| | Phil, she checked the travel times via landrover between sites to see that they were consistent. They were. Apparenly, KSM is held in high regard among scientists for good reason.
Jonathan, I fear that anything I have to say here to you and others here on RoR will be obvious. (See below.) In a senior class in criminology, two of my peers gave presentations on the same subject and delivered the same facts from the same websites. Obviously, both girls did a top-level search, found the first hits, and went with that. Neither of them checked further. I will google an author to see what else they wrote, look for a CV. I will also reframe a search, from simply reversing the words, to using synonyms for all or some terms.
Being older, of course, I started with library card files. In my day, there were separate files for Title/Author and Subject. While Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal are different, they follow similar schemas. When I walk into a library, the first thing I note is the catalog system, so I know were to look. For me, LoC cataloging places numismatics in CJ. History is in the Ds, alphabetical by geography, with England closer to Germany, and Japan in Asia. (No surprise in that.) Mathematics starts the Qs with computers in there, but, "computers" are also near the top in As with books of general knowledge. Computer topics will also be in Technologies and Engineering which are in the Ts. (500s and 600s for Dewey.) Numismatics is 737 with collectibles. Postage stamps and paper money are in there, also, but with LoC, stamps are with transportation and paper money is in the Gs with banking. When I look up a book, I am not so focused on one specific call number, but on the general area. Therefore, I go to that general area and browse the stacks. Two books nominally in the same subject might not show up together in a computerized catalog, but if I go to the stacks, I find related material.
In the stacks, browsing books, I look for authors. I pay attention to publishers also. Wiley, of course, is a known publisher of science texts. So, a book on UFOs, for instance, published by Wiley will rank higher with me than one from, say, something like "Starchild" or whatever. I know that an edu domain name will have better information, given the usual caveats that college professors can be crackpots.
That all seems obvious, perhaps. It is somewhat intuitive or maybe just habitual. Can you describe how to walk? If you read this post, you may not notice that I avoided using the same key word in two consecutive places. That makes the reading more interesting. So, too, with research. I ask, "What else?... Where else?... Is there some other way to say this?" Speaking of science fiction, as we were, if you want to know about the geology of the Moon, you have to know that the study can be called "selenology." The nice thing about the Britannica (Americana, etc.) is that at the end of an article, they give other keywords.
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