Welcome!

Research helps us understand our role in the universe and make better decisions. We are inquisitive—it is what makes us human. To be able to conduct high-quality research is paramount to understanding our place in space.

Chances are, each of you already knows how to find some online information to fill a particular need. What you may not already know—or perhaps you do, and that's why you're here—is that the thousands of results you get from an Internet search may not represent the best information available on a topic, and may not encompass the broad, cross-disciplinary scope of research being done in a particular field. This course is designed to help students worldwide find, evaluate, and use information efficiently, effectively, and ethically for academic work—to go beyond the search engine.

If you are new to the course...

If you are a returning student, click the links below to jump to the weekly modules or click Modules on the left side of the page.
WEEK 1 Information Introduce yourself Identify types of information	WEEK 2 Evaluation Explore peer-review Evaluate authors and content
WEEK 3 Searching Learn simple search strategies Limit search results	WEEK 4 Ethics Explore copyright and fair use Review citations and plagiarism
WEEK 5 Resources Explore the Internet Find scholarly open-access resources	WEEK 6 Presenting Quote, paraphrase, and summarize Present research effectively

This course content is offered under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license Links to an external site. and can be attributed to Rose Petralia and Jared Campbell. Some material is based on Mastering Academic Research Links to an external site., originally developed at Florida Institute of Technology.