Tips and Practice for Finding and Using
Tax Information on the Internet

1. Introduction

2. Basics of 
Information Analysis
Preliminaries
Basic Information Analysis - A Review
Information Analysis - Internet Considerations
From Raw Data to Useful Report

3. Practice Exercise
Research Topic
Research Steps
Step 1: State the question(s) for which you are seeking information.
Step 2: Conduct a broad search.
Step 3: Conduct a more focused search.
Step 4: Explore and critique the relevant sites found by the search engines.
Step 5: Complete the research.

4. Tax Research on the Internet
Words of Advice
Tax  Links

5. Summary
Recap
Comments?
Test Your New Knowledge!
For More Information

Professor Nellen
College of Business
San José State University

Module 1 - Introduction

This web page is the first part of a 5-part tutorial designed to familiarize you with techniques for effective searching on the Internet.  The Internet is a vast library of information that for the most part, has not been organized or evaluated under traditional publishing guidelines. For example, before an author publishes an article or book, it is typically reviewed by experts and editors. Thus, there is some increased assurance that the information is accurate, clear and complete. This is not true of many information sites on the Internet. Also, when information is in a library, it has been sorted by librarians and we can easily find information by topic. Again, this is not true on the Internet.

The fives parts (pages) of this tutorial are noted in the column to the left. You should complete the tutorial in order. Each of the pages includes links to get you to any part of the tutorial that you may want to review.

The objectives of the tutorial are:

• To review techniques for analyzing information to ensure that only reliable, relevant, timely, and accurate information is used to complete a research project.

• To understand how information from the Internet can be sorted to allow for more productive researching.

• To gain an understanding of how to effectively use search engines to find information on the Internet.

• To practice using internet search tools and techniques.

• To gain an understanding of  various sources of tax information available on the Internet.

NEXT - Module 2 - Basics of  Information Analysis