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Find quality information

How to find quality information for academic purposes, including databases, specific information formats, Google Scholar and the web, research alerts and evaluating information.

Using non-academic sources

While academic sources are generally preferred for university work (check our information on the types of information you should be using), there may be times when you need to use non-academic materials. For example, web searching might be useful for finding news or information from reputable organisations.

Note that if you are actually looking for academic materials then a scholarly search engine like Google Scholar might be a better choice than Google. The following information will help with your web searching.

Get started with web searching

How to search

Google, Bing and other web search engines are designed to be easy to search. For academic purposes it is still a good idea to consider your topic and your search words thoughtfully. You can use the same tips from a Simple approach to searching for search engines.

Evaluating information

When searching the web it's important to consider the quality of the web page or source. For instance, a possible indicator of quality is whether the page has been authored by:

  • a government agency
  • international organisation
  • a non-governmental organisation (NGO)
  • company or think tank.

Evaluate information you find has further useful criteria for evaluating web resources.

Referencing

You must reference any information you find on the web in your paper. We have Referencing style guides, including APA, Vancouver (AMA), and MLA to help you.

Extra techniques in Google

You might get better results in Google by using some of these techniques.

Phrase searching

This limits your results to those where your search terms appear side by side. In Google, put double quotation marks around the words, e.g. “child protection" Queensland.

Site searching

Use the site: operator to search for information within a site or domain. For example, gold mining site:edu.au will find gold mining information from educational sites in Australia. Some useful domains include:

  • Government websites
    • .gov.au – Australia
    • .gov – United States
  • Educational websites
    • .edu.au – Australia
    • .edu – United States
  • Organisational websites. This might help you find materials from non-profit organisations such as NGOs, however any company can register for a .org domain name
    • .org.au – Australia
    • .org – United States.

View a list of domain names, and find more country code domains to limit your search to particular country's websites.

Limiting to file types

It can sometimes be very helpful to focus your search on certain file types. For example, organisational reports and documents are often produced in PDF format. Use the filetype operator, e.g. environmental impact bottled water filetype:pdf.

Advanced search

Google's Advanced search makes it easy to use many advanced search techniques. Click Tools on the Google page to get the Advanced search option.

The Advanced search form narrowing options include:

  • site or domain
  • terms appearing in the title of the page not just anywhere on the page
  • file type to limit by format such as .pdf.

Do an Advanced Search on Google has more tips.

Specific organisations

If you know of key organisations related to your topic it might be useful to visit their web sites directly to find information.

Google Books

Google Books searches the full-text of millions of scanned books from participating publishers and libraries. It can be an excellent way to identify books that might be useful for your work.

Check Library Search to access books you find via Google Books. If the book is not held by the Library you can:

Other search engines

There are other search engines available that may give more useful results for your searches.