Tips on doing Internet Research in Nigeria

1) JSTOR: One resource that requires institutional support but which every librarian in Nigeria should know about, is that one of the largest academic journal databases, JSTOR, gives free access to non-profit organizations in Africa. This includes public universities. On their website, JSTOR claims they partner with 750 institutions in 43 continents on the continent.  […]

1) JSTOR: One resource that requires institutional support but which every librarian in Nigeria should know about, is that one of the largest academic journal databases, JSTOR, gives free access to non-profit organizations in Africa. This includes public universities. On their website, JSTOR claims they partner with 750 institutions in 43 continents on the continent.  They also partner with the website aluka.org, which is devoted to compiling digital scholarly resources from and about Africa. Librarians should just fill out the “JSTOR Participation Agreement for the African Access Initiative form” to sign up their institutions. That will give anyone at that institution access, as long as they have the institutional password. I have used JSTOR at Bayero University and the University of Jos. I imagine most other public universities in Nigeria also have access.

However, there are many other free resources online that anyone without institutional affiliations can access.  I will discuss a few of them here.

2) Google Scholar is my favourite free academic resource online.  You can access Google Scholar by going to the top right hand corner of the black banner across the top of the Google home page. Click on the “more.” It will open up a drop down menu. Choose the last option “even more.” This will open a page full of Google extras. On the right-hand column you will find Google Scholar, which helps you search for keywords or specific authors in the same way you would search Google. The difference here is that the search will generally come up with scholarly materials. Some of them are behind an institutional “pay wall,” but I have been amazed by how many materials I have been able to access for free, from academic articles to entire books.

3) Online book repositories:  There are many online book resources, including Project Gutenberg, which has over 40,000 free full-text versions of old books, which are no longer copyright protected. This will not necessarily give you up-to-date information, but if you are looking for historical primary source materials or old novels, these sites are treasure troves. What about accessing up-to-date materials? This is where I turn to Google Books, which is one of the selections in the drop-down box under the “more” option in the black banner toolbar at the top of the Google home page. Using Google Books, you can access scanned-in pdfs of many old books and historical materials that are out of copyright, but you can also sometimes find partial copies of the most recent books. Usually you can only access a few chapters before the free content ends. But I have found that if I search for keywords inside the book, sometimes they will bring up partial views of pages. If you are trying to check the source for a quote cited in another work, this is particularly useful.  In fact, if you type in a sentence from the quote you are looking for, the page where it is located will often come up in Google books.

Another surprisingly helpful place to check is Amazon.com. While you cannot buy online books at Amazon unless you have a credit card based outside of Nigeria, many books do have “look inside” options. Here you can search inside books and may be able to access chapters you have not been able to see through Google. I usually start with Google Books and read what I can there, and then go to Amazon.com and click on the next chapters. While this is an unwieldy way to read a book and does not always give you access to the entire thing, it is useful for reading introductions, key chapters, and checking table of contents and citations you have read in other scholarly works.

4) Publisher websites: Journal or book publishers, such as Wiley and Blackwell, often offer free pdfs of “sample” chapters and introductions. Go to publisher websites and browse their books or check for certain books to see if they have a “read excerpt”  option.

5) Scholar Webpages: If you are familiar with which scholars are the most well known in your field, check to see if they have university webpages. Some publishers give authors permission to upload  copies of their articles on their own webpages, and many scholars provide links to at least some of their publications on their personal sites.

6) Academic social media sites: Once you sign up to become a member of social media sites like Academia.edu  and Scribd, you will have access to materials other members have uploaded. This is also a good way of getting your publications out there.

7) Wikipedia: A word of advice. As a scholar, I would never cite Wikipedia in an academic paper. Neither would I accept it as a citation in a student paper. While it is generally a fairly reliable source of information, the online encyclopedia has been built through volunteer work. Anyone, whether or not they are an expert on a topic, can sign up and contribute to or edit entries. Because of that, it is often biased and sometimes includes inaccurate information, so it is important to take any information you find there with a grain of salt. However, at the brainstorming and idea gathering stage of your writing it is a great resource. If you are trying to find out general background information about a topic, Wikipedia has far more entries than an average encyclopedia. Where it comes in handy for research is the footnote section, where contributors are supposed to provide a link to the source from which they get the information they put in the Wikipedia entries. Through Wikipedia footnotes, I have found links to excellent primary source materials.  However, Wikipedia is only a starting point and should only be used for finding original sources, never used as a source itself.

8) Piracy: I am aware that there are certain piracy resources that allow scholars to break into the library systems of universities in the U.S. and Europe, and access databases of academic journal articles. While this is illegal, I personally think it helps balance out some of the inequalities of academic structures in which access to and publication in the most reputable academic publications, most of them in the West,  is dominated by Western scholars. However, while I know a few scholars who know how to do this, I don’t know how to do it myself, and, since it is illegal, I will not offer advice on that here.

Note: I have sometimes had problems accessing certain sites like Google Scholar because they block internet service providers from which a great deal of spam is coming. If this happens, there are ways of getting around it, such as downloading a programme like hotspot shield, which will enable you to bypass the privacy blocks. Make sure you have an up-to-date virus protection before you use such tools, however, as they can sometimes make you more vulnerable to viruses and spyware.

This is not an exhaustive list of how to do online research, but rather some of the tools I have found useful. If you have come across any tools I haven’t mentioned here, I’d be interested in hearing about them, and maybe doing a follow-up article with reader suggestions.