What are the most useful research sites you've found on the internet?

I probably use Jstor more than anything. I also use Infotrac a lot. The volume of material on both is massive, but you do need a login for both (I think). My school provides both services to me as long as I’m enrolled, so I’m good to go, but after that, I’m out of luck unless I want to pony up the cash for a login.

I have also found the outside references and sources on many wikipedia pages to be incredibly useful.

…which reminds me.

Scholar.google.com

is made of PURE WIN.

Wikipedia

These are some of my favorite top level reference sites, places to start looking.

refdesk.com

martindalecenter.com

info-s.com

referencedesk.org

The following are more library and archive links but some of the sources they link to have online access to some of their collections:

Repositories of Primary Sources

Travelinlibrarian

He’s kind of interesting, the travelinlinbrarian

And two sites I came across recently were worth bookmarking, at least, I thought, though I haven’t spent that much time on them so I can’t absolutely recommend them but it might be worth your time to take a look at them, and those are: infochimps.com and freebase.com. Some of the data on infochimps is free, some is for sale and sometimes it links you to the original source.

Honestly, the New York Times website has been a pretty strong research tool for me. Last year, I wrote a research paper about how the technology of film has changed over the past ninety years or so and I found the original NYTimes movie review for the Jazz Singer which was just stunning. The search feature is actually pretty good and if you’re interested in something going on right now, the site updates constantly. I tracked the whole Egypt situation on NYTimes.com as everything was going down. It’s not the best for specific facts I so would not consult it for a chemistry paper but for opinions, quotes, and general events of the US and the world, it’s aces.

TV Tropes – http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage
It’s to-the-point and, in most cases, I find it easy to process and understand than wikipedia. It wouldn’t really work out as a historical source but it’s useful for everything else. It’s also quite addictive if you go on archive-binges.

I like Mayo Clinic for medical information and Pub Med for clinical trials and controlled studies.

In terms of government/policy research, I’m a big fan of www.opencrs.com.

Here’s a good example:

http://www.scienceprogress.org