Surfing the Internet

Searchingthe Internet by just jumping in—without a plan, without experience, without expert help—is a crap shoot. But it happens all the time. Students enter terms in their favorite search engine, get back a mountain of results, randomly follow a few leads, and all too often end up with a handful of documents or sites that just happened to be among the first 20 or so listed in the search results. These items often get woven into a paper regardless of their quality, credibility, scholarly status, relevance, or coherence.

　　The result is that too much student research on the Internet resembles the proverbial monkey pounding away at the keyboard. Give the monkey enough time and he'll crank out Hamlet; give a student Internet access for 15 minutes and she'll crank out the raw material for a paper on capital punishment, with references to John Stuart Mill, Canada, the history of capital punishment in Maryland, and a list of current death row inmates in California.

　　That might look like research, but it's not.

　　One way of making sense of the Internet for college research is to distinguish two kinds of online searches: open searches and closed searches. Open searches look through the vast amounts of publicly-accessible material on the web, using free search engines and subject directories. They are primarily useful for informal and introductory research, for brainstorming, and for filling in missing details （when you want to know the population of Brazil, or the speed of light in water, or the year John Donne wrote"The Flea"）.

　　Closed searches, by contrast, look not through the whole web but through limited, edited collections. Typically one pays for a closed search, though since licenses and fees have often been arranged by one's organization （a college library or corporation, for instance）, a closed search can feel free to an individual user. Closed searches are primarily useful for formal research, for instance when you need to search for recent publications in an academic field.

　　Both open and closed searches are useful for anyone engaged in research, but they achieve different things and require different search strategies. Closed searches won't tap into the richness of the web, and open searches won't reliably produce scholarly material on academic topics. Many undergraduates, however, blur the two kinds of searches together, with the predictable result of bizarre tangents, a mishmash of references, and a lack of scholarly gravitas.