As my grad school class is working on their literature reviews I wanted to offer some advice on how to use Google Scholar. I began using Google Scholar in June thanks to Richard Byrne and one of his older posts I happened to come across when writing a literature review for a different class.
Google Scholar is a great search tool that works best when you start off broad and then narrow your search down a bit. It is also a great tool to use during the beginning stages of your research because it reaches into various databases and provides an overview of your research topic. To begin your search, you would type in words just like you would into Google. To get a little more specific, it is suggested that you type in Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) in order to find relationships if you are searching for multiple terms. You can also put phrases inside of quotation marks if you are wanting to focus on that exact phrase. For example, I am researching methods of implementing blended learning for my low and high learners. I could type in something like "blended learning AND low learners OR high learners" and perform a simpler and more refined search. Google Scholar allows the user to filter the publication date of journals, articles, books, and other sources being looked for. Once an article or source has been found you are able to continue to narrow down your topic of interest by citing other papers that previously used that source. One of my favorite components of Google Scholar is that it assists the user in citing their sources. Once a source has been selected, the user can choose the "Cite" button located underneath the title, author, and abstract on the search results page and you can see the citations in various standardized formats. I highly suggest that if you are going to use this as a source to create your reference page to check over your citations because they are not always correct.
Google Scholar is a great search tool that works best when you start off broad and then narrow your search down a bit. It is also a great tool to use during the beginning stages of your research because it reaches into various databases and provides an overview of your research topic. To begin your search, you would type in words just like you would into Google. To get a little more specific, it is suggested that you type in Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) in order to find relationships if you are searching for multiple terms. You can also put phrases inside of quotation marks if you are wanting to focus on that exact phrase. For example, I am researching methods of implementing blended learning for my low and high learners. I could type in something like "blended learning AND low learners OR high learners" and perform a simpler and more refined search. Google Scholar allows the user to filter the publication date of journals, articles, books, and other sources being looked for. Once an article or source has been found you are able to continue to narrow down your topic of interest by citing other papers that previously used that source. One of my favorite components of Google Scholar is that it assists the user in citing their sources. Once a source has been selected, the user can choose the "Cite" button located underneath the title, author, and abstract on the search results page and you can see the citations in various standardized formats. I highly suggest that if you are going to use this as a source to create your reference page to check over your citations because they are not always correct.
I am also a huge fan of Google Scholar. In undergrad I never used it, but I am becoming more and more familiar with it. I haven't used the citing feature yet, but I can definitely see where that would be helpful especially if certain components such as a publisher are hard to locate within a source. Thanks for the tips!
ReplyDeleteI really like google scholar as well. I have never heard of it until my research class last semester. It is a really great tool to use!
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