Find Quality Information
6-12
Find Information within a Source
- Parts of a Book
Use these two book parts to help find the information you need.
- Table of Contents
- Found at the very beginning of a book
- Provides an overall picture of what is covered in the book. Is there a section that has the information you need?
- Index
- Found at the very end of a book
- Provides an alphabetical list of topics covered in the book and the exact pages to locate them
- Skim and Scan
Use these strategies to quickly find the relevant information in any book section, newspaper article, magazine or journal article, or website:
- Scan the entire article or website to determine how it is organized
- If the source is online (website or database), can you search for keywords within the article or website? Try Control+F to bring up a search box.
- Use headings to locate the section that has the information you want to find
- Read the 1st line of every paragraph until you find the section you need
- You may need to skim the entire article or page for keywords to find the information you need.
Next => After finding information within a source, it is time to record that information. Start by learning about citing to avoid plagiarism.