To verify availability of book and journals consult WorldCat for books and Union List for journals. Researching on the internet means making judgments about the quality of information. Some sites are simply misinforming, like the humorous Mankato Home Page , which attributes tropical qualities to a town just south of the Canadian border. To find scholarly resources on the web, look for sites that have academic or government affiliation, that cite the original source of information, and that list credentials of the author. One way to screen web sites is to use a web directory as your search engine.
Web directories vary in restrictiveness, but all have some sort of rating system for site inclusion.
MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.