Overview
The web holds a wide variety of scientific information and misinformation, ranging from popular press coverage to scholarly communications to advertisements to science buff sites. Be careful when using information from websites; it is changed often, which makes it hard to cite it in a paper. If you can find a final, published version of the same information, it is preferable to use that.
Government Websites and Data
- Science.govSearches documents from all science-related agencies in the US government. A great place to look for governmental reports or research if you're not sure which agencies might be involved.
- NIST Physical Reference DataThe National Institute of Standards and Technology maintains this website, and it is very current. You can find numerical data, reference information and information on papers that have been published relating to the data.
- Department of Energy Data ExplorerAccess to the Department of Energy's data collections. These collections are funded in whole or part by the DOE. All collections are available for free.
Reference Sources and Websites
- Physics WorldThis site, brought to you by the Institute of Physics, includes news, resources, company information, and job listings.
- PhysLink Physics & Astronomy Reference SourcesAn index of many different types of physics-related data, including less common data such as the exact USNO atomic clock time, information on physics Nobel Prize winners, and the indices of refraction of various materials.
CRC Handbook of Chemistry and PhysicsCall Number: ONLINEISBN: 9780367712600Online version of the most heavily-consulted reference work in chemistry and physics. It contains 16 sections of information pertaining to physics and chemistry as well as related fields.
Strategic Googling
There's a lot of good information out on the web! The trick is to find it amongst everything else out there.
Keywords
Depending on your topic, choosing the right keywords can be extremely important to making sure you get relevant results:
- Think about the terms that authors might use in writing about your topic.
- Pay attention to the results you're getting and think about what terms seem to be working, and which ones aren't
- Use those in future searches on Google and in other places.
Narrowing your search
- You can narrow your search to only results from a specific domain or type of domain by adding the search operator "site:" to your search.
- "site:.edu" narrows to websites from US educational institutions.
- "site:.ac.uk" will narrow to UK educational institutions.
- "site:.gov" will narrow to US government sites.
- On the search results page, you can narrow your search to particular types of sources and to sites published during a certain time. You can also choose to search on your exact words instead of the Google's default of searching for similar words.
