| Skip Google, and most other online Web search. Seek instead published books, journal, and magazine articles. Bibliographies, in published books, articles, and Wikipedia entries are highly useful. Course syllabi are increasingly difficult to find (they're being scooped up in walled gardens) but are gold. Academic and research organisations can prove quite useful, excepting their publicity / press contacts. (There's a circle of Hell reserved for academic press offices.) Despite some phenomenally effective footgunning, OPLC's Worldcat retains some scant utility. Internet Archive's Open Library (<https://openlibrary.org/>) is an increasingly comprehensive replacement, with the added advantage of direct access to surfaced references. Google Scholar is useful for scholarly journal search. See also Microsoft Academic, PubMed, and Semantic Scholar. Library Genesis (including its various specific indices) is absolutely indespensible, though search is limited if you don't have a specific reference in mind. There are relatively few domains in which information updates at sufficient speed that online references are the most useful source. |