#research tip

[tilbageidanmark]

The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free

[apollolewis]

If you're writing anything relating to more modern history a great place to start looking for sources and accounts is just to look through different archives. I've only been able to find ww1 letters to help my book writing because the UK's national archives have a lot of them in their data base.

[historysurvivalguide]

Search without AI-Overview

AI-overviews and suggested answers have made research very annoying lately. Very often the prompted answers are just wrong, even at a casual glance of the article they are stealing from

And since it shows up first, this kind of misinformation can be dangerous

But there is a lot way to use Google without their weird ideas about “improving” searches with ads/misinformation

Add: “udm=14” at the end of search results to remove prompted answers

Current results (left) and added “udm=14” (right)

“It’s essentially Google, minus the crap. No parsing of the information in the results. No surfacing metadata like address or link info. No knowledge panels, but also, no ads. It looks like the Google we learned to love in the early 2000s, buried under the "More" menu like lots of other old things Google once did more to emphasize, like Google Books.”

This was added under the search options as “web” but it is faster to appended the udm option

A simplified view does not replace the declining quality of Google’s results, largely caused by decades of SEO optimization by website creators. The same overly optimized results are going to be there, like it or not. It is not Google circa 2001—it is a Google-circa-2001 presentation of Google circa 2024, a very different site.

Google Announcement on Twitter

Forget AI. Google just created a version of its search engine free of the extra junk it has added over the past decade-plus. You just need o

[silentlyscreamingatyou]

This might be well known to a lot of people, but if you’re a writer and you’re researching, adding FICTION to the beginning of your searches about things that usually come with a “if you need help” warning takes that warning away and gives you actual answers.

[creature-wizard]

General research tip: don't just trust a book or something simply because it has citations; take the time to actually investigate those citations. People can and do sometimes cite bad or questionable sources.

[penguicorns-are-cool]

DO NOT DO THIS!!!

If a website has a paywall, like New York Times, DO NOT use the ctrl+A shortcut then the ctrl+c shortcut as fast as you can because then you may accidentally copy the entire article before the paywall comes up. And definitely don't do ctrl+v into the next google doc or whatever you open because then you will accidentally paste the entire article into a google doc or something!!!! I repeat DO NOT do this because it is piracy which is absolutely totally wrong!!!

[potatotalksculture]

Potato Tweet: If you’re writing a paper or a thesis about some specific person, try looking for some memoir or journals they might have written. It can be a deal breaker for trying to understand all the secondary works written about them.

[creature-wizard]

When seeking information from academic/scholarly sources, remember that it's better to seek out more than one. Everyone gets things wrong sometimes, and if you're only paying attention to one person it won't always be obvious where they get things wrong.