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"I recently boiled down some of the advice I try to give students about how to carry out searches and formulate research questions, which I'll reproduce here. I start with the basic insight that I've picked up from Swarthmore's library staff, that the point where many students struggle in research is not with finding credible or authoritative sources once they've settled on a topic but with understanding what is researchable or knowable within the constraints of the assignment, the resources, the disciplinary framework and so on. I feel as if too many of my colleagues are still focused on the former issue rather than the latter one, still too worried that students aren't finding the "right" sources that have scholarly legitimacy in favor of Wikipedia or whatever they can find on as full-text at 2 a.m. I don't think this is a big issue both because I have a much higher opinion of Wikipedia and such than many of my colleagues and because I find that students actually have fairly good skills for finding properly authoritative sources and material. As long as they've gotten the research framed correctly at the outset, that is. So what I focus on is processes of discovery that students should use to find out what's known and knowable, how researchable a particular question is, what the shape or character of information about that question looks like, and how to make smart decisions about where to invest labor and time in developing a research assignment. "