Monday, November 10, 2008
The EIR lesson last week taught us how to use the relevant search terms on Google and its sister site, Google Scholar.
On the whole, I found that Google is pretty good as the information generated from a search query is pretty diversified. That said, there are quite a lot of unnecessary information which were thrown at me during the search. But after comparing to Google Scholar, I think Google wins hands down. Although there are tons of research papers found via Google Scholar, they are mostly pay-to-read kinds.
Creating a discussion thread in a forum is nothing new to me. Although the replies are mostly irrelevant to the topic, some interesting alternative perspective and insights were shared. And besides, it is where I get to save random funny images like this one.
So in a way, the waiting time for replies are always pretty exciting as you never know if you'll get flamed, a good/bad answer or some funny idiot who decides to post for the sake of increasing his post count. Then again, I could always use a good laugh and I actually killed a few threads by being 'un-serious' in the past. I am still like that now, but that's another story.
And the last part regarding why we have to do citations for sources, we are using someone's intellectual property to give credibility to our own work. It makes our work seem authentic and allows interested parties to read up on the source at their own leisure. In addition, I'd say we should do citations to show our appreciation for the information that the person provided.
around the world in 80 days
[8:11 AM]
