I have recently (re)started to get articles wrtten for me by the team at Need an Article. When working with them and other decent writers they like to have some idea of the reference material we would like to use. Often we point them at Wikipedia and leave it at that. Sometimes this is enough, but for a series of articles or for ‘insight’ we need to do more.

A couple of months ago I needed a load of material on cord blood donation and preservation. Apart from a load of splogs recycling each other’s material there was not a lot of real information out there. BUT I hit lucky: http://www.highbeam.com/
This service acts a collator of content for research the great thing is that the ‘noise’ that we find in Google et al is filtered and the residue is good quality source material.
The service is not free, but there are subscription deals and a free trial period. I did not want to write about http://www.highbeam.com/ before I had used them for a while but as they are still getting my money it seemed worthwhile to pass on the tip.

The way I use HighBeam is to do a search for my source material, save it and then download the documents so they can be passed onto the writers.
Sometimes one can find the same material online but usually only after first having used HighBeam to filter out the rubbish. If you need to provide good quality sources for your writers these guys can save scads of time and give much better results than Wikipedia and Google searches will do.