Often when I am looking or enquiring into something on the net, I will come across websites that can not exactly be described as “scholarly” (you know, like “Dan’s Great Webpage for Learning Some Funky Math”).
The only real websites that I can think of to consult when searching for stuff that contain somewhat reliable information are ones like Scientific American or How Stuff Works. But these have thier limitations, especially for SA in attempting to search for general explanations on certain topics (such as protein synthesis or probabilities).
So where exactly on the internet can I go if I want reliable information in studied fields such as mathematics or physics? Are there any databases which can provide the right information (or at least direct me to where I can) that I can use for free?
What I am ideally looking for is information that is verified or, for lack of a better word, professional.
So when you are searching for this type of verifiable information on the internet, whether it be for economics, the sciences or whatever, where can you go to obtain this information that has this relatively high quality/standard?
If you’re looking for answers in the physical sciences or mathematics, I would recommend these sites. Questions in the social sciences or life sciences are better answered elsewhere.
Professional medical articles aren’t as intimidating as they look, BTW. (Professional biology papers, on the other hand, are probably even more intimidating than they look, and you’ll get both med and bio papers from PubMed.) You have to read a few to get into the general style of writing, but I had little trouble understanding them at the age of 19 (after a year of freshman biology in college), when I had a job at a drug company that mostly involving reading medical papers. The only major problem is that unless you’re affiliated with a large organization like a university that buys journal access for you, you probably can’t read most of them. (There are exceptions, such as the BMJ, but they’re in the minority.) You can get the abstracts, which are little summaries of the major points of the paper - they’d probably be enough to answer any questions you had, since you probably don’t care much about their specific methadology or the reasons they arrived at their conclusions, just what the conclusions are.
A good calculator site (geometry, algebra, trigonometry, chemisry, physics, astronomy, finance, and units converters (length, area, volume, etc) is www.1728.com.
And I agree that the NIST site www.nist.gov is very reliable.
I believe ALL sites ending in .gov are well-done and accurate.
I gotta say, tho, that even places like HSW or gasp TSD, are not necessarily always 100% factual (or woruld thew word be “correct”?). Like most referance material, you need to take it with a grain of salt, and consider the context the referance is given in, and the context of how you apply it.
Another possible source for reputable science facts would be Project Gutenberg, a free online repository for the world’s books. There you can read the actual published works of scientists, for example: Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Charles Babbage, even Aristotle.
Since they have to be books out of copyright, you won’t see the newest stuff there. But it will be reputable. For example, you can’t get anything more “reputable” on relativity than reading Albert Einstein!
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If you want to help add to the list of freely available books online by donating just a bit of you time, go to Distributed Proofreading and proofread a page or two.
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