Data may be found through a variety of internet searches and databases. Depending on the field of study, many disciplines offer entire databases for students who are majors or researchers in that program. For example, computer scientists have access to online databases facilitated by the Computer Science Bibliography Server and the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (See Reference 2, pg 3).
Literature reviews are summaries created by other academics and researchers. These reviews outline what the literature in a field state about a subject or topic. The literature review is expansive, listing all the works an author used or did not use for their research. If a researcher uses this as a guide, they can find a number of works that their discipline has used for past research papers. This gives the researcher a solid precedent to refer to for books and useful literature (See Reference 3).
Since colleges and universities have existed, libraries have always been the central location for finding sources to research. Municipal and college libraries store and catalog immense amounts of research materials in all possible disciplines and fields. Researchers can use libraries to find the latest information and research that can be pertinent to their academic research. The advantage of libraries is that they will often have academic journals, which offer peer reviewed literature in a field, as well as books and papers done by institutes and academics instead of non-fiction writers.
To respect the time a researcher needs to research and then write a paper, quick tools to see how well a work lives up to academic scrutiny are necessary. This saves time on the part of the researcher from reading work that is not highly regarded in the academic community or is clearly biased. Any report or paper that makes an absolute claim, does not offer counter-factuals or alternative views and does not admit the limits of its own argument are not considered scholarly writing. Viewing the preface, a research summary, or the back book cover will offer the researcher a chance to see if this work is scholarly.