Research sources for writing assignments?

[rachel83az]

More resources:

https://unpaywall.org/
https://openaccessbutton.org/
https://plos.org/
https://www.si.edu/openaccess
https://www.loc.gov/collections/

Some lists of freely available materials (may or may not duplicate sources already listed in this thread and one another):
https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/FreeResources/general
https://www.library.ucsb.edu/search-rese...-databases
https://www.scribendi.com/academy/articl...es.en.html
https://www.history.ac.uk/library/collec...-resources
https://www.bl.uk/help/open-access-resou...r-research#

[bluebooger]

my sources
google

that is all you need

[rachel83az]

my sources              
google                  

that is all you need

I wish! Sadly, not really.

[ss20ts]

my sources              
google                  

that is all you need

This rarely works when you need access to journals. 


Has this thread been sticky noted?

[rachel83az]

Has this thread been sticky noted?

Yes, I remembered about this thread and stickied it today, adding more resources.

[PrettyFlyforaChiGuy]

One service I haven't seen mentioned is academic.microsoft.com, which has a lot of pretty good filters.

If you get locked out behind a paywall, you can simply search by the article's DOI on sci-hub.se. You'll likely have the PDF loading on your screen immediately after.

As a last resort, you can directly message the authors to request access to their papers by finding their email address or searching for the paper on Researchgate.net, but I've found this to be a slow process.

[LevelUP]

Research sources for writing assignments? What are we talking about here? So given the OP's sig, it looks like the OP was talking about WGU. 

For WGU, I heard some courses require scholarly sources in which Google Scholar and WGU Library would be good to use. Some master's programs such as the WGU MSITM doesn't require scholarly sources. All courses there are pass/fail, so I wouldn't go overboard with gathering sources and certainly not spend weeks gathering sources. That is nuts. 

For TESU, most general ed/business/tech courses don't require scholarly sources. For the business capstone, I didn't use scholarly sources. However, for the liberal capstone, I did use all scholarly sources as my research was heavy in education and psychology. TESU provides Proquest and EBSCO. TESU also provides access to the NJ library though I found it too confusing and time-consuming to use efficiently.

There is no scholarly source requirement for Study.com, generally for business and technology courses. However, some have a scholarly source requirement if you do psychology courses there.

I would check with your school to see what sources they provide.  Then go elsewhere if you can't find what you need. 

[rachel83az]

Overall, I am wondering how your educational institutions allow using such sources when having a paper assignment, how about plagiarism checker?

As long as you follow citation rules, you're not going to be dinged for plagiarism. The specific source doesn't matter as much as how you use it.

[bjcheung77]

Overall, I am wondering how your educational institutions allow using such sources when having a paper assignment, how about plagiarism checker?

Where are you from?  How does your institutions allow you to do your research?  For most institutions, they have TurnItIn or other alternatives.  The tool basically checks your submission with others in the institution and the cited sources to see if your sentence structure is identical to what has been found.  

I had been flagged before as my personal details are always on my paper, but there was one time, I had a very "common" sentence and for some reason, it matched the cited page, I had to "retype" that sentence before the grader did their work in grading...

[bluebooger]

my sources              
google                  

that is all you need

This rarely works when you need access to journals. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Scholar

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.
...Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.

https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html

it works just fine to provide you the links -- but you may have to pay or subscribe to a journal to get the full article