Research Blog #4: Rutgers RIOT

The Rutgers RIOT reinforces everything that the librarian taught us in class on Monday. It is very helpful in that it teaches you the basics of the beginning of writing a research paper. First, you need to select a good topic using limiters like time, geography, and population so that it is not too broad of a topic. Then you need to find sources by entering the correct keywords in the databases that the Rutgers libraries have. This tutorial also helps you to identify your citations as a book or journal, and you get some practice with evaluating the quality of your sources and learning if they are too old or not by an acceptable author for the topic you chose. One big thing I learned was that the libraries and their databases are a lot easier to use and a lot better than other search engines like google or yahoo when you are searching for information for a research paper. Rutgers RIOT is a very well put together interactive tutorial for teaching necessary research skills. The way they teach you is good in that you can actually answer some questions along the way and really get engaged in the tutorial. To improve it, however, they could maybe make it necessary for you to answer the questions correctly before moving on.