Better places to do research

It's been a week since the Wikipedia blackout. It really drove the point home about SOPA and PIPA, I think, because if you look for anything on google, the Wikipedia article about it is going to be the first hit, or one of the first at least. Lots of people, then, saw what was probably their favorite source for information and trivia, go black, with a message about why everyone should oppose bad legislation.

I joked to myself, "where is everybody going to go for their quick facts? Where are two of my (non-fiction) writers going to find text to dump into the manuscripts to pad the word count?"

Seriously, though, we all know that writers of everything, even fiction, need to research things. Wikipedia is too convenient to ignore; but it's not reliable enough to use as a single source. I think nothing should be used as a single source if the topic matters to what you're writing about.

There are plenty of other places to look things up. When I want something medical, I go to Medline. When I want something mechanical, I go to How Stuff Works. If I want some hard core academic knowledge, there are no fewer than a dozen college and university libraries in my city.

Wikipedia is still good for general facts, and the articles that actually list their sources with hyperlinks to them are more or less trustworthy; the sources are often better than the articles.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun for people to list their "go to" sites for information on specific topics that they need to research for their work. I listed two above and I'll add some more when they come to mind, but what about yours?

I think Youtube has the same problems as Wikipedia. Anybody can post to it and it's not that hard to be anonymous there. It has the example in how "seeing is believing" and there are plenty of sincere, knowledgable people there, but it's not moderated as much as Wikipedia.

Google Scholar is cool. Google Patents can give you some insight into how things get invented and how engineers think (provided that you aren't one already); or you can search for American patents at the USPTO through their somewhat wonky interface.

The library should be a last resort. If you can't get anything online, then it's the only option left. Keep in mind the many people who do not live within driving distance of a good one; not to mention those of us who are a wee bit too busy to move away from our desks while we are working on multiple projects.

Captcha said:

I think there's a significant difference between academic research and research for writing fiction.... most of the novel-related research I do doesn't have to be that precise.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that.

If I needed a peer-reviewed work of research in an academic journal or in book-length form university libraries are best; and there are more than I can really count in an easy commute from where I am. I've done enough research in them to know that if I was writing a novel with specific facts (often facts of a purely local nature) in it, that I would likely not find what I am looking for in one of those or if I did, it would not be found very quickly. And when I need to fact-check something that a writer sends to me, a trip to the library subtracts productive hours from my day. I'm not a grad student anymore. Time is at a premium.

Though it was good to raise Google Books as a point. Many of the books that ended up there are on that level of academic acuity.

Wikipedia is insufficient as a source for fiction writers for slightly different reasons than it is for university students. Even if you only need a bit of info to get local, technical, or historical details in a story right; the trouble is that Wikipedia articles can be written, edited, modified; and revised by anyone and as extensive as their checks and balances might be, it is very easy for errant nonsense or stuff that's just plain wrong to be in the articles. This is all the more possible in obscure topics, because there will be fewer people monitoring those articles. Add in the tendency for Wikipedia articles to focus on very recent things, even including recent references to the article's subject matter in popular culture, and I start to wonder if Wikipedia's main value is more as a form of entertainment than as an encyclopedia. For university students, Wikipedia's deficiencies are obvious: it's not academically peer-reviewed and somebody who is paying so many thousands of dollars a year to have the privilege of putting two or three letters after his or her name and adding a line or two to his or her CV should be expected to work harder than a mere Google search. (Note: the tone is only slightly ironic here. I am not denigrating academia; I am saying that people who portend to be a part of it are held to way higher standards than everybody else, for reasons that are not always obvious to everybody else.)

My OP was a question about other sources, topic-specific sources, that are readily available online; ones that not everybody necessarily would know about; various "go-to" sources for information that can provide information that is more reliable than Wikipedia. I said that the library should be your last resort because of the time factor.