[Ocker]

What web-sites do you consider a valid tool for research, or a general source of legitimate information - general interest, or focused study?

Hopefully we can get a link collection together, and I will make a sticky, wherein I will also lay down some basic guidelines for posting in this forum - perhaps some added professionalism will generate some more activity here, instead of the growing influx of Gorkiy nonsense.

If possible, use the following format:

http://www.manaan.gov/kolto.html - Collection of essays on the synthesis of Kolto

This will make it much easier for me to properly BBCode format into one post.

Cheers.

[bradley]

http://scholar.google.com/ - Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research

http://www.biomedcentral.com/ - BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research
([b]n.b.: can someone please try this as it may be that I can access their resources from Oxford University, whereas others can't)

I will post some more, soon. The Oxford Bodleian library is digitising all their public-domain books, which is great.

[Iain]

Pubmed : http://www.pubmed.org resource for medical papers.

BadAstronomy : http://www.badastronomy.com/ (exposing, rather than espousing, it). An excellent site covering things from the moon landing "hoax" to why the sky is blue and why we have seasons.

UK National Statistics service : http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ If it's been measured, it's here. Standard tactic is to accept anything that props up your view and claim the government are making up the evidence if it doesn't

New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com - Contains some good commentaries which explain the issues; normally a good starting place before digging deeper.

Bradley - I can get to biomedcentral fine. I haven't tried registering, but it says it's free so it doesn't look like there should be any problems.

[bradley]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=books - lots of great biomedical books (many are textbooks i use on a daily basis, for example) scanned online

[Iain]

TalkOrigins (www.talkorigins.org) has good explanations of a number of scientific theories and ideas around evolution, geology etc.