Journal Entry, Week One

Journal prompt:  Where do you tend to begin your research, for academic purposes? For personal purposes?

When beginning research, I tend to start by searching for any information that I can find that is relevant, whether it be in agreeance or contradictory to what I believe.  I try to find many different sources and opinions on the topic in order to get a robust amount of information and to be able to have a varied pool of sources.  The first places that I look for information is in the online library databases such as ProQuest or EBSCOhost.  Another place that I like to look for information is on government websites.  A lot of the times, I will find a ton of different laws, statistics, or studies that have been done through different government agencies.  For a topic such as mine that focuses on the challenges of Social Networking forensics, I think that I should be able to find a fair amount of information using these venues.  When I am reading different articles, I may copy and paste part or all of a document into a document that I use for all of my research notes so that I do not have to keep going back to the original website and database.  I also be sure that I cite the works in my notes so that I can keep track of where the information came from.  Keeping all of my research notes in one place and citing my sources early helps to save me a headache later on.

As for personal research, where else would I start it, but Google?  Google is not my only resource for personal research though.  It sounds crazy, but I do a ton of personal research on Facebook.  There, I can find out the going-ons in my local community, learn how to coupon or build a house out of pallets, you name it!  In my experience, people in Facebook-land love to share, share, share, and it has been a consistent source of information from real people for me.