I have difficulty getting articles off the Internet. Can I use these?(A15)


Because Internet is freely accessible to almost everyone, its information overload is enormous and its reliability open for discussion. As a basic rule, consider the Internet as a not very reliable source. If you visit a website, you have to make sure that it is a reliable source. What can you do to check the reliability of an Internet source?

• Check the website’s name and reputation
• Check the publisher’s name
• Check the suffix of an URL (.com/.org/.tv/.gov)
• Check when the website was updated for the last time
• Check several other sources to increase the reliability of your source
• Check the number of visitors to the website
• When referring to an Internet source in your writing always refer to the date you visited the website
• Always make references of Internet sources in footnotes and endnotes the moment you make use of this particular source in your analysis
• Use Wikipedia prudently (see Skill Sheet A15)

Save and/or print the information that you used of websites. If you are accused of plagiarism (see Skill Sheet E2), you must be able to provide the source of your information. The rate of circulation of websites is very high and many websites disappear into the mysterious landscape of the electronic highway. The validity of your research decreases if you are unable to provide the source to somebody who uses your bibliography.

The site www.archive.org allows you to search for old websites. It is a digital library. Their ‘Wayback Machine’ could help recover your lost URLs.

 

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