Bibliographies and Works Cited lists found at the end of books and articles are also an excellect source for finding citations related to your topic. In theory, search engines attempt to index every available site, but each search engine works differently and no one search engine covers all sites. Search engines do, however, allow you to cast the widest possible net when performing keyword searches. Subject Directories - A subject directory provides you with a set of links that are organized according to both general and more specialized subject headings. Unlike search engines, subject directories are human centered inasmuch as the Websites indexed are generally submitted to the directory and then evaluated by the people running the subject directory.
Subject directories are thus more limited in terms of the amount of sites indexed.
Listed below are some general guidelines to consider when evaluating information resources. The title of a book or article is a good first indication, but you often need to look further to fully evaluate relevancy. For books you can scan the preface , table of contents and index of a work to get a good overview. There is, however, a vast range of literature in which an author's bias may not be explicitly stated. Use reference sources such as citation and book review indexes to see what else the author has published and try to determine whether there is a discernable pattern.