site, you can sometimes tell if the site is
professional and scholarly. University sites can be produced by departments, libraries, and individual professors.
They can also be produced by graduate students and undergraduates. Use your best judgment, and be cautious of classroom projects, where the information published by
students will vary in quality.
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Organization Sites
".org"
These sites are run by various types of organizations. These may be business-oriented sites
with advertisements or non-profit groups. With these sites in
particular, look for the mission of the organization in order to determine the
biases of the site.
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Commercial sites
".com"
These sites are connected with some type of business. Not only do you want to examine the professionalism of the pages, but you want to consider the purpose and motivation for the site.
There are literary sites run by bookstores offering online purchasing
options, and one could question the qualifications of the
web page author in these cases. Unless you would use an
"infomercial" in a research paper, you might not use a
".com" site either!
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individual sites
Home pages may not be evident from the address, but vary widely in
content. The ones with family photos are easy to spot; the others--fan
sites, personal research projects and such--may look academic. Look for
the person's credentials before you use the information.
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Questions
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Updated: 07/26/00
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