McGraw-Hill Guide to Electronic Research, page 21

McGraw-Hill Guide to Electronic Research

You can browse in print, flipping through the table of contents or index of a book, for example, or sampling a middle chapter.

Text-only electronic versions of articles are taken out of the context of the original. However, graphics, other articles and advertisements adjacent to an article in a newspaper or journal can give you a broader sense of history and culture.

You can immediately tell the size of a book or article in print, but it's difficult to get a sense of the length of some computerized texts. You won't necessarily know even when the size of the file is given (for example, 15K) because some of those kilobytes may be for graphics. (Without graphics, 15K is about 6 pages.) If the information is given, note the pages an article covered in its original form.

General Guidelines for a Research Project

The same guidelines apply to researching electronically as for searching through print:

Spend preliminary time jotting down ideas and questions
Determine the level of information you need and the time limits of your project
Continually refine your search as you go
Save notes on your computer disk where possible
Record the source of every fact or quotation
Stop periodically to assess; write your thoughts on what you are discovering
Stay open to discovery--allowing time for browsing and reflection

For example, if your topic is the mercury poisoning of fish, first figure out what it is you want to learn

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