For those who want to do some forecasting of high uncertainty events, we’ve added a new page for software. Free software, too.
Archive for Research methods
You can search the Deep Web for many topics, but searching for academic scholarship has the fewest headaches. It is easier than other topics because there are so many colleges and universities who have dedicated staff and resources to indexing their collections. However, there is no central repository where all these indexes reside. So deep web is still the medium by which your target must be sought.
More than likely you will need to do a three tier approach to finding your target scholarship:
- Identify the type of collection that would have it
- Find the index search portal and search for your scholarship
- Download or request a copy via ILL or other appropriate means
It is always tough to use subjective judgment. Especially when trying to establish the credibility of an author you don’t know. Here are some treatments of author authority and a quantitative means to evaluate them.
http://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin/web-eval-sites.htm
Vetting secondary source authors and
how the journal of history and computing do it.
So this should give you a guide of where to start in quantitatively assigning authoritative rank.