Tools to Aid the Research of Neurological Issues

Web research is a difficult task at best. The techniques that are to be mastered are not in and of themselves - difficult - but are necessary to be successful. What is success in this task? Success is measured by the amount of meaningful and pertinent information that can be located and verified per unit time. There is much material that is present on the Web. Some of it is out of date, some if it is misinformation, some if it is just plain dubious. Thus the task of web research it to find pertinent and timely information from reliable sources - that is verifiable.

Here we examine this procedure and the tools required for the successful research of information from the Internet or Web as it has come to be known. The use of search engines provides the means by which one may locate relevant research documents. The library membership provides the means to have access to full text research documents. The medical dictionaries provide the means by which one may learn of new medical terms in order to fully understand the content of these recent research documents. And cross checking the authors and the issues provide the means by which the relevance of these research documents may be assessed.

Management of Web-based resources requires that a list or database of these resources be kept as a description or brief summary and the pertinent URL or URLs. A URL is a Universal Resource Location or Locator. This is the Internet name of the address of the resource. The Internet name is then translated by the Domain Name Server into a standard IP (Internet Protocol) address. This IP address appears as xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where the value of xxx is less than 256.

Search Engine Skills

Search engines are the only effective means of rapid access to groups of research documents on the Internet. The search engine is the researcher's basic tool. Thus it is necessary to learn these search engines and how to extract the most useful results from each. Each researcher may choose a particular set of search engines that best serve the desired search methodology and the specific requirements of the search. Search methodologies are very personal and there is much variation in strategies available. Most users prefer the ability to narrow the search with successive or recursive search techniques. This is where the next level of search uses as input the results of the previous search - with a new search argument.

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