Information Cycle

Searching social media platforms may require creating your own account on the site. Choose carefully which sites you join, how much personal information you share with the site and other users, and consider creating a dedicated anonymous account for research purposes, separate from any personal accounts.

Some social media sites allow their content to be discovered by other search engines, like Google. Youtube is a good example here. Others, like Instagram, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter), can be discovered via Google, but may require an account on those sites to view the full content.

Social media posts often include memes (viral images and text) or video clips. It is imperative that you track down these partial forms of information to their original source to properly evaluate its validity. These sites may help:

Reverse Image Searching

Many news organizations, including TV network and cable news stations, radio, newspapers, and news magazines, make some of their content available for free on the internet. This is sometimes limited to a few free articles per month. For very recent events, a Google search may be the best way to find news coverage. You can also try searching specific news organizations' websites (e.g. cnn.com).

For access to news coverage behind paywalls, try some of these library-subscribed resources:

For more databases of historical news coverage, visit the Newspapers research guide.

There are many databases that specialize in describing and providing access to scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles. The databases below are interdisciplinary, meaning they cover a wide range of subject areas.

However, these two databases treat searches very differently.

• Academic Search Complete matches your search terms or keywords to the descriptive parts of the article, not the full text. Therefore, choose search terms that you think will appear in the Title or Abstract of an article, or search by Author's name if you know which scholar's work you need.
• JSTOR matches your search terms to the full text of the articles is has access to. This means you may get many thousands of results if your keywords show up lots of articles, regardless of how relevant it is to the main topic.

QuickSearch on the library homepage is also a good choice as it searches content across multiple databases, and includes books and ebooks in our collection. Note that QuickSearch is not limited to peer-reviewed sources, and also includes some news and magazine content.

Ask a librarian for help with your search if you're having trouble finding relevant results, or if you'd like recommendations for more discipline-specific databases.

When local, state, or federal governments take action and produce information sources, they may do so in a number of ways that affects the information types created. Legislatures may hold hearings or create laws. Politicians may give speeches. Courts may hear specific cases and issue rulings on matters of law. Agencies with special areas of expertise may conduct research, gather and publish data, or issue reports.

Consult with a librarian for help navigating this sometimes complicated information environment. Here are a few sources to help get started.