Skip to Main Content

Paideia 112 Research Unit

A step-by-step guide to the Research Paper Unit in Paideia 112.

Online Resources Gathered by Search Engines

Search engines such as Google are also available for research and can be good sources particularly for primary materials that are too costly or rare to be among the holdings in Preus Library.

However, you will need to be smart about how you use the internet as these searches yield large amounts of information that require some degree of evaluation on your part.  It can be difficult to know exactly who is responsible for presenting information--whether, for example, an interpretation of a Shakespeare play comes from an expert or a seventh-grade student who likes to put everything she writes on the web!

It's critical, then, that you evaluate websites for reliability and accuracy before you use them in your research paper. The librarian working with your section may have suggestions for reliable web sites, which you can find on your topic guide linked from the Home page.

Again, make sure you keep track of the URL(s) for the website(s) and the date you found the information, as you you will need that information for the citations in your bibliography.

Online Resources Provided by Preus Library

The electronic information provided by Preus Library is selected with Paideia research papers in mind.  These include databases to help you find scholarly articles as well as full-text journals online and electronic dictionaries and encyclopedias.

  • All of these resources provide quick and reliable access to peer-reviewed scholarly information.  "Peer-reviewed" means that articles have been examined by subject experts before publication and so are considered accurate and appropriate for your research. 
  • All of these databases can be accessed through the library’s home page and the online catalog. Librarians can help answer additional questions about how to access and use these resources.
  • The good news for you is that you will not need to apply the same rigorous evaluative questions to materials found in these databases since the librarians have already done this part of the research for you.
  • Keep track of which database you used and the date you accessed the article for information you will need in your bibliography.
Content © Luther College Preus Library, 700 College Drive, Decorah, IA 52101 (563) 387-1166 Creative Commons License
chat loading...