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10 Best Online Websites and Resources for Academic Research

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• Finding credible sources for academic research can be a major challenge for many college students.
• A growing number of online databases and libraries offer millions of potential sources.
• The university library helps students access restricted academic sources.
• Discover new online resources to make your next research project more efficient.

Every college student conducts research at some point. And professors have strong views on what counts as a credible academic resource. Choosing the wrong sources can hurt your grade.

So how can you conduct research efficiently while avoiding sleepless nights in the campus library? Online academic research websites make it easier to find reliable sources quickly.

College students conduct academic research in all kinds of disciplines, including science, history, literature, engineering, and education. And when it comes to college research papers , academic resources are the best sources.

Rather than pulling random facts from the internet — and running into problems with citations — college students need to know how to find credible sources and how to use online academic tools. Keep reading to learn how you can find the best credible sources for your college research needs.

How to Find Credible Sources for Research

How can you find credible sources for research and avoid misinformation? Your instructor likely recommends avoiding general web content or Wikipedia.

Finding the most reliable websites for research starts with evaluating the website itself. Sites run by academic or government organizations rank high in reliability. Databases and specialized search engines can also provide good research sources.

Next, make sure you understand the source of the information and the process used to publish it. Scholarly articles and books that undergo peer review make for the best academic resources.

Finally, when in doubt, check with your instructor or an academic librarian. They can help point you to reliable sources or double-check sources you're unsure about.

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The 10 Best Academic Research Sources

What resources will point you toward reliable sources for your academic research? Rather than scrolling through pages of search results, turn to these academic resources when you need to find sources.

1. Google Scholar

Looking for an academic article, thesis , or abstract? Google Scholar should be your first stop. Google Scholar helps you find related works, locate full documents at your school library , and access scholarly research.

While Google created Google Scholar, it's very different from a general online search. Google Scholar brings together academic articles and ranks them based on the authors, publication location, and citation record. That means the top results generally represent the most reliable scholarship on your topic.

For journal articles, books, images, and even primary sources, JSTOR ranks among the best online resources for academic research. JSTOR's collection spans 75 disciplines, with strengths in the humanities and social sciences . The academic research database includes complete runs of over 2,800 journals.

And if you're looking for images, turn to Artstor , which offers over 2.5 million images related to the arts, sciences, and literature. However, JSTOR is not an open-access database. That means you'll need to log in through your university library, which typically includes off-campus access .

3. Library of Congress

As the largest library in the world, the Library of Congress is an amazing online resource for academic research. Students can search its collections to access digital resources, videos, audio recordings, photographs, and maps.

The library's materials also include notated music, web archives, legislation, and 3D objects. You'll find materials for almost any topic in its extensive collections. You can search historic American newspapers from 1777-1963 with the Chronicling America tool or look up pirate trials in another digital collection.

4. PubMed Central

The National Library of Medicine, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, runs PubMed Central. Founded in 2000, the database includes academic scholarship dating back to the 18th century. The resource connects college students with life sciences and biomedical academic sources.

And as an open-access database, PubMed Central offers free access to scholarly literature. Today, PubMed Central has over 7 million full-text records, making it a great resource for students in the life sciences or medical fields.

5. Google Books

Whether you're looking for a recent publication or an out-of-print book, there's a good chance you'll find it on Google Books. In 2019, Google announced that Google Books contains over 40 million books .

You can enter any search term to find books that contain matches. And you can download the full text of any book in the public domain — which includes 10 million titles. Make sure to check publisher and author information when using Google Books.

The site also includes reference pages that link to book reviews. Keep in mind that you'll have more limited access to recent books. Still, Google Books is a great first step to find sources that you can later look for at your campus library.

6. Science.gov

If you're looking for scientific research, Science.gov is a great option. The site provides full-text documents, scientific data, and other resources from federally funded research.

A U.S. government site, Science.gov searches more than 60 databases and 2,200 scientific websites. You'll find over 200 million pages of research and development information, including projects funded by 14 federal agencies. Students in any STEM field can benefit from the resource.

7. Digital Commons Network

University librarians curate the Digital Commons Network, which connects students with peer-reviewed articles. The site's other resources include dissertations, book chapters, conference proceedings, and working papers.

The Digital Commons Network includes scholarly work from diverse disciplines like architecture, business, education, law, and the sciences. You can also access humanities, social sciences, and engineering scholarship through the network.

8. ResearchGate

ResearchGate has been described as social networking for research scientists. But ResearchGate is also a great option to find open-access academic sources. Scholars upload their work to ResearchGate, which makes it available to the public for free.

Currently, over 20 million researchers around the world use the site, which contains over 135 million publications. College students looking for scientific research can often find resources on ResearchGate and even connect with scholars.

9. WorldCat

When you're looking for library resources, WorldCat is one of the best tools. Connected to over 10,000 libraries, WorldCat is a database that allows you to search library collections.

The database lists books and articles available at your local libraries, making it easier to find materials that are not available online. In addition to books, WorldCat contains music, videos, audiobooks, and scholarly articles.

You can also find digital research materials, including photos. When you're logged into WorldCat through your university library, you can also access full-text articles and other resources. Or you can use WorldCat to find sources to request through interlibrary loan.

10. Your University Library

When you're conducting academic research, your university library can be one of your best resources. In addition to online databases, journal articles, and books, your campus library also has academic librarians who can point you to the best sources.

When you don't know where to start, reach out to an academic librarian to learn more about your school's research tools. Or use interlibrary loan to get a scanned copy of an article. Many of the campus library's resources are available online, making them easy to access.

How to Access Academic Resources

Many sites offer open-access resources. That means anyone can access the materials. Other sites restrict what you can read. For example, you might find some blank pages when searching on Google Books because of copyright restrictions. And many academic articles are behind paywalls.

Fortunately, college students benefit from one of the best resources for conducting research: the university library. Your library likely subscribes to multiple academic databases and journals. If you run into a paywall, check whether your library offers access to the resource.

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5 Best Tools to Annotate and Highlight Web Pages for Research and Study

These free tools let you annotate or highlight any part of a web page to share it with others or use as reference for your research.

When you share a link with someone, the relevant part is just a tiny snippet or two. Use these free tools to annotate or highlight the important part to draw attention to it.

All the apps in the article have a highlight marker (often with different colors) and a way to write sticky notes or comments anywhere on the page. Both features are excellent when you want to add notes for research and study, whether for your personal needs or friends. Beyond that, a few small features make each tool better for different needs.

1. Diigo (Chrome, Bookmarklet, Android, iOS): Annotations, Highlights, Comments on Any Web Page

Diigo is one of the oldest and most popular online annotation tools. Of course, it has changed a lot over the years, but it is a simple and reliable app to add highlights and comments to any web page at its core.

Available as a Chrome extension or a bookmarklet for other browsers, Diigo is intuitive to use. Select any text on any article, and you can highlight it in one of four colors. You can also add a small note to the highlight or a floating note anywhere on the page. You can also share notes with collaborators, and you can change their colors too. As Diigo says in its help section, you might want to mentally assign a specific purpose to each color, thus keeping your highlights organized for your eyes.

All annotations on a page can be seen quickly through the extension shortcut. You can also view and organize annotations in the web dashboard for Diigo. You can create groups in Diigo and share annotations and highlights with them and as PDFs.

Diigo is also a bookmark app, saving each page and its annotations to your account and syncing it across devices. On phones, Diigo is available as a standalone browser with many of the same features.

Download: Diigo for Chrome | Bookmarklet (Free)

Download: Diigo Browser for Android | iOS (Free)

2. Smort (Web): Annotate and Edit Articles to Share With Friends

Most annotation apps will only let you add highlights, sticky notes, and comments to the article. Smort enables you to change the article contents itself, remove entire paragraphs or images, add text, etc. And you don't need to install anything to do this either.

When you want to share any article, add "smort.io" before the URL and press Enter to open it in the Smort editor. Here, you can edit the article as you see fit, with a simple Markdown editor to change text and text formatting. Smort also supports highlights of four different colors, so you can add a note at the top of the article about what each color means. There are handy Undo and Redo buttons at the top if you make any mistakes.

Smort auto-generates a table of contents for each article to make navigation easier. As the editor, you can also switch between four different font types and a dark or light mode for easier reading. Once you've finished editing, click the Share button to generate a unique link that lasts for seven days from creation. After that, if you make further edits, you'll need to regenerate a new link and reshare.

3. Spade (Chrome): Privately Annotate and Highlight Web Pages

Spade is an excellent free tool to aid your research for essays and papers while keeping it private. It's a Chrome browser extension with annotation and highlighting abilities and a few other neat tricks like citations and machine-learning analysis.

Once you install the extension, Spade appears as a little button in one of the four corners of every web page (customizable by you). Click the button to expand a toolbar that has an annotation pen to draw or scribble anywhere and a highlight marker. You can control the point size for each and choose from seven different colors. Spade also lets you form a text box anywhere on the page to write notes and has a simple eraser to take it all away. All these highlights are shared and synced to your Spade web account so that you can access them anywhere.

In our tests, sharing a page made in Spade didn't show the annotations or highlights to the recipient. Nonetheless, you can export any annotated page as a PDF file with all notes intact.

Apart from these annotation features, Spade includes a built-in citation tool for research papers that automatically cites pages in leading journals. It also uses machine learning to rate a web page's credibility and summarizes large text into precis.

Download: Spade for Chrome (Free)

4. Hypothes.is (Web, Chrome): Collaborative Annotations and Highlights on the Web

If you're working with a study group or a team on a research project that needs to share links with annotations, Hypothesis is as good as it gets. This Chrome extension is much lighter than others and focuses on the ability to collaborate. Plus, it's ad-free and has no hidden costs or restrictions.

All users will need to sign up for a Hypothesis account before installing the extension. Then, create a private group if you wish to keep your shares confidential with your friends, or use the default Public tab let anyone see the annotations.

On any web page, you can select text to turn it into a highlight or an annotation (i.e., highlight with a note). Each of these shows up in your Hypothesis sidebar in chronological order for that page. Collaborators can add comments and reply to each annotation individually. You can also add a note on any page which appears in the Notes section.

The Hypothesis web dashboard makes it easy to search through all your highlights and notes. Along with a full-text search, you can add advanced operators (like username, group name, URL, or tag) to find what you're looking for quickly.

Download: Hypothesis for Chrome (Free)

5. LINER (Browsers, Mobile): Best Cross-Platform Highlight Tool, Also for YouTube

Liner is one of the best online annotation apps and has been for years, especially with its recent updates. Its broad support for different platforms makes it the go-to choice if you're switching between phones, tablets, and computers but need one place to collect all your highlights.

Once you create an account and log in, you can select any text to highlight it. You can also add a comment to any highlight and share this with friends and collaborators. The free basic account only lets you work with one color for the highlighter and limits you to 15 highlights per page. For more colors and unlimited highlights, you need the Premium package.

Liner also works with YouTube, which makes it stand apart. You can highlight any part of a YouTube video, much like highlighting text on a web page. This worked well for us on browsers but not on mobiles.

The app has a few other features worth checking out, like how it shows the most popular highlights by other users on any page. And the dashboard can distinguish between text and video highlights.

Download: Liner for Android | iOS (Free)

Download: Liner for Chrome | Edge | Safari | Whale (Free)

Use Colors as Your Own Organizing System

Whichever annotation tool you use, there's a nifty hack suggested by multiple users and app blogs. Since most of them let you use different colors for highlighting or annotation, use these colors for your own tagging or organizing system.

For example, when you highlight text in yellow, it means "worth reading," but when you highlight it in red, it means "use as-is in the research paper." Do that for all the colors. No one other than you needs to know what each color signifies, but as long as you are consistent with how you use them, it'll give you a useful system.

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A Comprehensive Framework to Evaluate Websites: Literature Review and Development of GoodWeb

Rosalie allison.

1 Public Health England, Gloucester, United Kingdom

Catherine Hayes

Cliodna a m mcnulty, vicki young, associated data.

Summary of included studies, including information on the participant.

Interventions: methodologies and tools to evaluate websites.

Methods used or described in each study.

Summary of the most used website attributes evaluated.

Attention is turning toward increasing the quality of websites and quality evaluation to attract new users and retain existing users.

This scoping study aimed to review and define existing worldwide methodologies and techniques to evaluate websites and provide a framework of appropriate website attributes that could be applied to any future website evaluations.

We systematically searched electronic databases and gray literature for studies of website evaluation. The results were exported to EndNote software, duplicates were removed, and eligible studies were identified. The results have been presented in narrative form.

A total of 69 studies met the inclusion criteria. The extracted data included type of website, aim or purpose of the study, study populations (users and experts), sample size, setting (controlled environment and remotely assessed), website attributes evaluated, process of methodology, and process of analysis. Methods of evaluation varied and included questionnaires, observed website browsing, interviews or focus groups, and Web usage analysis. Evaluations using both users and experts and controlled and remote settings are represented. Website attributes that were examined included usability or ease of use, content, design criteria, functionality, appearance, interactivity, satisfaction, and loyalty. Website evaluation methods should be tailored to the needs of specific websites and individual aims of evaluations. GoodWeb, a website evaluation guide, has been presented with a case scenario.

Conclusions

This scoping study supports the open debate of defining the quality of websites, and there are numerous approaches and models to evaluate it. However, as this study provides a framework of the existing literature of website evaluation, it presents a guide of options for evaluating websites, including which attributes to analyze and options for appropriate methods.

Introduction

Since its conception in the early 1990s, there has been an explosion in the use of the internet, with websites taking a central role in diverse fields such as finance, education, medicine, industry, and business. Organizations are increasingly attempting to exploit the benefits of the World Wide Web and its features as an interface for internet-enabled businesses, information provision, and promotional activities [ 1 , 2 ]. As the environment becomes more competitive and websites become more sophisticated, attention is turning toward increasing the quality of the website itself and quality evaluation to attract new and retain existing users [ 3 , 4 ]. What determines website quality has not been conclusively established, and there are many different definitions and meanings of the term quality, mainly in relation to the website’s purpose [ 5 ]. Traditionally, website evaluations have focused on usability, defined as “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use [ 6 ].” The design of websites and users’ needs go beyond pure usability, as increased engagement and pleasure experienced during interactions with websites can be more important predictors of website preference than usability [ 7 - 10 ]. Therefore, in the last decade, website evaluations have shifted their focus to users’ experience, employing various assessment techniques [ 11 ], with no universally accepted method or procedure for website evaluation.

This scoping study aimed to review and define existing worldwide methodologies and techniques to evaluate websites and provide a simple framework of appropriate website attributes, which could be applied to future website evaluations.

A scoping study is similar to a systematic review as it collects and reviews content in a field of interest. However, scoping studies cover a broader question and do not rigorously evaluate the quality of the studies included [ 12 ]. Scoping studies are commonly used in the fields of public services such as health and education, as they are more rapid to perform and less costly in terms of staff costs [ 13 ]. Scoping studies can be precursors to a systematic review or stand-alone studies to examine the range of research around a particular topic.

The following research question is based on the need to gain knowledge and insight from worldwide website evaluation to inform the future study design of website evaluations: what website evaluation methodologies can be robustly used to assess users’ experience?

To show how the framework of attributes and methods can be applied to evaluating a website, e-Bug, an international educational health website, will be used as a case scenario [ 14 ].

This scoping study followed a 5-stage framework and methodology, as outlined by Arksey and O’Malley [ 12 ], involving the following: (1) identifying the research question, as above; (2) identifying relevant studies; (3) study selection; (4) charting the data; and (5) collating, summarizing, and reporting the results.

Identifying Relevant Studies

Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines [ 15 ], studies for consideration in the review were located by searching the following electronic databases: Excerpta Medica dataBASE, PsycINFO, Cochrane, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Scopus, ACM digital library, and IEEE Xplore SPORTDiscus. The keywords used referred to the following:

• Population: websites
• Intervention: evaluation methodologies
• Outcome: user’s experience.

Table 1 shows the specific search criteria for each database. These keywords were also used to search gray literature for unpublished or working documents to minimize publication bias.

Full search strategy used to search each electronic database.

a EMBASE: Excerpta Medica database.

b CINAHL: Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature.

c ACM: Association for Computing Machinery.

d IEEE: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Study Selection

Once all sources had been systematically searched, the list of citations was exported to EndNote software to identify eligible studies. By scanning the title, and abstract if necessary, studies that did not fit the inclusion criteria were removed by 2 researchers (RA and CH). As abstracts are not always representative of the full study that follows or capture the full scope [ 16 ], if the title and abstract did not provide sufficient information, the full manuscript was examined to ascertain whether they met all the inclusion criteria, which included (1) studies focused on websites, (2) studies of evaluative methods (eg, use of questionnaire and task completion), (3) studies that reported outcomes that affect the user’s experience (eg, quality, satisfaction, efficiency, effectiveness without necessarily focusing on methodology), (4) studies carried out between 2006 and 2016, (5) studies published in English, and (6) type of study (any study design that is appropriate).

Exclusion criteria included (1) studies that focus on evaluations using solely experts and are not transferrable to user evaluations; (2) studies that are in the form of electronic book or are not freely available on the Web or through OpenAthens, the University of Bath library, or the University of the West of England library; (3)studies that evaluate banking, electronic commerce (e-commerce), or online libraries’ websites and do not have transferrable measures to a range of other websites; (4) studies that report exclusively on minority or special needs groups (eg, blind or deaf users); and (5) studies that do not meet all the inclusion criteria.

Charting the Data

The next stage involved charting key items of information obtained from studies being reviewed. Charting [ 17 ] describes a technique for synthesizing and interpreting qualitative data by sifting, charting, and sorting material according to key issues and themes. This is similar to a systematic review in which the process is called data extraction. The data extracted included general information about the study and specific information relating to, for instance, the study population or target, the type of intervention, outcome measures employed, and the study design.

The information of interest included the following: type of website, aim or purpose of the study, study populations (users and experts), sample size, setting (laboratory, real life, and remotely assessed), website attributes evaluated, process of methodology, and process of analysis.

NVivo version 10.0 software was used for this stage by 2 researchers (RA and CH) to chart the data.

Collating, Summarizing, and Reporting the Results

Although the scoping study does not seek to assess the quality of evidence, it does present an overview of all material reviewed with a narrative account of findings.

Ethics Approval and Consent to Participate

As no primary research was carried out, no ethical approval was required to undertake this scoping study. No specific reference was made to any of the participants in the individual studies, nor does this study infringe on their rights in any way.

The electronic database searches produced 6657 papers; a further 7 papers were identified through other sources. After removing duplicates (n=1058), 5606 publications remained. After titles and abstracts were examined, 784 full-text papers were read and assessed further for eligibility. Of those, 69 articles were identified as suitable by meeting all the inclusion criteria ( Figure 1 ).

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses flowchart of search results.

Study Characteristics

Studies referred to or used a mixture of users (72%) and experts (39%) to evaluate their websites; 54% used a controlled environment, and 26% evaluated websites remotely ( Multimedia Appendix 1 [ 2 - 4 , 11 , 18 - 85 ]). Remote usability, in its most basic form, involves working with participants who are not in the same physical location as the researcher, employing techniques such as live screen sharing or questionnaires. Advantages to remote website evaluations include the ability to evaluate using a larger number of participants as travel time and costs are not a factor, and participants are able to partake at a time that is appropriate to them, increasing the likelihood of participation and the possibility of a greater diversity of participants [ 18 ]. However, the disadvantages of remote website evaluations, in comparison with a controlled setting, are that system performance, network traffic, and the participant’s computer setup can all affect the results.

A variety of types of websites evaluated were included in this review including government (9%), online news (6%), education (1%), university (12%), and sports organizations (4%). The aspects of quality considered, and their relative importance varied according to the type of website and the goals to be achieved by the users. For example, criteria such as ease of paying or security are not very important to educational websites, whereas they are especially important for online shopping. In this sense, much attention must be paid when evaluating the quality of a website, establishing a specific context of use and purpose [ 19 ].

The context of the participants was also discussed, in relation to the generalizability of results. For example, when evaluations used potential or current users of their website, it was important that computer literacy was reflective of all users [ 20 ]. This could mean ensuring that participants with a range of computer abilities and experiences were used so that results were not biased to the most or least experienced users.

Intervention

A total of 43 evaluation methodologies were identified in the 69 studies in this review. Most of them were variations of similar methodologies, and a brief description of each is provided in Multimedia Appendix 2 . Multimedia Appendix 3 shows the methods used or described in each study.

Questionnaire

Use of questionnaires was the most common methodology referred to (37/69, 54%), including questions to rank or rate attributes and open questions to allow text feedback and suggested improvements. Questionnaires were used in a combination of before or after usability testing to assess usability and overall user experience.

Observed Browsing the Website

Browsing the website using a form of task completion with the participant, such as cognitive walkthrough, was used in 33/69 studies (48%), whereby an expert evaluator used a detailed procedure to simulate task execution and browse all particular solution paths, examining each action while determining if expected user’s goals and memory content would lead to choosing a correct option [ 30 ]. Screen capture was often used (n=6) to record participants’ navigation through the website, and eye tracking was used (n=7) to assess where the eye focuses on each page or the motion of the eye as an individual views a Web page. The think-aloud protocol was used (n=10) to encourage users to express out loud what they were looking at, thinking, doing, and feeling, as they performed tasks. This allows observers to see and understand the cognitive processes associated with task completion. Recording the time to complete tasks (n=6) and mouse movement or clicks (n=8) were used to assess the efficiency of the websites.

Qualitative Data Collection

Several forms of qualitative data collection were used in 27/69 studies (39%). Observed browsing, interviews, and focus groups were used either before or after the use of the website. Pre-website-use, qualitative research was often used to collect details of which website attributes were important for participants or what weighting participants would give to each attribute. Postevaluation, qualitative techniques were used to collate feedback on the quality of the website and any suggestions for improvements.

Automated Usability Evaluation Software

In 9/69 studies (13%), automated usability evaluation focused on developing software, tools, and techniques to speed evaluation (rapid), tools that reach a wider audience for usability testing (remote), and tools that have built-in analyses features (automated). The latter can involve assessing server logs, website coding, and simulations of user experience to assess usability [ 42 ].

Card Sorting

A technique that is often linked with assessing navigability of a website, card sorting, is useful for discovering the logical structure of an unsorted list of statements or ideas by exploring how people group items and structures that maximize the probability of users finding items (5/69 studies, 7%). This can assist with determining effective website structure.

Web Usage Analysis

Of 69 studies, 3 studies used Web usage analysis or Web analytics to identify browsing patterns by analyzing the participants’ navigational behavior. This could include tracking at the widget level, that is, combining knowledge of the mouse coordinates with elements such as buttons and links, with the layout of the HTML pages, enabling complete tracking of all user activity.

Outcomes (Attributes Used to Evaluate Websites)

Often, different terminology for website attributes was used to describe the same or similar concepts ( Multimedia Appendix 4 ). The most used website attributes that were assessed can be broken down into 8 broad categories and further subcategories:

• Usability or ease of use is the degree to which a website can be used to achieve given goals (n=58). It includes navigation such as intuitiveness, learnability, memorability, and information architecture; effectiveness such as errors; and efficiency.
• Content (n=41) includes completeness, accuracy, relevancy, timeliness, and understandability of the information.
• Web design criteria (n=29) include use of media, search engines, help resources, originality of the website, site map, user interface, multilanguage, and maintainability.
• Functionality (n=31) includes links, website speed, security, and compatibility with devices and browsers.
• Appearance (n=26) includes layout, font, colors, and page length.
• Interactivity (n=25) includes sense of community, such as ability to leave feedback and comments and email or share with a friend option or forum discussion boards; personalization; help options such as frequently answered questions or customer services; and background music.
• Satisfaction (n=26) includes usefulness, entertainment, look and feel, and pleasure.
• Loyalty (n=8) includes first impression of the website.

GoodWeb: Website Evaluation Guide

As there was such a range of methods used, a suggested guide of options for evaluating websites is presented below ( Figure 2 ), coined GoodWeb, and applied to an evaluation of e-Bug, an international educational health website [ 14 ]. Allison at al [ 86 ] show the full details of how GoodWeb has been applied and outcomes of the e-Bug website evaluation.

Framework for website evaluation.

Step 1. What Are the Important Website Attributes That Affect User's Experience of the Chosen Website?

Usability or ease of use, content, Web design criteria, functionality, appearance, interactivity, satisfaction, and loyalty were the umbrella terms that encompassed the website attributes identified or evaluated in the 69 studies in this scoping study. Multimedia Appendix 4 contains a summary of the most used website attributes that have been assessed. Recent website evaluations have shifted focus from usability of websites to an overall user’s experience of website use. A decision on which website attributes to evaluate for specific websites could come from interviews or focus groups with users or experts or a literature search of attributes used in similar evaluations.

Application

In the scenario of evaluating e-Bug or similar educational health websites, the attributes chosen to assess could be the following:

• Appearance: colors, fonts, media or graphics, page length, style consistency, and first impression
• Content: clarity, completeness, current and timely information, relevance, reliability, and uniqueness
• Interactivity: sense of community and modern features
• Ease of use: home page indication, navigation, guidance, and multilanguage support
• Technical adequacy: compatibility with other devices, load time, valid links, and limited use of special plug-ins
• Satisfaction: loyalty

These cover the main website attributes appropriate for an educational health website. If the website did not currently have features such as search engines, site map, background music, it may not be appropriate to evaluate these, but may be better suited to question whether they would be suitable additions to the website; or these could be combined under the heading modern features . Furthermore, security may not be a necessary attribute to evaluate if participant identifiable information or bank details are not needed to use the website.

Step 2. What Is the Best Way to Evaluate These Attributes?

Often, a combination of methods is suitable to evaluate a website, as 1 method may not be appropriate to assess all attributes of interest [ 29 ] (see Multimedia Appendix 3 for a summary of the most used methods for evaluating websites). For example, screen capture of task completion may be appropriate to assess the efficiency of a website but would not be the chosen method to assess loyalty. A questionnaire or qualitative interview may be more appropriate for this attribute.

In the scenario of evaluating e-Bug, a questionnaire before browsing the website would be appropriate to rank the importance of the selected website attributes, chosen in step 1. It would then be appropriate to observe browsing of the website, collecting data on completion of typical task scenarios, using the screen capture function for future reference. This method could be used to evaluate the effectiveness (number of tasks successfully completed), efficiency (whether the most direct route through the website was used to complete the task), and learnability (whether task completion is more efficient or effective second time of trying). It may then be suitable to use a follow-up questionnaire to rate e-Bug against the website attributes previously ranked. The attribute ranking and rating could then be combined to indicate where the website performs well and areas for improvement.

Step 3: Who Should Evaluate the Website?

Both users and experts can be used to evaluate websites. Experts are able to identify areas for improvements, in relation to usability; whereas, users are able to appraise quality as well as identify areas for improvement. In this respect, users are able to fully evaluate user’s experience, where experts may not be able to.

For this reason, it may be more appropriate to use current or potential users of the website for the scenario of evaluating e-Bug.

Step 4: What Setting Should Be Used?

A combination of controlled and remote settings can be used, depending on the methods chosen. For example, it may be appropriate to collect data via a questionnaire, remotely, to increase sample size and reach a more diverse audience, whereas a controlled setting may be more appropriate for task completion using eye-tracking methods.

Strengths and Limitations

A scoping study differs from a systematic review, in that it does not critically appraise the quality of the studies before extracting or charting the data. Therefore, this study cannot compare the effectiveness of the different methods or methodologies in evaluating the website attributes. However, what it does do is review and summarize a huge amount of literature, from different sources, in a format that is understandable and informative for future designs of website evaluations.

Furthermore, studies that evaluate banking, e-commerce, or online libraries’ websites and do not have transferrable measures to a range of other websites were excluded from this study. This decision was made to limit the number of studies that met the remaining inclusion criteria, and it was deemed that the website attributes for these websites would be too specialist and not necessarily transferable to a range of websites. Therefore, the findings of this study may not be generalizable to all types of website. However, Multimedia Appendix 1 shows that data were extracted from a very broad range of websites when it was deemed that the information was transferrable to a range of other websites.

A robust website evaluation can identify areas for improvement to both fulfill the goals and desires of its users [ 62 ] and influence their perception of the organization and overall quality of resources [ 48 ]. An improved website could attract and retain more online users; therefore, an evidence-based website evaluation guide is essential.

This scoping study emphasizes the fact that the debate about how to define the quality of websites remains open, and there are numerous approaches and models to evaluate it. Multimedia Appendix 2 shows existing methodologies or tools that can be used to evaluate websites. Many of these are variations of similar approaches; therefore, it is not strictly necessary to use these tools at face value; however, some could be used to guide analysis, following data collection. By following steps 1 to 4 of GoodWeb, the framework suggested in this study, taking into account the desired participants and setting and website evaluation methods, can be tailored to the needs of specific websites and individual aims of evaluations.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Primary Care Unit, Public Health England. This study is not applicable as secondary research.

Abbreviations

Multimedia appendix 1, multimedia appendix 2, multimedia appendix 3, multimedia appendix 4.

Authors' Contributions: RA wrote the protocol with input from CH, CM, and VY. RA and CH conducted the scoping review. RA wrote the final manuscript with input from CH, CM, and VY. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript.

Conflicts of Interest: None declared.

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Research Process

• Brainstorming
• Explore Google This link opens in a new window

Explore Web Resources

• Explore Background Information
• Explore Books
• Explore Scholarly Articles
• Narrowing a Topic
• Primary and Secondary Resources
• Academic, Popular & Trade Publications
• Scholarly and Peer-Reviewed Journals
• Grey Literature
• Clinical Trials
• Evidence Based Treatment
• Scholarly Research
• Database Research Log
• Search Limits
• Keyword Searching
• Boolean Operators
• Phrase Searching
• Truncation & Wildcard Symbols
• Proximity Searching
• Field Codes
• Subject Terms and Database Thesauri
• Reading a Scientific Article
• Website Evaluation
• Article Keywords and Subject Terms
• Cited References
• Citing Articles
• Related Results
• Search Within Publication
• Database Alerts & RSS Feeds
• Personal Database Accounts
• Persistent URLs
• Literature Gap and Future Research
• Web of Knowledge
• Annual Reviews
• Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analyses
• Finding Seminal Works
• Exhausting the Literature
• Finding Dissertations
• Researching Theoretical Frameworks
• Research Methodology & Design
• Tests and Measurements
• Organizing Research & Citations This link opens in a new window
• Scholarly Publication
• Learn the Library This link opens in a new window

Although not scholarly, the Internet will more than likely be your initial starting point for topic ideas and information. Informal channels of information, such as blogs and alert services, are invaluable resources that help you stay current and informed about your research area, and will provide assistance in directing you to the resources that are appropriate to use in your research. Start by searching for some of the keywords related to your area of interest to begin a very broad scan of the range of topics and information sources. Use keywords such as: trending news or trending topics, recent research, controversial issues, policy debates, and other relevant terms to locate recent news. Remember that using the Internet to find academic information takes a lot of hard work to carefully evaluate the good from the bad.

Remember, not everything you find on the Internet is appropriate to use as a resource in your research. For more guidance on how to evaluate online information, review the Website Evaluation  page, or view the Library’s Workshop Video on Website Evaluation .

Web Resource Types

• Research News
• Popular News & Magazines
• Feeds & Alerts
• Open Access

Blogs can be a valuable source for information on trending issues, current events, recent research, debates and more. Scholars, associations, executives, innovative researchers, every day practitioners, and students are just some of the people who write blogs. Knowing about and reading blogs that are written by experts in the field, or relevant associations, may be an important step in identifying current studies and trends in a subject area.

The websites ResearchBlogging.org and ACI Scholarly Blog Index aggregate blog posts regarding recent peer-reviewed research and publications.

Many online popular and news magazines have blog sections. For example, Psychology Today offers a large index of their blogs with a guide to their blogging experts’ credentials.

• Psychology Today Index of Blogs
• Scienceblogs.com

Another great resource for searching blogs is Nexis Uni . On the home page, select News and conduct a search using your keyword or phrase. On the search results screen, you may filter Publication Type to Blog, as shown below:

Research news websites are also good sources for the latest information in research. This is a great way to keep up with current research, learn about potentially interesting topics, and understand where the research in a particular field is heading. Headlines for recently published research can be found by searching by the keywords ‘research news’.

Science Daily is a website that provides top headlines in recent research and discoveries in key topic areas like Health and Medicine, Education & Learning, Computers & Mathematics and more. EurekAlert! , sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is a service that gathers and posts press releases from research organizations (universities, medical centers, government agencies, publishers).

• Science Daily
• EurekAlert!

Popular news sources and magazines can also be useful for finding out about the latest trends or research. News sources, like New York Times , Washington Post , NPR, The Chronicle of Higher Education and more, will regularly report on research of interest to a general audience.

Use the links provided in online articles or the informal in-text citation within the article to locate the original research publication. These resources can be found by conducting an internet search, or using NU Library’s Find a Resource tool to search for specific publications by title.  

You may also want to learn more about the differences between Academic and Popular Sources  to better understand the use of these resources in your academic research.

• New York Times
• Washington Post
• The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Find a Resource

Controversial topics and debates are useful for learning about different perspectives on the same issue. For a general internet search, try the keyword phrase “policy debate” to find trending or hot topics in the news or from policy institutes.

The website ProCon.org presents articles on current debates in the news and society. This site is directed toward students and educators.

News feeds or alerts are another extremely useful tool to locate recently published research in a subject area. Subscribing to news feeds helps you stay up-to-date on the research that is being done in a specific field. Many websites offer ways to subscribe to their feeds. Tools like Feedly allow you to keep websites and news sources all in one place. A simple way to organize and streamline information is to use an RSS feed reader. This quick tutorial video explains how to choose an RSS feed reader and subscribe to a number of RSS feeds.

There are also many websites that offer news and journal table of contents alert services. One example is Google Alerts for news and other web content. Another site,  Journal TOCs , a free service that collects and makes available Table of Contents for the top academic journals in a wide range of disciplines. On their website you can browse or search for research areas.

It is important to keep in mind that with so many resources out there, you could quickly become overwhelmed with information being delivered daily. It is probably best to skim blogs and newsgroups until you settle on a specific idea, and then limit yourself to one or two key groups, newsfeeds, etc.

• Google Alerts
• Journal TOCs

Open Access Resources can be invaluable for exploring your topic. These resources are freely available 'open access’ documents from professional and trade associations, government agencies, non-profit organizations, research institutes, universities and other entities. These resources are not proprietary , meaning they do not require login or subscription (although occasionally for-profit associations may request that you create a free account to access their publications). They are good places to explore for statistics, reports, conference abstracts and proceedings, white papers, association newsletters, industry news and more.

NU Library maintains a collection of curated links organized by NU disciplines and specializations, as well as related academic topics. Visit the Open Access Resources Guide for recommended sites.

Wikipedia or other online wiki sources are helpful for finding background information on a topic and getting ideas for keywords and phrases, but they should never be used as a cited reference in academic research . These sites can be useful for learning the basics of a topic that you are not familiar with. If the website entries provide references, these can be sources of scholarly information to explore further.

Here is an example of an article with extensive references from academic books and journals on the topic of Mirror Symmetry . This article is also designated as a Feature Article by Wikipedia because meets specific criteria such as supporting claims with citations.

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How to Do Internet Research

Last Updated: October 28, 2023 Approved

Where to Begin

Getting good sources, evaluating for credibility, compiling and saving your sources.

This article was co-authored by Megan Morgan, PhD . Megan Morgan is a Graduate Program Academic Advisor in the School of Public & International Affairs at the University of Georgia. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Georgia in 2015. There are 12 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. This article has 14 testimonials from our readers, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 255,820 times.

The internet has made researching a topic easier than ever before. Instead of making a trip to the library, people with internet access can simply pull up a search engine, type, and click away. But, in addition to making it easier to access information, the web has also made it easier to access misinformation. [1] X Research source [2] X Research source [3] X Research source However, by following some simple rules, you can avoid being fooled or misinformed by a phony, inaccurate, or biased web source.

• You can usually access these databases through your home library’s website. Some academic and universities libraries may require a password if you are accessing them remotely (from somewhere other than in the library itself).
• If you don’t have access to a library, try using Google Scholar for your searches. You can find academic research through this search engine, and Google Scholar will show you where you can find free copies of the articles online.

• Most search engines can be “gamed” by savvy websites in order to ensure their content comes up first. Moreover, each search engine has its own algorithm, and some tailor their results based on your browsing history. So the “top” result on Google will not necessarily be the “top” result on Yahoo, even with the exact same search phrasing. [8] X Research source
• Be aware that simply because you find information online doesn’t make it credible or authoritative. Anyone can make a webpage, and the amount of poor, unverified, and just plain wrong information often outweighs the good stuff online. [9] X Trustworthy Source Pew Research Center Nonpartisan thinktank conducting research and providing information on public opinion, demographic trends, and social trends Go to source To help you sift through the useless stuff, talk to your teacher or librarian, and use library or academic search engines when possible.

• For example, if you are doing research on feminism in China, you might run a search for “feminism AND China.” This will return results that include both of those topic keywords.
• You can use OR to run searches for related keywords. For example, you could search for “feminism OR feminist OR social justice.” This would return results that contain one or more of those terms.
• You can use NOT to exclude keywords from your search. For example, you could search for “feminism AND China NOT Japan.” You would not get any results that included Japan.
• You can use quote marks to search for full phrases. For example, if you want to search for academic performance , you would search for the whole phrase inside quotation marks: “academic performance.” Be aware, though, that using quotation marks will kick out any result that isn’t an exact match. For example, you would not get results about “school performance” or “academic functioning” because they are not worded exactly the way you searched.
• Use specific keyword phrases to locate the most relevant information. For example, if you are looking for information social welfare expenditures in the U.S., you’re more likely to get the results you want by searching for “total yearly amount spent on welfare programs in U.S.” than searching for “welfare,” which would bring up definitions of welfare, types of welfare in other countries, and thousands more results you don’t want. Be aware, though, that you can’t always find information like this -- the more words you enter, the fewer results you’re likely to get.
• Use alternate words or keyword phrases to locate additional research sources. For example, if you are researching “welfare,” consider using “safety net” or “social programs” or “public assistance” in place of “welfare” to find different results. In many cases, your word choice might unintentionally bias your results, since terms like “welfare” are often politically loaded. Using a wider variety of terms ensures that you’ll be exposed to a broader — and therefore potentially less biased — set of sources.

• For example, in your search for “total yearly amount spent on welfare programs in U.S.,” you’ll quickly discover that there are several different public assistance programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Use that information to decide which program(s) you’re interested in, and then perform a new (more specific) search, such as “total yearly SNAP expenditures in U.S.”

• Government sources will often have “.gov” somewhere in the webpage. For example, the United States Department of State’s website is www.state.gov. The official website for Australia’s Department of Defence is www.defence.gov.au.
• Websites that end in .edu belong to colleges and universities. However, you do need to be careful with .edu sites, because often faculty and students can run personal webpages that will have the .edu extension, but the information there may not be vetted by the university. [11] X Research source It’s better to find academic sources through an academic database or search engine, like EBSCOhost or Google Scholar.
• Websites that end in .org belong to non-profit organizations. While some of these are highly credible, some are not. Anyone can purchase a website with a .org extension. Check these sites carefully, and don’t rely on them as your sole source of information if you can avoid them. [12] X Research source
• Major news sources such as The Guardian, CNN, and Al Jazeera tend to be credible, but you also need to make sure you’re reading a factually based article and not an opinion piece. Many news sites also have blogs and editorial sites where people can state their opinions, which aren’t necessarily backed up by facts.

• While it’s impossible to view all of the results for most searches, it’s important to view at least several pages of results in order to ensure you’re not missing important information. Because of search engine optimization, if you’re using a regular search engine like Google or Yahoo, the first several pages might contain the links that were most effectively promoted, not the ones with the best information. [14] X Research source

• For example, if you are writing a report on penguins, you could start with the Wikipedia page on Penguins. Scrolling to the References section would show you several peer-reviewed academic journal articles on penguins, along with references to book chapters by academic publishers. Look at those sources for more authoritative information.

• For example, if you’re doing research on changes in welfare expenditures during the past 20 years, there’s no reason to trust a blog, or any secondary source. Most credible sources will note that they’re using data from federal agencies. Therefore, it’s usually better to search for the original government data sources and cite them directly, rather than citing a page that is itself just reporting (possibly incorrectly) the data.
• Citing the original source will also make your own research more authoritative and credible. For example, it is much more impressive to your teacher if you cite an article from the National Institutes of Health (a US government source) than if you cite an article from WebMD -- even if they have the same information. If you can cite the original scholarly research that produced the information you're discussing, that's even better.

• No matter what information you’re seeking, if you can’t find a single official source, it’s advisable not to trust a piece of information until you find identical information on several independent sites. So, for example, if you can’t find an original source for SNAP expenditures in 1980, enter the data you found into a search engine to ensure that the same number is reported on multiple sites and that those sites are not all citing the same (potentially erroneous) source.

• If you’re using an academic database, check out who published the article or book. Texts from prestigious journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine , and books from academic publishers like the Oxford University Press, carry more weight than sources from less-known publishers.
• If you’ve never heard of a source, the first place to look is the “About Us” (or similar) portion of the website. If that doesn’t provide you with a good idea of who’s producing the web page, try conducting an internet search for the site itself. Often news articles, Wikipedia entries, and the like that reference a source will include information about its affiliation(s), ideology, and funding. When all else fails, consider using a web domain search engine to discover who owns the website. However, if you’ve had to go to that length, chances are good that the site is too obscure to be trusted.

• For example, does this person have education in their field? Neil deGrasse Tyson has a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the prestigious Columbia University, so it’s likely that what he says about astrophysics is credible and authoritative (meaning trustworthy and up to date). On the other hand, an amateur star-watcher’s blog will not be authoritative, even if the information is accurate.
• Has the author written anything else on the topic? Many authors, including journalists and academic scholars, have areas of specialty and have spent years studying and writing about these topics. If the author has written many other articles on the same area, this makes them more credible (especially if those articles are peer-reviewed).
• If there is no author, is the source credible? Some sources, particularly government sources, will not list an author. However, if the source you are getting the information from is authoritative -- such as an article on chickenpox from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- the absence of an author isn’t cause for concern on its own.

• For example, if you were writing a research paper on treatments for cancer, you wouldn’t want to use only articles from the 1970s, even if they were published in prestigious academic journals.

• Look for the site’s sources. A credible internet site will cite its sources. A really great site may even link out to the original research articles so you can track them down. If you can’t find any references for the information provided, or if the references are out of date or poor quality, it’s a good sign that your site isn’t reliable.
• Watch for bias. Highly emotional language, inflammatory rhetoric, and informal writing are all signs of potential bias in your source. Most academic writing tries to steer clear of these and aim for impartiality and objectivity as much as possible. If your website uses emotional language like “Manipulative big pharma companies are out to keep you broken and unhealthy to line their own pockets!” it’s a good sign that there is bias present.
• Review each website for grammatical errors and broken links. If the website is credible and reliable, grammar and spelling should be accurate, and all links should take you to the appropriate landing page. Websites with numerous grammatical errors and broken links may be copying their information from another source or may not be legitimate.

• Bibliography entries for webpages traditionally consist of the author of the web article or webpage (if available), the title of the article or page, the name of the site, the site’s web address, and the date on which you accessed the article or page.

• The simplest way to save a webpage as you see it today is to print a hard copy or save it as a PDF. [19] X Research source This will allow you to refer back to the page, even if it's moved or deleted.
• Since a hard copy or PDF version will only be available to you, you should periodically check the links in your research if it is published on the web. If you discover a web page has been deleted or moved, you can keyword search for its new location in a search engine or check to see if it was archived by Archive.org's Wayback Machine, which preserves web pages as they previously displayed. [20] X Research source

• Using the bookmarks feature of your web browser is the simplest way to save sources. Rather than saving every source in the parent “Bookmarks” folder, consider creating subfolders for specific topics. For example, if you’re researching welfare, you might want to create a folder for “Welfare” in “Bookmarks” and then maybe even create more folders within “TANF,” “SNAP,” etc.

• Numerous services and apps have made it possible to sync sources to the cloud, capture images of web pages as they appear on the day you accessed them, add keywords to sources, etc.
• Many of these services, such as Zotero, are freeware created by academics and other open-source advocates. Others, such as Pocket, offer some services for free and charge for others. If you need functions beyond your web browser’s standard bookmarking features, consider using one of these sources to make organizing your sources easier.

Community Q&A

You Might Also Like

• ↑ http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/401/internet-politics.html
• ↑ http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ZDM/story?id=97336&page=1
• ↑ http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/corrections_dont_go_viral.php
• ↑ http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/reading-and-researching/research-using-internet
• ↑ https://eric.ed.gov/
• ↑ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
• ↑ http://www.ala.org/rusa/resources/guidelines/professional
• ↑ http://www.ipl.org/div/aplus/internet.htm
• ↑ http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/11/01/how-teens-do-research-in-the-digital-world/
• ↑ http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo
• ↑ http://www.pcworld.com/article/2853698/how-to-save-a-webpage-as-a-pdf-or-mht-file.html
• ↑ https://archive.org/web/

About This Article

To do internet research, look for sources that are credible and reliable by prioritizing information from academics, government sources, and nationally recognized news organizations. The best way to find academic sources is through a reputable academic database like Google Scholar or EBSCOhost. If you’re using a news source such as The Guardian, check that what you’re reading is a factually based article and not an opinion piece. Once you’ve found reputable sources, make sure to back them up either by printing or saving them as PDFs, since web pages can get moved or deleted. For more tips, like how to spot information that is reliable and accurate, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Build-your-own website for scientists

Tips to help you promote your research, attract recruits, and share resources.

Credit: Andrew Thoesen/andrewthoesen.com

11 May 2020

Andrew Thoesen/andrewthoesen.com

For some researchers, self-isolation in the COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to build and launch a personal academic website.

It’s a relatively small investment of time that can pay off in terms of career progress , giving researchers greater control over how their expertise is presented online. It can also help researchers to attract PhD students, share resources with the scientific community, and promote their work to the general public.

It's also an important asset for researchers thinking about launching an independent career .

But it can be difficult to know where to start.

Generic developers like Squarespace and Wix provide ready-to-use templates and web analytics tools for a monthly fee. There are also resources aimed specifically at scientists, such as ScienceSites , Owlstown , and Academic Web Pages , which provide support in website design, content development, and maintenance for those with little or no site-building experience.

Before engaging such a service, researchers need to plan the focus of their website. Building it is likely to take 2 to 4 weeks (depending on other demands), and they should also set aside time to update it where necessary, once it’s launched.

For Andrew Thoesen , postdoctoral researcher at the Bio-Inspired Robotics Technology and Healthcare Lab at Arizona State University (whose homepage is seen above) his website has been invaluable.

"Whether communicating my work quickly at conferences through hosted videos, or including it to display my outreach and work for career advancement, it has proven useful from the day I built it," says Thoesen.

"Having the graphical equivalent of a CV at my disposal through my phone – many website builders optimize for mobile viewing now – enhances any elevator pitch I need to make. It also works as a great confidence booster, to [be able to] quickly review your greatest hits."

Nature Index spoke to three researchers who shared their website-making experiences and top tips for how to get started.

Ritu Raman, postdoctoral fellow, chemical engineering

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts Academic website: rituraman.com

My motivation: I started my website in the second year of graduate school. I purchased the domain RituRaman.com, realizing that people in my profession were Googling my name. I figured I could either let them sort through several pages of random links, or give them a well-curated resource. That is when I decided to properly create a website.

L’Oréal USA

The challenge: I was intimidated by web design because I’m more of a ‘verbal’ than a ‘visual’ person. After evaluating a few [platform] options, I chose Wordpress, because it’s essentially the same as Microsoft Word, in terms of how you use it to put words and images on a page. I use a standard template and fill it with photos and videos that were professionally taken during my career.

What I do with it: My website has evolved into a dynamic CV. I see it as a one-stop showcase of myself, professionally. Besides using it to highlight my accomplishments in research and teaching, my website also features my outreach activities that focus on advancing women and underrepresented minorities in STEM.

Nearly every week, I get a few emails from young scientists saying how my videos or blogs have helped them navigate something difficult. This makes me feel that spending time on my website is worth it.

Top tip: Be sure to link your social media accounts (Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram) to your website. This is important for search engine page rank optimization (SEO) to increase your visibility.

James Dahlman, assistant professor, biomedical engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia Academic website: dahlmanlab.org

My motivation: I set up my website several months before I started my lab at Georgia Tech. I reasoned that the success of my career will depend on recruiting good students. To accomplish that goal, students needed to know that I exist.

Georgia Institute of Technology

James Dahlman

The challenge: The website was challenging to set up, as I wanted a platform that was informative, without creating a cluttered interface. Even now, it still takes a lot of effort to update it with new information, and my students are supporting me with that.

What I do with it: My website has enabled me to recruit excellent students and post-docs. I also have a section named ‘Resources’ for external labs to access computational codes we have created to analyse large datasets. Several labs had been emailing me to access our codes, so I thought it would be easier putting it online to share with the scientific community.

Top tip: A picture tells a thousand words. An effective website interface should contain interesting images to visually educate its visitors.

Sharda Umanath, Assistant Professor, psychological science

Claremont Mckenna College, Claremont, California Academic website: umanathlab.com

My motivation: I wanted to have control over my web presence for folks to find out more about me and my research.

Sharda Umanath

The challenge: I wanted my website to present information in an accessible and professional way, but I had little experience in making one, so I hired ScienceSites to design and maintain my website. The company has a clear sense of what researchers need and they make great suggestions.

What I do with it: Besides showcasing my research, my website acts as a recruitment [tool] for undergraduate research trainees and study participants. Having a polished online presence also helps me recruit community members who might be interested in participating in my research.

I also wanted to give a feeling of legitimacy and excitement to my undergraduate research assistants by showcasing them on my website.

Top tip: If funding permits, seek professional help to upgrade your website and create lasting impressions and impact.

Information Retrieval and the Web

The science surrounding search engines is commonly referred to as information retrieval, in which algorithmic principles are developed to match user interests to the best information about those interests.

Google started as a result of our founders' attempt to find the best matching between the user queries and Web documents, and do it really fast. During the process, they uncovered a few basic principles: 1) best pages tend to be those linked to the most; 2) best description of a page is often derived from the anchor text associated with the links to a page. Theories were developed to exploit these principles to optimize the task of retrieving the best documents for a user query.

Search and Information Retrieval on the Web has advanced significantly from those early days: 1) the notion of ""information"" has greatly expanded from documents to much richer representations such as images, videos, etc., 2) users are increasingly searching on their Mobile devices with very different interaction characteristics from search on the Desktops; 3) users are increasingly looking for direct information, such as answers to a question, or seeking to complete tasks, such as appointment booking. Through our research, we are continuing to enhance and refine the world's foremost search engine by aiming to scientifically understand the implications of those changes and address new challenges that they bring.

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15 Best Free Web Tools to Organize Your Research

How to stay organized when researching and writing papers

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Organizing research is important not only for your own sanity, but because when it comes time to unfold the data and put it to use, you want the process to go as smoothly as possible. This is where research organizers come in.

There are lots of free web-based organizers that you can use for any purpose. Maybe you're collecting interviews for a news story, digging up newspaper archives for a history project, or writing a research paper over a science topic. Research organizers are also helpful for staying productive and preparing for tests.

Regardless of the topic, when you have multiple sources of information and lots to comb through later, optimizing your workflow with a dedicated organizer is essential.

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Many of these tools provide unique features, so you might decide to use multiple resources simultaneously in whatever way suits your particular needs.

Research and Study

You need a place to gather the information you're finding. To avoid a cluttered space when collecting and organizing data, you can use a tool dedicated to research.

• Pocket : Save web pages to your online account to reference them again later. It's much tidier than bookmarks, and it can all be retrieved from the web or the Pocket mobile app .
• Mendeley : Organize papers and references, and generate citations and bibliographies.
• Quizlet : Learn vocabulary with these free online flashcards .
• Wikipedia : Find information on millions of different topics.
• Quora : This is a question and answer website where you can ask the community for help with any question.
• SparkNotes : Free online study guides on a wide variety of subjects, anything from famous literary works of the past century to the present day. 
• Zotero : Collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Lets you organize data into collections and search through them by adding tags to every source. This is a computer program, but there's a browser extension that helps you send data to it.
• Google Scholar : A simple way to search for scholarly literature on any subject.
• Diigo : Collect, share, and interact with information from anywhere on the web. It's all accessible through the browser extension and saved to your online account.
• GoConqr : Create flashcards, mind maps, notes, quizzes, and more to bridge the gap between your research and studying.

Writing Tools

Writing is the other half of a research paper, so you need somewhere useful to go to jot down notes, record information you might use in the final paper, create drafts, track sources, and finalize the paper.

• Web Page Sticky Notes : For Chrome users, this tool lets you place sticky notes on any web page as you do your research. There are tons of settings you can customize, they're backed up to your Google Drive account, and they're visible not only on each page you created them on but also on a single page from the extension's settings.
• Google Docs or Word Online : These are online word processors where you can write the entire research paper, organize lists, paste URLs, store off-hand notes, and more.
• Google Keep : This note-taking app and website catalogs notes within labels that make sense for your research. Access them from the web on any computer or from your mobile device. It supports collaborations, custom colors, images, drawings, and reminders.
• Yahoo Notepad : If you use Yahoo Mail , the notes area of your account is a great place to store text-based snippets for easy recall when you need them.
• Notion : Workflows, notes, and more, in a space where you can collaborate with others.

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Harvard Guide to Using Sources 

• The Honor Code
• Evaluating Web Sources

Although you should generally begin your electronic research by using e-resources available through the Harvard Library, there may be times when you will want to use Google. When you find a source online, you will need to assess whether it is a credible source.

Who is the author of this site?

As with any source, it's important to identify the author of a website and to become familiar with the author's qualifications. Be skeptical of any web page that does not identify an author or publisher. If you are going to depend on a website as a source of information, you need to determine the author's credentials as well as the purpose and rationale for posting the site in the first place. For example, a site created to serve a particular viewpoint, or to make a monetary profit, might skew information for the author's own ends. Other sites might contain information that is incomplete or wrong. In addition to considering the author, you should also consider the publisher of the site—the place or server on which the document resides (or from which it originates). If this information isn't readily apparent, try backing up several levels (deleting from the right side of the URL). Is the web document linked to a federal agency (.gov), a non-profit site (.org), an educational institution (.edu), or a business (.com)?

How accurate and objective is the site?

If you are going to cite information found on a website, it's important to know whether you can trust the accuracy of the facts (i.e., hard data, study results) under discussion in a particular document. First, determine if the factual information on a website can be corroborated elsewhere—through a reference to or citation of a clearly reliable source, for example. A website with data that cannot be confirmed should never be trusted, no matter how perfect it might seem for your purposes.

It's also important to understand the website's point of view or bias. How clear are its purposes? Does the language used on this site suggest a specific ideology or social or political agenda? Advocacy for a particular cause is not in itself a bad thing; when the slant of a site is deceptive or extreme, however, you should reject it as a legitimate research resource. If advertising appears on a web page, try to determine the extent to which it may be influencing informational content: Is it clear where the boundary is between the advertising and information content? Does the data seem manipulated to serve the ads, or are the ads simply used to fund the site?

Sites that have academic or educational content are often non-profit sites and generally follow certain rules. Scholarship relies upon context and usually builds on precedent, so ask these questions:

• Do you have the sense that the author is taking a position within an ongoing and serious discussion?
• Does the site demonstrate knowledge of related research—and does the author cite current and reliable sources?
• If footnotes, bibliographies, and hypertext links are used, do they add authority, credibility, or depth to the argument or only seem to do so?

What is the site's currency and coverage?

Since information on the web is so easily posted, it's especially important to make sure that the sources you consult are timely. Ask these questions:

• Is the creation date of the document (or of its most recent revision) listed?
• Is the information up-to-date? Age is relative on the Web: certain documents are timeless—their value is determined completely by their place in the historical record, and a document that is three or four years old can still be "timely" in certain disciplines. In fields where knowledge develops rapidly (the sciences, for example) or data is expected to change (statistics, for example), currency is more critical. As always, if you have questions about whether a source is current enough for your purposes, ask your instructor or a librarian.
• Locating Sources
• Evaluating Journal Articles
• Evaluating Online Media Content
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• Making Decisions Based on Your Discipline
• Integrating Sources

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• Using sources
• Evaluating Sources
• Online Library and Citation Tools

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The best can album, according to damo suzuki, adam sandler’s best movies of the 2010s, ranked, distilled water filters out contaminants, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best water to drink, fantasia barrino on her golden globe best actress nomination for ‘the color purple’: “i’m still here”, what’s the best vpn for torrenting in 2024, the best craft breweries in nevada, the 15 best cbd lubes, according to sex educators and sex havers, choosing the best forex trading app: features to consider, the 24 best hair oils to make your hair even more beautiful this winter, 5 best tools to annotate and highlight web pages for research and study.

The internet has become a vast ocean of knowledge and information that is accessible to us at any time. However, conducting effective research and study often requires the ability to annotate and highlight web pages, making it easier to retain information and organize thoughts. Below are the five best tools to annotate and highlight web pages for research and study.

1. Diigo : Diigo is a web annotation and research tool that allows you to highlight, tag, and save web pages to your library. Diigo also has social features that allow users to share their notes and annotations with others. It provides a variety of tools that make it easy to highlight important information, add notes and comments, as well as keep track of web pages for later review.

2. Evernote Web Clipper : The Evernote Web Clipper is a browser extension that allows you to save web pages, images, and links to your Evernote account. The service provides a variety of annotation and highlighting tools that allow you to capture and save important information from web pages. It also allows you to create notes that can be tagged and organized for easy reference.

3. Kami : Kami is a digital tool that enables users to annotate PDF files, images, and documents in real-time collaboratively. The tool can detect hyperlinks, signatures, and lists, as well as insert shapes, comments, and highlights. Kami is a great tool for students and researchers who work with PDF files.

4. Hypothes.is: Hypothes.is is a web annotation tool that allows you to highlight and annotate web pages for research and collaborative discussions. It is community-based, meaning you can share your annotations with others and view theirs. Hypothes.is is a great tool for students and researchers to collaborate on research, share notes, and learn from each other.

5. Notion Web Clipper : Notion is a powerful productivity tool that allows users to take notes, create tasks and collaborate with team members. The Notion Web Clipper allows users to capture web pages, images and notes directly from the browser and add them to their workspace. It provides a variety of annotation tools, including the ability to highlight, underline and strikethrough text.

In Conclusion, these five tools are a great way for students and researchers to annotate, highlight, and organize information from web pages. Each tool has its unique features and benefits that make it effective in different situations. Whether you are working solo, collaboratively, or just need to research information, these tools will help you stay organized and on track.    

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• How to Cite a Website | MLA, APA & Chicago Examples

How to Cite a Website | MLA, APA & Chicago Examples

Published on March 5, 2021 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on January 17, 2024.

To cite a page from a website, you need a short in-text citation and a corresponding reference stating the author’s name, the date of publication, the title of the page, the website name, and the URL.

This information is presented differently in different citation styles. APA , MLA , and Chicago are the most commonly used styles.

Use the interactive example generator below to explore APA and MLA website citations.

Note that the format is slightly different for citing YouTube and other online video platforms, or for citing an image .

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Table of contents

Citing a website in mla style, citing a website in apa style, citing a website in chicago style, frequently asked questions about citations.

An MLA Works Cited entry for a webpage lists the author’s name , the title of the page (in quotation marks), the name of the site (in italics), the date of publication, and the URL.

The in-text citation usually just lists the author’s name. For a long page, you may specify a (shortened) section heading to locate the specific passage. Don’t use paragraph numbers unless they’re specifically numbered on the page.

The same format is used for blog posts and online articles from newspapers and magazines.

You can also use our free MLA Citation Generator to generate your website citations.

Generate accurate MLA citations with Scribbr

Citing a whole website.

When you cite an entire website rather than a specific page, include the author if one can be identified for the whole site (e.g. for a single-authored blog). Otherwise, just start with the site name.

List the copyright date displayed on the site; if there isn’t one, provide an access date after the URL.

Webpages with no author or date

When no author is listed, cite the organization as author only if it differs from the website name.

If the organization name is also the website name, start the Works Cited entry with the title instead, and use a shortened version of the title in the in-text citation.

When no publication date is listed, leave it out and include an access date at the end instead.

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An APA reference for a webpage lists the author’s last name and initials, the full date of publication, the title of the page (in italics), the website name (in plain text), and the URL.

The in-text citation lists the author’s last name and the year. If it’s a long page, you may include a locator to identify the quote or paraphrase (e.g. a paragraph number and/or section title).

Note that a general reference to an entire website doesn’t require a citation in APA Style; just include the URL in parentheses after you mention the site.

You can also use our free APA Citation Generator to create your webpage citations. Search for a URL to retrieve the details.

Generate accurate APA citations with Scribbr

Blog posts and online articles.

Blog posts follow a slightly different format: the title of the post is not italicized, and the name of the blog is.

The same format is used for online newspaper and magazine articles—but not for articles from news sites like Reuters and BBC News (see the previous example).

When a page has no author specified, list the name of the organization that created it instead (and omit it later if it’s the same as the website name).

When it doesn’t list a date of publication, use “n.d.” in place of the date. You can also include an access date if the page seems likely to change over time.

In Chicago notes and bibliography style, footnotes are used to cite sources. They refer to a bibliography at the end that lists all your sources in full.

A Chicago bibliography entry for a website lists the author’s name, the page title (in quotation marks), the website name, the publication date, and the URL.

Chicago also has an alternative author-date citation style . Examples of website citations in this style can be found here .

For blog posts and online articles from newspapers, the name of the publication is italicized. For a blog post, you should also add the word “blog” in parentheses, unless it’s already part of the blog’s name.

When a web source doesn’t list an author , you can usually begin your bibliography entry and short note with the name of the organization responsible. Don’t repeat it later if it’s also the name of the website. A full note should begin with the title instead.

When no publication or revision date is shown, include an access date instead in your bibliography entry.

The main elements included in website citations across APA , MLA , and Chicago style are the author, the date of publication, the page title, the website name, and the URL. The information is presented differently in each style.

In APA , MLA , and Chicago style citations for sources that don’t list a specific author (e.g. many websites ), you can usually list the organization responsible for the source as the author.

If the organization is the same as the website or publisher, you shouldn’t repeat it twice in your reference:

• In APA and Chicago, omit the website or publisher name later in the reference.
• In MLA, omit the author element at the start of the reference, and cite the source title instead.

If there’s no appropriate organization to list as author, you will usually have to begin the citation and reference entry with the title of the source instead.

When you want to cite a specific passage in a source without page numbers (e.g. an e-book or website ), all the main citation styles recommend using an alternate locator in your in-text citation . You might use a heading or chapter number, e.g. (Smith, 2016, ch. 1)

In APA Style , you can count the paragraph numbers in a text to identify a location by paragraph number. MLA and Chicago recommend that you only use paragraph numbers if they’re explicitly marked in the text.

For audiovisual sources (e.g. videos ), all styles recommend using a timestamp to show a specific point in the video when relevant.

Check if your university or course guidelines specify which citation style to use. If the choice is left up to you, consider which style is most commonly used in your field.

• APA Style is the most popular citation style, widely used in the social and behavioral sciences.
• MLA style is the second most popular, used mainly in the humanities.
• Chicago notes and bibliography style is also popular in the humanities, especially history.
• Chicago author-date style tends to be used in the sciences.

Other more specialized styles exist for certain fields, such as Bluebook and OSCOLA for law.

The most important thing is to choose one style and use it consistently throughout your text.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2024, January 17). How to Cite a Website | MLA, APA & Chicago Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved March 18, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/citing-sources/cite-a-website/

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Scientific Style (CSE) Citation Examples

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END REFERENCE (ONE AUTHOR)

    IN TEXT

(Geggel 2016 ) .

END REFERENCE

[Author abbreviation] Author. Date. Title. Place of publication: Publisher; [updated date; accessed date]. URL.

​ [IRPC] Industrial Psychology Research Centre. 2010. Aberdeen (UK): University of Aberdeen. [updated 2010 Oct 6; accessed 2019 Jan 22]. http://www.abdn.ac.uk/iprc/ .

IN TEXT 

(IRPC 2010).

(Human Biology . . . c2002-2016).

​ Organizations and memberships. 2016. Reston  (VA): American Institute of Biological Sciences, [accessed 2016 Jul 1]. http://access.aibs.org/organizations.html.

(Organizations . . . 2016).

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Web scraping

Open In Colab

Web research is one of the killer LLM applications:

• Users have highlighted it as one of his top desired AI tools.
• OSS repos like gpt-researcher are growing in popularity.

Gathering content from the web has a few components:

• Search : Query to url (e.g., using GoogleSearchAPIWrapper ).
• Loading : Url to HTML (e.g., using AsyncHtmlLoader , AsyncChromiumLoader , etc).
• Transforming : HTML to formatted text (e.g., using HTML2Text or Beautiful Soup ).

Quickstart ​

Scraping HTML content using a headless instance of Chromium.

• The async nature of the scraping process is handled using Python’s asyncio library.
• The actual interaction with the web pages is handled by Playwright.

Scrape text content tags such as <p>, <li>, <div>, and <a> tags from the HTML content:

<p> : The paragraph tag. It defines a paragraph in HTML and is used to group together related sentences and/or phrases.

<li> : The list item tag. It is used within ordered ( <ol> ) and unordered ( <ul> ) lists to define individual items within the list.

<div> : The division tag. It is a block-level element used to group other inline or block-level elements.

<a> : The anchor tag. It is used to define hyperlinks.

<span> : an inline container used to mark up a part of a text, or a part of a document.

For many news websites (e.g., WSJ, CNN), headlines and summaries are all in <span> tags.

These Documents now are staged for downstream usage in various LLM apps, as discussed below.

AsyncHtmlLoader ​

The AsyncHtmlLoader uses the aiohttp library to make asynchronous HTTP requests, suitable for simpler and lightweight scraping.

AsyncChromiumLoader ​

The AsyncChromiumLoader uses Playwright to launch a Chromium instance, which can handle JavaScript rendering and more complex web interactions.

Chromium is one of the browsers supported by Playwright, a library used to control browser automation.

Headless mode means that the browser is running without a graphical user interface, which is commonly used for web scraping.

Transformer ​

Html2text ​.

HTML2Text provides a straightforward conversion of HTML content into plain text (with markdown-like formatting) without any specific tag manipulation.

It’s best suited for scenarios where the goal is to extract human-readable text without needing to manipulate specific HTML elements.

Beautiful Soup ​

Beautiful Soup offers more fine-grained control over HTML content, enabling specific tag extraction, removal, and content cleaning.

It’s suited for cases where you want to extract specific information and clean up the HTML content according to your needs.

Scraping with extraction ​

Llm with function calling ​.

Web scraping is challenging for many reasons.

One of them is the changing nature of modern websites’ layouts and content, which requires modifying scraping scripts to accommodate the changes.

Using Function (e.g., OpenAI) with an extraction chain, we avoid having to change your code constantly when websites change.

We’re using gpt-3.5-turbo-0613 to guarantee access to OpenAI Functions feature (although this might be available to everyone by time of writing).

We’re also keeping temperature at 0 to keep randomness of the LLM down.

Define a schema ​

Next, you define a schema to specify what kind of data you want to extract.

Here, the key names matter as they tell the LLM what kind of information they want.

So, be as detailed as possible.

In this example, we want to scrape only news article’s name and summary from The Wall Street Journal website.

Run the web scraper w/ BeautifulSoup ​

As shown above, we’ll be using BeautifulSoupTransformer .

We can compare the headlines scraped to the page:

Looking at the LangSmith trace , we can see what is going on under the hood:

• It’s following what is explained in the extraction .
• We call the information_extraction function on the input text.
• It will attempt to populate the provided schema from the url content.

Research automation ​

Related to scraping, we may want to answer specific questions using searched content.

We can automate the process of web research using a retriever, such as the WebResearchRetriever .

Copy requirements from here :

pip install -r requirements.txt

Set GOOGLE_CSE_ID and GOOGLE_API_KEY .

Initialize retriever with the above tools to:

• Use an LLM to generate multiple relevant search queries (one LLM call)
• Execute a search for each query
• Choose the top K links per query (multiple search calls in parallel)
• Load the information from all chosen links (scrape pages in parallel)
• Index those documents into a vectorstore
• Find the most relevant documents for each original generated search query

Going deeper ​

• Here’s a app that wraps this retriever with a lighweight UI.

Question answering over a website ​

To answer questions over a specific website, you can use Apify’s Website Content Crawler Actor, which can deeply crawl websites such as documentation, knowledge bases, help centers, or blogs, and extract text content from the web pages.

In the example below, we will deeply crawl the Python documentation of LangChain’s Chat LLM models and answer a question over it.

First, install the requirements pip install apify-client langchain-openai langchain chromadb tiktoken

Next, set OPENAI_API_KEY and APIFY_API_TOKEN in your environment variables.

The full code follows:

Help us out by providing feedback on this documentation page:

• AsyncHtmlLoader
• AsyncChromiumLoader
• Beautiful Soup
• LLM with function calling
• Define a schema
• Run the web scraper w/ BeautifulSoup
• Going deeper
• Question answering over a website

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NIMH Research and Science Track at 2024 APA Annual Meeting

75th Anniversary

Date and Time

As part of ongoing 75th Anniversary celebrations, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is hosting the Research and Science track at the 2024 American Psychiatric Association (APA) Annual Meeting   . This year’s meeting theme focuses on confronting addiction and charting the course from prevention to recovery. NIMH's research track highlights some of the major initiatives NIMH has undertaken or been involved with over the years. 

If you plan to attend the meeting, please join us at the following sessions presented by NIMH leadership and staff.

NIMH Director’s presentation

75 Years of the National Institute of Mental Health: Current and Former Directors Perspective  

Wednesday, May 8, from 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. ET Location: Room 1E11, Javits Center Chair: Megan Kinnane Presenters: Joshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D.; Steven Hyman, M.D.; Thomas R. Insel, M.D. As part of the 75 th anniversary celebration of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), this session will consist of a panel discussion between three former NIMH directors and the current NIMH director. Each director will describe what they sought to achieve during their directorships, how NIMH contributed to psychiatry during their tenures, and their vision for the future of mental health research as we enter the next 25 years. Audience members are encouraged to come with questions.

Additional NIMH presentations

Expanding 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and Crisis Services and Research: What Psychiatrists Need to Know  

Sunday, May 5, from 3:45 – 5:15 p.m. ET Location: Room 1E10, Javits Center Chair: Stephen O’Connor, Ph.D. Presenters: Anita Everett, M.D.; Matthew Goldman, M.D., M.S.; Jonathan Purtle, Dr.Ph., M.P.H, M.Sc.; Victor Armstrong, M.S.W.

ACLP Presidential Symposium: Hot Topics in Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry Across the Lifespan  

Monday, May 6, from 8:00 – 9:30 a.m. ET Location: Room 1A21, Javits Center Chair: Maryland Pao, M.D. Presenters: Haniya Raza, D.O., M.P.H., Mark A. Oldham, M.D., Durga Roy, M.D.

Cutting Edge Mental Health Disparities Research: Current State and Future Directions  

Monday, May 6, from 1:30 – 3:00 p.m. ET Location: Room 1E11, Javits Center Chair: Juliette McClendon, Ph.D., BeShaun Davis, Ph.D. Presenters: Margarita Alegria, Ph.D.; Leslie Adams, Ph.D.; Neil Krishan Aggarwal, M.D.

Brain Behavior Quantification and Synchronization: Multimodal Measurements in the Real World  

Tuesday, May 7, from 8:00 – 9:30 a.m. ET Location: Room 1E11, Javits Center Chair: Andrea Beckel-Mitchener, Ph.D. Presenter: Justin Baker, M.D., Ph.D.

Early Psychosis Care: From RAISE to EPINET and Beyond  

Tuesday, May 7, from 1:30 – 3:30 p.m. ET Location: Room 1E11, Javits Center Chair: Robert Heinssen, Ph.D. Presenters: Kenneth Duckworth, M.D.; Oladunni Oluwoye, Ph.D.; Sapana Patel

Therapeutics Pipeline for the Treatment of Mood and Psychotic Disorders  

Wednesday, May 8, from 1:30 – 3:30 p.m. ET Location: Room 1E11, Javits Center Chair: Linda S. Brady, Ph.D. Presenters: Carlos Zarate, M.D.; Samantha Meltzer-Brody; Stephen Brannan, M.D.; Tiffany Farchione, M.D.

Rigor, Translation, and Inclusion in NIMH-Supported Youth Mental Health Research to Advance Impact: Lessons Learned and Opportunities  

Wednesday, May 8, from 3:45 – 5:15 p.m. ET Location: Room 1E11, Javits Center Chair: Christopher Sarampote, Ph.D. Presenters: Lauren Wakschlag, Ph.D.; Melissa Brotman, M.D.; Wanjiku Njoroge, M.D.; Anna Lau, Ph.D.

Leveraging the All of Us Research Program Dataset to Support Mental Health Research and Advance Precision Medicine   Tuesday, May 7, from 3:45 – 5:15 p.m. ET Location: Room 1E11, Javits Center Chair: Holly A. Garriock, Ph.D. Presenters: Cheryl Clark, M.D., Sc.D.; Karmel Choi, Ph.D.; Samantha Tesfaye; Amy Price, Ph.D.

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What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later

The more time students spent in remote instruction, the further they fell behind. And, experts say, extended closures did little to stop the spread of Covid.

By Sarah Mervosh ,  Claire Cain Miller and Francesca Paris

Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic.

Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year.

A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.

While poverty and other factors also played a role, remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic, research shows — a finding that held true across income levels.

Source: Fahle, Kane, Patterson, Reardon, Staiger and Stuart, “ School District and Community Factors Associated With Learning Loss During the COVID-19 Pandemic .” Score changes are measured from 2019 to 2022. In-person means a district offered traditional in-person learning, even if not all students were in-person.

“There’s fairly good consensus that, in general, as a society, we probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who helped write guidance for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommended in June 2020 that schools reopen with safety measures in place.

There were no easy decisions at the time. Officials had to weigh the risks of an emerging virus against the academic and mental health consequences of closing schools. And even schools that reopened quickly, by the fall of 2020, have seen lasting effects.

But as experts plan for the next public health emergency, whatever it may be, a growing body of research shows that pandemic school closures came at a steep cost to students.

The longer schools were closed, the more students fell behind.

At the state level, more time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores, according to a New York Times analysis of school closure data and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress , an authoritative exam administered to a national sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students.

At the school district level, that finding also holds, according to an analysis of test scores from third through eighth grade in thousands of U.S. districts, led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard. In districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math on average, while in districts that spent most of the year in person they lost just over a third of a grade.

( A separate study of nearly 10,000 schools found similar results.)

Such losses can be hard to overcome, without significant interventions. The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses , with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year.

Some time in person was better than no time.

As districts shifted toward in-person learning as the year went on, students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.

Students in hybrid or remote learning, 2020-21

80% of students

Some schools return online, as Covid-19 cases surge. Vaccinations start for high-priority groups.

Teachers are eligible for the Covid vaccine in more than half of states.

Most districts end the year in-person or hybrid.

Source: Burbio audit of more than 1,200 school districts representing 47 percent of U.S. K-12 enrollment. Note: Learning mode was defined based on the most in-person option available to students.

Income and family background also made a big difference.

A second factor associated with academic declines during the pandemic was a community’s poverty level. Comparing districts with similar remote learning policies, poorer districts had steeper losses.

But in-person learning still mattered: Looking at districts with similar poverty levels, remote learning was associated with greater declines.

A community’s poverty rate and the length of school closures had a “roughly equal” effect on student outcomes, said Sean F. Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford, who led a district-level analysis with Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard.

Score changes are measured from 2019 to 2022. Poorest and richest are the top and bottom 20% of districts by percent of students on free/reduced lunch. Mostly in-person and mostly remote are districts that offered traditional in-person learning for more than 90 percent or less than 10 percent of the 2020-21 year.

But the combination — poverty and remote learning — was particularly harmful. For each week spent remote, students in poor districts experienced steeper losses in math than peers in richer districts.

That is notable, because poor districts were also more likely to stay remote for longer .

Some of the country’s largest poor districts are in Democratic-leaning cities that took a more cautious approach to the virus. Poor areas, and Black and Hispanic communities , also suffered higher Covid death rates, making many families and teachers in those districts hesitant to return.

“We wanted to survive,” said Sarah Carpenter, the executive director of Memphis Lift, a parent advocacy group in Memphis, where schools were closed until spring 2021 .

“But I also think, man, looking back, I wish our kids could have gone back to school much quicker,” she added, citing the academic effects.

Other things were also associated with worse student outcomes, including increased anxiety and depression among adults in children’s lives, and the overall restriction of social activity in a community, according to the Stanford and Harvard research .

Even short closures had long-term consequences for children.

While being in school was on average better for academic outcomes, it wasn’t a guarantee. Some districts that opened early, like those in Cherokee County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, and Hanover County, Va., lost significant learning and remain behind.

At the same time, many schools are seeing more anxiety and behavioral outbursts among students. And chronic absenteeism from school has surged across demographic groups .

These are signs, experts say, that even short-term closures, and the pandemic more broadly, had lasting effects on the culture of education.

“There was almost, in the Covid era, a sense of, ‘We give up, we’re just trying to keep body and soul together,’ and I think that was corrosive to the higher expectations of schools,” said Margaret Spellings, an education secretary under President George W. Bush who is now chief executive of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Closing schools did not appear to significantly slow Covid’s spread.

Perhaps the biggest question that hung over school reopenings: Was it safe?

That was largely unknown in the spring of 2020, when schools first shut down. But several experts said that had changed by the fall of 2020, when there were initial signs that children were less likely to become seriously ill, and growing evidence from Europe and parts of the United States that opening schools, with safety measures, did not lead to significantly more transmission.

“Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of Covid,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directed the Covid response at the U.C.S.F. Parnassus emergency department.

Politically, though, there remains some disagreement about when, exactly, it was safe to reopen school.

Republican governors who pushed to open schools sooner have claimed credit for their approach, while Democrats and teachers’ unions have emphasized their commitment to safety and their investment in helping students recover.

“I do believe it was the right decision,” said Jerry T. Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which resisted returning to school in person over concerns about the availability of vaccines and poor ventilation in school buildings. Philadelphia schools waited to partially reopen until the spring of 2021 , a decision Mr. Jordan believes saved lives.

“It doesn’t matter what is going on in the building and how much people are learning if people are getting the virus and running the potential of dying,” he said.

Pandemic school closures offer lessons for the future.

Though the next health crisis may have different particulars, with different risk calculations, the consequences of closing schools are now well established, experts say.

In the future, infectious disease experts said, they hoped decisions would be guided more by epidemiological data as it emerged, taking into account the trade-offs.

“Could we have used data to better guide our decision making? Yes,” said Dr. Uzma N. Hasan, division chief of pediatric infectious diseases at RWJBarnabas Health in Livingston, N.J. “Fear should not guide our decision making.”

Source: Fahle, Kane, Patterson, Reardon, Staiger and Stuart, “ School District and Community Factors Associated With Learning Loss During the Covid-19 Pandemic. ”

The study used estimates of learning loss from the Stanford Education Data Archive . For closure lengths, the study averaged district-level estimates of time spent in remote and hybrid learning compiled by the Covid-19 School Data Hub (C.S.D.H.) and American Enterprise Institute (A.E.I.) . The A.E.I. data defines remote status by whether there was an in-person or hybrid option, even if some students chose to remain virtual. In the C.S.D.H. data set, districts are defined as remote if “all or most” students were virtual.

An earlier version of this article misstated a job description of Dr. Jeanne Noble. She directed the Covid response at the U.C.S.F. Parnassus emergency department. She did not direct the Covid response for the University of California, San Francisco health system.

How we handle corrections

Sarah Mervosh covers education for The Times, focusing on K-12 schools. More about Sarah Mervosh

Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. More about Claire Cain Miller

Francesca Paris is a Times reporter working with data and graphics for The Upshot. More about Francesca Paris

WCPO: Cincinnati a hub for stroke research

WCPO highlighted the Steps for Stroke 2024 event, raising money to advance stroke research, including at the University of Cincinnati.

Bethany Moeddel, a two-time stroke survivor, participated in the event for the 12th time on March 17 and told WCPO her parents brought her to the University of Cincinnati because of its status as a world-class leader in stroke research and patient care. 

The UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute has recently been renewed as the National Coordinating Center for NIH StrokeNet , overseeing all clinical trials and other federally funded stroke research across the country.

UC's Stacie Demel, DO, PhD, provided opening remarks at the Steps for Stroke event. She said while there has been great progress in preventing and treating strokes and in stroke rehabilitation, there is still more work to be done.

"My hope is that with ongoing research we'll be able to treat patients who weren't included in those initial studies," she told WCPO. "Maybe it's patients who have some disability at baseline who were included in those initial trials."

Watch or read the WCPO story.

Featured photo at top of UC Health's mobile stroke unit courtesy of UC Health.

Remember how to identify a stroke

Because of the quick onset of stroke, it is important to know the FAST mnemonic device that details the most common signs of stroke and how to respond:

• F: Facial drooping
• A: Arm or leg drop, or weakness in the arm or leg
• S: Speech issues, such as slurred speech or an inability to get your words out
• T: Time is of the essence; call 911 immediately
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Cheers! NASA’s Webb Finds Ethanol, Other Icy Ingredients for Worlds

Editor's Note: This article was updated March 13, 2024, to clarify the likelihood that chemicals found around IRAS 2A were present in the first stages of development of our solar system.

What do margaritas, vinegar, and ant stings have in common? They contain chemical ingredients that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has identified surrounding two young protostars known as IRAS 2A and IRAS 23385. Although planets are not yet forming around those stars, these and other molecules detected there by Webb represent key ingredients for making potentially habitable worlds.

An international team of astronomers used Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) to identify a variety of icy compounds made up of complex organic molecules like ethanol (alcohol) and likely acetic acid (an ingredient in vinegar). This work builds on previous Webb detections of diverse ices in a cold, dark molecular cloud.

Image A: Parallel Field to Protostar IRAS 23385 (MIRI Image)

What is the origin of complex organic molecules (coms) .

“This finding contributes to one of the long-standing questions in astrochemistry,” said team leader Will Rocha of Leiden University in the Netherlands. “What is the origin of complex organic molecules, or COMs, in space? Are they made in the gas phase or in ices? The detection of COMs in ices suggests that solid-phase chemical reactions on the surfaces of cold dust grains can build complex kinds of molecules.”

As several COMs, including those detected in the solid phase in this research, were previously detected in the warm gas phase, it is now believed that they originate from the sublimation of ices. Sublimation is to change directly from a solid to a gas without becoming a liquid. Therefore, detecting COMs in ices makes astronomers hopeful about improved understanding of the origins of other, even larger molecules in space.

Scientists are also keen to explore to what extent these COMs are transported to planets at much later stages of protostellar evolution. COMs in cold ices are thought to be easier to transport from molecular clouds to planet-forming disks than warm, gaseous molecules. These icy COMs can therefore be incorporated into comets and asteroids, which in turn may collide with forming planets, delivering the ingredients for life to possibly flourish.

The science team also detected simpler molecules, including formic acid (which causes the burning sensation of an ant sting), methane, formaldehyde, and sulfur dioxide. Research suggests that sulfur-containing compounds like sulfur dioxide played an important role in driving metabolic reactions on the primitive Earth.

Image B: Complex Organic Molecules in IRAS 2A

Similar to the early stages of our own solar system?

Of particular interest is that one of the sources investigated, IRAS 2A, is characterized as a low-mass protostar. IRAS 2A may therefore be similar to the early stages of our own solar system. As such, the chemicals identified around this protostar may have been in the first stages of development of our solar system and later delivered to the primitive Earth.

“All of these molecules can become part of comets and asteroids and eventually new planetary systems when the icy material is transported inward to the planet-forming disk as the protostellar system evolves,” said Ewine van Dishoeck of Leiden University, one of the coordinators of the science program. “We look forward to following this astrochemical trail step-by-step with more Webb data in the coming years.”

These observations were made for the JOYS+ (James Webb Observations of Young ProtoStars) program. The team dedicated these results to team member Harold Linnartz, who unexpectedly passed away in December 2023, shortly after the acceptance of this paper.

This research has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

Right click the images in this article to open a larger version in a new tab/window. Download full resolution images for this article from the Space Telescope Science Institute. This research has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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Laura Betz - [email protected] , Rob Gutro - [email protected] NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center , Greenbelt, Md.

Christine Pulliam - [email protected] Space Telescope Science Institute , Baltimore, Md.

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Weight loss caused by common diabetes drug tied to “anti-hunger” molecule in study

A Stanford Medicine study found that metformin, a commonly prescribed diabetes drug associated with moderate weight loss, stimulates production of lac-phe, a molecule abundant after exercise.

March 18, 2024 - By Krista Conger

Jonathan Long co-discovered lac-phe, known as the "anti-hunger" molecule. Courtesy Jonathan Long

An “anti-hunger” molecule produced after vigorous exercise is responsible for the moderate weight loss caused by the diabetes medication metformin, according to a new study in mice and humans. The molecule, lac-phe, was discovered by Stanford Medicine researchers in 2022.

The finding, made jointly by researchers at Stanford Medicine and at Harvard Medical School, further cements the critical role the molecule, called lac-phe, plays in metabolism, exercise and appetite. It may pave the way to a new class of weight loss drugs.

“Until now, the way metformin, which is prescribed to control blood sugar levels, also brings about weight loss has been unclear,” said Jonathan Long , PhD, an assistant professor of pathology. “Now we know that it is acting through the same pathway as vigorous exercise to reduce hunger. Understanding how these pathways are controlled may lead to viable strategies to lower body mass and improve health in millions of people.”

Long and Mark Benson, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, are co-senior authors of the study , which was published on March 18 in Nature Metabolism . Postdoctoral scholar Shuke Xiao , PhD, is the lead author of the study.

Many people with diabetes who are prescribed metformin lose around 2% to 3% of their body weight within the first year of starting the drug. Although this amount of weight loss is modest when compared with the 15% or more often seen by people taking semaglutide drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, the discoveries that led to those drugs also grew from observations of relatively minor, but reproducible, weight loss in people taking first-generation versions of the medications.

Post-workout appetite loss

When Long and colleagues at Baylor University discovered lac-phe in 2022, they were on the hunt for small molecules responsible for curtailing hunger after vigorous exercise. What they found was a Frankenbaby of lactate — a byproduct of muscle fatigue — and an amino acid called phenylalanine. They dubbed the hybrid molecule lac-phe and went on to show that it’s not only more abundant after exercise but it also causes people (as well as mice and even racehorses) to feel less hungry immediately after a hard workout.

“There is an intimate connection between lac-phe production and lactate generation,” Long said. “Once we understood this relationship, we started to think about other aspects of lactate metabolism.”

Metformin was an obvious candidate because as it stimulates the breakdown of glucose (thus reducing blood sugar levels) it can trigger the generation of lactate.

The researchers found that obese laboratory mice given metformin had increased levels of lac-phe in their blood. They ate less than their peers and lost about 2 grams of body weight during the nine-day experiment.

The fact that metformin and sprint exercise affect your body weight through the same pathway is both weird and interesting.

Long and his colleagues also analyzed stored blood plasma samples from people with Type 2 diabetes before and 12 weeks after they had begun taking metformin to control their blood sugar. They saw significant increases in the levels of lac-phe in people after metformin compared with their levels before treatment. Finally, 79 participants in a large, multi-ethnic study of atherosclerosis who were also taking metformin had significantly higher levels of lac-phe circulating in their blood than those who were not taking the drug.

“It was nice to confirm our hunch experimentally,” Long said. “The magnitude of effect of metformin on lac-phe production in mice was as great as or greater than what we previously observed with exercise. If you give a mouse metformin at levels comparable to what we prescribe for humans, their lac-phe levels go through the roof and stay high for many hours.”

Further research revealed that lac-phe is made by intestinal epithelial cells in the animals; blocking the ability of mice to make lac-phe erased the appetite suppression and weight loss previously observed.

Finally, a statistical analysis of the people in the atherosclerosis study who lost weight during the several-year study and follow-up period found a meaningful association between metformin use, lac-phe production and weight loss.

“The fact that metformin and sprint exercise affect your body weight through the same pathway is both weird and interesting,” Long said. “And the involvement of the intestinal epithelial cells suggests a layer of gut-to-brain communication that deserves further exploration. Are there other signals involved?”

Long noted that, while semaglutide drugs are injected into the bloodstream, metformin is an oral drug that is already prescribed to millions of people. “These findings suggest there may be a way to optimize oral medications to affect these hunger and energy balance pathways to control body weight, cholesterol and blood pressure. I think what we’re seeing now is just the beginning of new types of weight loss drugs.”

Researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Colorado, the University of Virginia and the Broad Institute contributed to the work.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (grants GM113854, K08HL145095, DK124265, DK136526, HHSN2682015000031, HSN26800004, UM1DK078616 and 1R01HL151855), a Stanford School of Medicine’s Dean’s Fellowship, the American Heart Association, Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience and Stanford Diabetes Research Center. 

About Stanford Medicine

Stanford Medicine is an integrated academic health system comprising the Stanford School of Medicine and adult and pediatric health care delivery systems. Together, they harness the full potential of biomedicine through collaborative research, education and clinical care for patients. For more information, please visit med.stanford.edu .

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Sen. joni ernst slams biden admin for funneling $2.8m for ‘high-risk pathogens’ research in guinea.

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The Biden administration shows no signs of stopping research on “pathogens of pandemic potential” abroad through a controversial US nonprofit, Sen. Joni Ernst said Monday, as the Pentagon will complete a $2.8 million grant this year for experiments on “high-risk pathogens” in Guinea.

The Department of Defense began funding Georgetown University in September 2021 for a three-year project out of its Defense Threat Reduction Agency focused on “reducing the risk of pathogens causing fever” in Guinea, a grant database shows.

EcoHealth Alliance has received subgrants as part of the project — despite concerns from lawmakers and scientific experts that the Manhattan-based nonprofit has used US taxpayers’ money to fund “risky” research in the past — including at a lab in Wuhan, China, the city where the COVID-19 pandemic started.

“It’s clear EcoHealth can’t be trusted — with dollars or dangerous diseases — after they funneled taxpayer dollars to fund Chinese-run risky research in Wuhan,” Ernst (R-Iowa) told The Post.

“That’s why Congress approved my proposal to audit the defense dollars flowing to and through EcoHealth to pay for batty experiments in China or anywhere else. Even after my provision, more funds have already found their way to Ecohealth Alliance. We must stop this before they are used to make the world a less safe place.”

The scientific research is aimed at “reducing the risk of pathogens causing fever” in Guinea, a grant database shows, and “will test blood samples” from human patients and “assess” bats, dogs, rodents and livestock “with which the patients may interact,” according to researchers at Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Sciences and Security .

The researchers are partnering with EcoHealth Alliance for help with observing and recording animal behavior and have paid the organization more than $150,000 so far.

EcoHealth funded bat coronavirus experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that increased virality and proposed other research that may have resulted in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that spawned the COVID-19 pandemic, according to government records and experts on viral research.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided more than $1.4 million to EcoHealth Alliance between 2014 and 2021 for research that “included genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains,” according to a June 2023 federal report .

In an October 2021 letter, NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak admitted to Congress that EcoHealth had also “failed to report” having created novel coronaviruses that exceeded “a one log increase in growth.”

Those experiments may have constituted gain-of-function research, with NIH documents confirming that humanized mice showed up to a 4 log increase to the growth rate of the original virus — or 10,000 times greater, The Intercept reported .

Tabak said the NIH grant could not have produced COVID-19, since the “sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant,” but another proposal from EcoHealth is now being cited as “ smoking gun ” evidence that it leaked out of a lab in Wuhan.

In 2018, EcoHealth submitted a grant proposal, known as Project DEFUSE, which would have tested engineered bat coronaviruses to make them more easily transmissible.

EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak sought to “downplay” that much of the research would be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in order to make DARPA feel “comfortable,” according to a draft proposal obtained by US Right to Know .

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) rejected it. However, the work may have continued with researchers in Wuhan with the help of Chinese government funding.

Other Project DEFUSE documents raise “to the level of a smoking gun,” the genetic evidence of COVID-19 being engineered, Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright told The Post.

A spokesperson for EcoHealth said in a previous statement on the disclosures that the proposals were “incomplete or early drafts” and the allegations of the virus being engineered from it were “false, based on misleading out-of-context quotations, and a lack of understanding of the process by which federal grants are awarded.”

“Because the work was not selected for funding, any assertions about these details are by definition based on review of incomplete information and are extremely misleading,” the spokesperson added.

The Energy Department and FBI have since determined an accidental lab leak was the most likely explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic last year, and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe went as far as to say it was the “ only ” explanation for COVID’s origin.

The Post has also reached out to EcoHealth about the grant for Guinea research. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The White Coat Waste Project, a taxpayer watchdog group that first exposed the Wuhan funding, is partnering with Ernst to “curtail wasteful government spending” on EcoHealth-related research on viruses that “can cause lab leaks and create bioweapons.”

“The solution is simple,” said Justin Goodman, the group’s senior vice president. “Stop the money. Stop the madness.”

Ernst and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) also asked the Defense Department’s inspector general in January to probe  more than $50 million  in Pentagon grants to Chinese pandemic research institutions.

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