The Best Online Research Materials for Freelance Writers and Students?

Freelance Writers - Reference Materials?

I am a freelance writer and wanted some help.

Can people please give some hints on places to access good academic resources such as Journals and/or E books online which are either free or paid subscription? As someone who is wheelchair bound it is often difficult getting out to access local libaries, I would be very grateful for your assistance.

These days, I am relying quite a bit on Questia.

The yearly annual subscription is reasonable (and tax deductible if you live in the U.S.) and the library contains a fair mix of books, academic journals and magazines. Easy search set up too.

If you need med articles, PubMed is a free cataloguing service run by the National Institutes of Health. It will provide abstracts and, when available, point you to where you can get an article either free or through a subscription.

As far as free, both Google books and Amazon will give you limited reads of a lot of their product, which can also be useful.

I hope that helps!

Nice to see you back posting again Lavinia. I used to have access to questia myself and will agree that it us quite reasonable and useful.

I cancelled my subscription when I quit writing, though I do have access to a lot of sites that are subscription based through the chambers I work for. These are expensive if you had to pay for them yourself so there is no point recommending them unless you are getting in so much work it justifies paying for such sites.

I have used Pubmed as well and ssrn can also be very useful. I am also signed up to medlaw.com which is free and gives you regular updates on changes in practice.

Try and get access to Athens through a university friend.That will put a wealth of resources at your disposal!

search engine that has credible and verified authors of articles written

any search engine that has credible and verified authors of articles written because i need to search articles for my project of 'Pak Eco'

Google Scholar

Online research sites with legitimate research sources

Can anyone recommend good online research sites that provide the kind of research sources acceptable in academic papers?

Try google scholar: scholar.google.co.uk

If you search through and click on the articles with PDFs you can get a lot of journal articles for free. However, many of the articles without a PDF link are just abstracts and require payment to obtain the full version. Worth a search though.

Hope that helps.

Avoiding Wikipedia. How about eHow.com and About.com - reliable sources?

I have often received strict instructions from my clients to avoid using Wikipedia for data mining as they consider it as an unreliable source of information. But what about eHow.com and About.com? Can they be considered reliable? Should they be used as resources for Academic works?

I don't think ehow.com or about.com are considered academia level references and often they are found to be inaccurate.

No in a word, most tutors would look down on these as sources and they certainly wouldn't be considered to have academic integrity.

Wikipedia and ehow are good for leading you to other sites, but not as sources themselves. About.com is not very useful for academic research.

Normally, professors consider any information coming from a .edu address as academically acceptable.

They used to accept .org sites as well but when those url extensions started to become questionable they struck that address from the list as well.

Unless, the .org or .edu address is one that is already widely known and accepted as a reputable source.

Most of the usual suspects when it comes to research are already online so finding legitimate sources are not that difficult to accomplish anymore.

However, one needs to be careful when dealing with formerly reputable sources such as time.com, cnn, and other related news media outlets due to the proliferation of fake news.

What was reputable before is questionable these days.

So the traditional research avenues online are now suspect as sources of information.

Professors these days are no longer stingy about giving their students a list of acceptable resources at the start of the term It would be best to ask the professor directly regarding his "verified" list of research websites, just to avoid confusion and questions when the time comes.

Questia is a one stop shop for research and other related tasks. I often recommend this site to my writers who ask for help in sourcing materials when the client either does not provide any reference materials or they cannot find a certain research source. The place has almost 100,000 books and 14 million other sources such as magazines, newspapers, journals, and other information sources. It is by subscription only though so the student or writer should be willing to spend for the yearly sign-up. Signing up for less than a year isn't worth it. It is more cost effective to sign up for the long term since there are 2 semesters in an academic year, with the trimester universities being an exception to this schedule. It's worth the subscription cost because it offers not only reference materials, but writing tools as well. That makes it well worth the money spent and will remove the guesswork regarding the validity of the sources used in a paper.

The best online research materials are the ones that the students themselves provide to the writer. It is only logical that they provide as much reference materials as they can since their professors have required reading for the lessons. As such, the student is constrained to use the class references. Professors also warn the students beforehand about websites, news sources, and other online references that are unacceptable in terms of verified information. Ask the student to provide the materials to avoid confusion and to ensure the academic integrity of the paper, as far as the professor is concerned. If you are asked to write a paper using your own sources, then make sure to have the student approve the materials and websites you have decided to use first. The last thing a writer wants to do is revise a paper due to a problematic information source.

Negative. A writer with thousands of academic projects under his belt is much better at finding appropriate source material than his clients; that's one of the reasons they hire a professional writer.


Negative. Sometimes, students do provide some source material, but much more often, they provide me with absolutely nothing besides the assignment prompt. If there's something unusually specific about the sources required for a project, I'll ask for them, but that happens quite rarely.


Rarely. In my experience, only about 10% of projects limit sources to course materials. In fact, the most common direction that I've encountered in 20 years of doing this is project specs that say students may use their textbooks but that the project specifically requires several sources in addition to the course textbook.


Students often need that kind of instruction because, otherwise, they'll typically use Wikipedia and other totally inappropriate source material that they find online. When students do provide source material, about half the time, it's exactly that: either Wiki stuff or simply the first few things that popped up when they spent 5 minutes Googling keywords from their assignments. I definitely don't need any "help" finding source material from students who just received instructions from their professors about how to identify academically-appropriate sources last week for the first time in their lives.


Negative. This only adds confusion and wastes time. I don't need any help from students finding high-quality sources or (especially) making sure that my work meets the expected standard of academic integrity.


OMG. Absolutely not. The last thing that any highly-experienced and very busy writer needs is to pause on every project, waiting for each client to "approve" the sources I'm using in between the research phase and the writing phase. Occasionally, this is required by the professor, and if the source list is due much earlier than the project, there might be an extra charge for that, simply because it means that I have to spend time on the project long before I actually sit down to write it a week or three later. Whether or not there's a charge for that depends on several factors, including the project type and length and the deadline; but if it's not charged, that's just a courtesy, especially if it's a project that I'd ordinarily research and write all in one sitting.


If the original project specs require specific criteria for sources (e.g. publication years, peer-reviewed journals, primary sources, etc.), then the client is entitled to a free revision if the sources used by the writer don't meet those criteria. However, anytime the specs don't specify or limit what sources may be used, there are no free revisions based on specs provided only after the fact. If the specs say nothing about the sources (or if the client fails to share any applicable specs in the original order), our only obligation is to use academically-appropriate sources. A revision necessitated by any mistake or omission in the original order is always charged.

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It's a dead link. It does not exist. I am not sure why you are building up that site considering that you have listed yourself as a freelance writer. You do not want students to use such links and resources, which would defeat the purpose of your being at this forum. The purpose being that you are trying to attract clients for yourself as a writer. Or are you an academic writing site promoter who messed up his advertisement posting? You sound more like a salesperson actually than a writer who is looking out for students and their academic writing welfare.

This is almost always the case anytime the content of a post, especially a first-ever post on this forum, doesn't match the designation (Company Rep, Writer, Student, "Observer," etc.) chosen by the poster.