Finding quality websites for your research / assignments...

...is a tricky business. We all know (or hopefully we do!) the perils of using the web for finding reliable academic quality information. Many websites you find through Google, Bing, Dogpile, AltaVista or any of the other mainstream search engines are likely to be of dubious quality. The sites you find may be strewn with careless (or even malicious) mistakes, they may have been written for a particular audience (e.g. people of a certain political persuasion, potential clients for a company and so on), they may be horribly out-of-date and, above all else, all the above may not be at all obvious (seeking information on the 'tree octopus'?: http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/). For further advice on sorting out 'good' sites from the 'dubious' ones, pick up a copy of our free guide, 'Evaluation of Web Sites' from any UEL library.

Of course, your primary port of call for quality information should be the library's resources - high-quality academic databases such as PsycINFO, our book stock and so on. However, sometimes the web can be useful for finding other information. So, how do you find reliable, high-quality websites?

The answer is that there are many different ways. And the means I want to highlight today is through 'gateways' or 'directories'. These are alternatives to search engines where instead of searching across the whole web, you are searching across specially selected collections of websites, organised into categories (meaning you can either search or browse through the websites). In the case of Intute, these websites have been selected specifically with UK universities in mind. This means that all the websites you find through Intute have been 'verified' as being of academic quality, and, importantly, won't be primarily American websites (as is often the case with general search engines). Another example is Google Directory. You will need to be a little more careful with this one, but it is a large and growing directory which should give more reliable websites that a standard Google search as all websites have been handpicked. I would suggesting browsing the 'Psychology' section of Google Directory (the link is on the front page, under 'Science') - you will see that this then expands out into dozens of sub-categories of psychology which can then be browsed through for websites on that subject area.

One little health warning: even through Intute, Google Directory, Yahoo! Directory, dmoz, Best of the Web and other gateways and directories, you must always evaluate the information you find before using it in your research or assignments - just because it is more likely to be reliable doesn't mean it is reliable!