Need Help?
Websites
Search Google for your topic keywords. Look for government, education, and/or organization webpages as well as news/magazine publications. Be cautious if using Wikipedia as the content cannot be verified.
Before using information found on a webpage, consider the following criteria to evaluate its credibility.
- Who is the author?
- What are his/her qualifications?
- Why was the website created?
- When was it last updated?
- How reliable is the information?
For further guidance, please refer to NOVA Libraries' How to...Evaluate Websites research guide.
Suggested Websites for Topic Ideas
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New York Times: 401 Prompts for Argumentative WritingPrompts that touch on every aspect of contemporary life — from social media to sports, politics, gender issues and school. See which ones most inspire you to take a stand. Each question comes from NYT's daily Student Opinion feature, and each provides links to free Times resources for finding more information.
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New York Times: 300 Questions and Images to Inspire Argument WritingRecent Student Opinion and Picture Prompts, categorized by topic, to help students discover the issues that matter to them.
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TED Talks TopicsBrowse TED topics from A to Z.
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Pew Research CenterPew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. They conduct public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research. They do not take policy positions.
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ProCon.orgProCon.org provides non-partisan resources for critical thinking on controversial topics, primarily in pro-con format.
Beyond Google
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Google ScholarInstead of turning to the all-purpose Google search engine, try using Google Scholar to access research. Register with Google Scholar using your NOVA affiliation and you'll get active links to open results of your research queries.
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Internet Archive ScholarSimilar to Google Scholar, the Internet Archive Scholar is a scholarly search engine giving searchers access to the full-text of over scholarly works.
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Semantic ScholarSemantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature