I was reading a very interesting article in the guardian.co.uk the other day entitled Web journals ‘narrowing study’ – Online publishing reduces academic research to little more than a ‘popularity contest’, critics warn. The article is about how online publishing is changing the way researchers write articles, itself a fascinating topic, and I came across the following quotation on another topic – searching: ”…the big difference about Google Scholar is that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to use it…It is intuitive and will lead you to a free version of an article if one exists.”
No wonder Google Scholar is popular with students. Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.
Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, by weighing a number of things such as the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature.
If you click on Scholar Preferences, you can select EndNote as your Bibliography Manager. This will mean that you can save references and import them into EndNote, as Heriot-Watt subscribes to EndNote.
You can find out more about EndNote.
The beauty of Scholar is that it’s so large that you can nearly always find something on any topic, and you can also find citations and related articles.
However, whilst Google Scholar has its uses, it would be folly to rely too much on it. If you want to do a more complete literature search, or if you are a serious researcher, there are many other databases that you should search as well. In addition, many of these other databases allow for more powerful and precise searching, and often enable you to manipulate and refine search results in clever ways.
Members of Heriot-Watt University have acess to over 100 databases, ranging from subject specific ones such as CBA (Construction and Building Abstracts) and Compendex (via Engineering Village 2), to multidisciplinary ones such as Index to Theses, CSA Illumina and Web of Knowledge. If you need help with any of these databases, or advice on which ones to search, contact one of the Subject Librarians.
Note also that Web of Knowledge allows you to easily import refereces into EndNoteWeb, with a few clicks.
Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian
3 November 2008 at 9:41 am |
Roddy,
That’s a very well considered post. We’ve done something similar in face to face training at Loughborough but I didn’t think of blogging it. Hope you don’t mind if I use your idea?
In case it’s useful to you I should say we put RSS feeds to classified sections of our new book page though I don’t know what the take up is of these feeds.