Before writing your first college research paper, you should have mastered the fundamentals of using twenty-first-century information resources. After reading this book, you’ll not only know how to find the best information on your topic using all kinds of sources, but you’ll also have learned how to evaluate and use the information you find.

The College Student’s Research Companion: Finding, Evaluating, and Citing the Resources You Need to Succeed, Fifth Edition, upholds the philosophy that information should be judged for what it conveys, not how it is conveyed—in other words, for its content rather than its format.

You may think that Google is great and Wikipedia is wonderful, and that they are so much easier to use than other harder-to-access sources like books and journals. Although these websites are useful for some purposes, as this book will
explain, if you think adequate research consists only of using web sources that are freely accessible to anyone, you will not write very good college research papers . . . and you won’t get very good grades, either.

To be information literate and succeed not only in college but also in life, you certainly need to be able to find information, but being able to judge it, utilize it, and integrate it is also essential. The chapters that follow explain the research process step-by-step.