Five Useful and Free Tools to Make Your Writing More Credible
By: Pashew Nuri
Tags: Open Source, Blogging, Writing Tips, Research, Resources

Five Useful and Free Tools to Make Your Writing More Credible

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Most writers write in order to convince the reader. They write with the goal of convincing the reader to do something, believe something, or feel something. And in order to do so, the content must be rooted in facts, in order to make the article credible to readers.

Much of what is published on Medium and blogging websites is a type of writing that shows — a narrative of how-to. What hovers the reader’s mind is finding an effective way out for this current issue that makes the reader seek out solutions.

In order to convince the reader of the credibility of your solutions to that particular issue, you will need to provide enough evidence for the reader to read your content to the end.

One effective way to doing so is by providing scientifically proven facts about what you are offering in your writing. This is done by finding external scientific articles on your topic and present it in a digestible and easy to read manner for the reader. This requires the writer to:

Be capable of reading scientific papers, Do her/his own research to find scientific evidence, and Know how to cite the reference.

Seeking out referencing external sources will give integrity to your writing. So, where are these external sources? where do you get these scientific articles? Especially when scientific journals are very expensive to access.

The answer is freely accessible search engines.

There is currently an open-source movement in place that advocates for free access to research and science to all. The movement has now resulted in building some free accessed search engines that allow writers (and readers) to access open scientific articles and papers.

These services include research databases and search engines that allow writers to use keywords to look for academic and non-academic scientific research articles in any particular field and topic.

In this post, I will introduce five known research databases that are currently available to be used by writers and readers alike. Here is a list of five of those research databases, and I will also mention 5 more at the end.

1. Google Scholar

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Google Scholar is one of the most used research databases in the world. It “provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts, and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other web sites.” Click here to access the website.

2. ERIC: Education Resources Information Center

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ERIC is considered as the largest database in the world for literature in the education field. It provides an easy to use and searchable database containing over 1.5 million records journal articles, conference papers, dissertations and theses, and books.

3. Microsoft Academic

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Microsoft Academic is the Google Scholar version of Microsoft. In searching, according to the website, Microsoft Academic understands the meaning of words, it doesn’t just match keywords to content. For example, when you type a word in the search bar, the database matches it with journal titles, conference names, and many research topics. The database currently sits on 238,899,148 publications, 48,946 journals, 4,471 conference, 740,562 topics, 243,336,779 authors, and 25,770 institutions. Click here to access the website.

4. CORE

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CORE is an academic search engine that provides access to open access to scientific research. When searching, the results include links to the full-text PDF or full-text web pages. CORE currently contains 194,967,211 open access articles, from thousands and over tens of thousands of journals, collected from 10,135 data providers around the world. It is delivered by The Open University and Jisc. Click here to access the website.

5. DOAJ

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DOAJ stands for Directory of Open Access Journals. It is an independent database that provides access to a community-curated list of open access journals. It is another effort made as a part of the open-source movement. According to the DOAJ website, it currently contains 12000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science, and humanities. Click here to access the website.

The above five databases are the ones that I am familiar with their usage and are most popular among researchers. There are other research databases that do the same jobs but may not be as wide in coverage as the above five.

For example:

To conclude, bloggers and/or writers need to make their writings more credible by providing scientifically proven facts about the topic. In doing so and when credited, the writer is adding extra strength to their claims, and provide certainty to readers. This, in turn, will make the reader see the writer as well-researched, accurate, and truthful. Traits that keep readers coming back for more, and that establishes the writer as a thought leader in the field.

Keep on writing…