Well, it's for a school research paper and we have to gather data on how social media affects stress and people's mental health.
Thank you for answering my dumbass questions even though it probably seems stupid, i really appreciate it
First off, asking for help on finding sources is not stupid/dumbass, it's the opposite. Smart people ask for help when they don't know what they're doing.
Second, since you said school and not uni, I'm going to assume you're at high school level roughly and not uni/college. If so, then google scholar is going to be a fine starting point for you to find sources. It's generally user friendly and going to provide decently quality for what you need.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources: ar
Unlike main google, it's been untouched by the AI nonsense and functions mostly like it did 5 years ago. It's also handy because it will often provide free copies of papers when it can find one. It should help you get some good research papers as sources that you can use as citations, and it'll let you save articles/handles citations for you.
Here's a quick guide for what you need to know to use google scholar!
When searching, put in keywords, NOT questions.
For reasons unclear to me, search engines and humans being weird has trained people to type in queries to search engines like questions. This is bad!!! It will get you worse results!! You want to instead remove any unnecessary words and focus in on giving the computer the most unique keywords to match you with what you actually want. For example:
BAD: how does social media affect stress and mental health?
BETTER: social media stress effect mental health
BEST: social media mental health
You really want to par down your keywords as much as possible, limiting connector or filler unless you absolutely need it. The more specific words you use (ie using "depression" rather than the more general "mental health") the more specific your results. Focus on practicing that and you'll do excellent.
With that out of the way, for actual google scholar use:
Right here, we have a very important feature, the free copy. If google can pull up a free public copy of a paper, it will! Always use those when possible.
Always check the date on the research you're pulling! For a topic like social media, I would be wary of pulling any source that's 5 years or older, since it's an evolving landscape! For other topics, the rules vary a lot depending on the topic and quality of research available.
Next up, saving & citation. The save button lets you save an article for later. You can stick it on a particular list. Handy for keeping track of sources. The cite button generates citations for you, in most of the common styles. Saves you having to mess with making them yourself.
Finally! Further research! When you click down here, you can see articles that have cited this paper and related articles. Both are quite handy for exploring a particular topic further as you look for research that builds on what you've found. Particularly when the area you're looking at is niche or highly specific. Also a great way to find systematic reviews of data that are sometimes a bit stubborn about showing up in research results.
Hopefully all of that is helpful, best of luck on your paper anon!
