The Pitfalls of Cyberspace and Electronic Database Research

Abstract

A book publisher's Web site has a line drawing from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that shows the Cheshire cat perched on a tree branch as Alice gazes up quizzically. A sign above the cat identifies it as New Media and a quotation from Alice is displayed below the drawing: Who am I then? asks Alice. Tell me that first and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else. The words penned more than a century ago seem oddly apropos to this brave cyberspace world we all live in today. The question is not only how we know who we are, as Alice ponders, but how we know anything at all. Does this new change our perceptions of the world? As we surf the Internet, massive amounts of information bombard our minds and sometimes our spirits as well. All of us are familiar with the terms used to describe this phenomenon information overload and information glut, to name but a few. So much information is available that coping methods are being devised to help sort through the volume. Businesses have information or knowledge management systems. The Net has several different kinds of search engines to scan the approximate 3 million servers and 800 million indexable Web pages. For academic researchers, multiple databases now provide almost instant access to even the most obscure journals and articles that can complement our search for knowledge. But, as Marshall McLuhan said decades ago, these mediums are changing us and our research as well. One of my former professors always cautioned his students to remember that all research is a compromise. The question I am struggling with now, however, is how to distinguish between research as compromise and compromised research. There have been numerous studies and journal articles on cyberspace, the media, and the Internet. Among other things, scholars have researched usage patterns and how the media may or may not affect the old mediums of newspapers, magazines, and television. Still others have explored the benefits and pitfalls of the media as it relates to our democratic society. My concern is more mundane and, as a faculty member, practical. I'm worried about doing the research and how to determine the validity and reliability of what I'm finding on the Web and on the proliferation of academic databases. Despite the abundance of research on media, there are surprisingly few studies that probe the idea of research itself. One article that did critically examine Web-based research paints a picture of concern about the use of search engines to ferret out information on the Web. In their article, Accessibility of Information on the published in Nature, researchers Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles found that about 85 percent of users use search engines to locate information. The search engine, therefore, is of critical importance in accessing information on the Web. They report that different search engines retrieve different documents even though the same key words were used in the query. In addition, the authors discovered that search engines index only a small fraction of the Web, most likely because it is not economically feasible. Nor were the search engine databases always up to date. Communica-tion scholar Harold Lasswell's standard transmission model of communication - Who says what, in what channel, to whom, with what effect? - is worth examining in the context of the channels of the Web and software databases. Universities subscribe to these databases and we scholars use them and base our research and our reputations on what we find there. For the researcher's purpose, the critical element in Lasswell's model may be the who. Just who is controlling the information we search? This confronts a basic question of research - How do we know what we know? But in this day of Internet access, various search engines, and different contracts for different databases, this question and the answers - become as illusive as Alice's Cheshire Cat. …