Most of the time, your Google search results page displays Wikipedia at the top when you make a query. Wikipedia is a helpful tool to gather information on almost any topic. Sadly, you cannot use this ever-dependable site for your research papers.

Wikipedia’s entries are open-source content. This means that anyone can edit the content you see on Wikipedia. Dr. Richard Austen Baker of Lancaster Law School tried to contribute to a Wikipedia entry to see why schools don’t accept the site to be included in bibliographies.

Why Is Wikipedia not acceptable according to academic standards?

Dr. Baker signed in to the site to contribute to an article on relational contract theory, an area they are an expert in. They found that the article needed some improvement. So they improved the piece and finished it. However, just like Dr. Baker, any other person on the Internet who doesn’t have the same expertise can sign up to be a contributor.

This demonstrates that Wikipedia is not a credible source. This is one of the reasons schools don’t allow you to cite articles from this site. At the same time, if schools allow students to use Wikipedia, it doesn’t encourage you to do your own academic reading.

The good news is that you can still use Wikipedia for initial reading. And when using the references page, you can locate credible sources that you can read to get firsthand information on the matter you are researching.

What are resource sites you can use?

There is a vast array of educational sites you can use for your research. Many of them are free, while some journals require you to subscribe or pay a fee. For the resources that need a fee, you can contact the authors themselves to see if they will allow you to have access to their work for research purposes. You can give this a shot; there is no harm in trying.

1. Books

Thanks to innovations like Google Scholar and Google Books, you can now search for the full text of different scholarly works. You can also find online copies of old books used in school for free. Some examples are works by Karl Marx. You can find copies of his books like The Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital volumes for free on other academic sites. The same goes for books on famous communication theories, economics, and classic literature.

2. News sites

You can always cite online news sites, especially those from reputable news organizations. The process of news production is structured. A news piece goes through several stages of editing, fact-checking, and triangulation before you see it online.

For example, you are interested in the rise of modern real estate properties and their developers. The news can be a source of data to know how the situation is in the real estate industry. However, it’s still up to you to do another round or two of fact-checking and comparing different sources to verify that you have the correct data.

3. Journals

Journals are an excellent source of up-to-date developments in a particular field. If you are researching media and communication, it is ideal that you read the latest studies published in your area of concern. Most books that you use in your curriculum were published decades if not centuries ago.

Times have changed, so it’s only natural that some phenomena that were true before are no longer applicable today. The same goes for other fields. You will find recent discoveries in the field of medicine in medical journals. It’s the same for the latest studies on economics and law.

It is your duty to look for the latest literature in the field that you are studying. This is the reason why a review of related literature is required for research. Universities usually have subscriptions to reputable journals. You can access them for free. Just ask your library for some information.

Looking for peer-reviewed journals has never been easier. You can go to Academia.edu to look for the latest research papers on your topic. Once you look into one field, it is easy to navigate the thousands of related studies that might help you. You can visit Springer link for scientific journals and reference works. And then, there are online archiving systems like JSTOR for all sorts of academic journals.

Doing research is not easy, but the Internet somehow lessens the burden. You now have access to online plagiarism checkers and even software applications that check your grammar. Use all of this to your advantage.