Your Scholarly Partners

One of the hallmarks of today’s information-heavy world has been the rise of “crowd sourced” information. The benefit of being able to access tons of information, posted by thousands (millions?) of contributors from all around the world represents a true sea change in the way we inform ourselves. Still, there are a lot of real pitfalls associated with crowd sourced information that cannot be overlooked. At the heart of this is accuracy. Web information is rarely validated by independent sources – Wikipedia does a pretty good job of fact-checking, but the many blogs and “expert sites” that you will be directed to when you enter a term in Google or another search engine are not. Often the information posted may be merely representative of one person’s opinion, or theory, or wishful thinking. It’s certainly not uncommon to find articles expressing completely opposite points of view on the same topic! For example, did you know that climate change is real, but that climate change is also a hoax?

While discovering this sort of prose might be helpful to the reader in suggesting trains of thought to consider, or providing hidden gems that actually can be tracked down and verified, it is unwise for anyone who wants to develop and expert, verified position on any topic to rely on much of the generic information that is readily available using the common tools most of us count on for discovering what we want to know online. Particularly if others are relying upon you as their expert, as a source of content, guidance or good advice, it is important that your position(s) are firmly grounded in verifiable data, information, and research.

Fortunately, there is hope! It’s called Google Scholar, and it just celebrated its tenth anniversary, although I am frequently surprised when people tell me they have never used it, or even heard of it!

Google Scholar could be looked at as a specialized version of the very familiar and ubiquitous Google search engine. The difference is that searches are done over a database of scholarly articles, and the results of a search will connect you with abstracts of articles from most of the peer-reviewed online journals around the world, as well as book excerpts, theses and court decisions. This is a massive database, estimated as covering 150 million documents or more. Using Google Scholar, you can not only find information on a topic of interest, but have that information delivered with a provided citation that will provide a higher level of confidence than a common search on a more general site like Google or Bing.

And there’s more. When you see your results you can also find lists of references that were used in the preparation of the document you are reading, and find out what other articles or entries have cited the current document, along with related articles that might be suggested by the tool. All of these features allow you to dig even deeper and find more reputable content on the topic of your desire.

The Google Scholar instructions include a variety of search tips that you might want to review to make sure you are getting the maximum benefit from this great tool. In particular these instructions address how you might get access to a full article, as the results you will see on Google Scholar are most often abstracts, brief synopses of a more detailed publication. Their instructions include clicking an attached “library link” or a link labeled [PDF] which may appear in your search results. If you have a subscription to a professional publication source, like Elsevier, or a library account at an institution of higher education, you may be able to gain access to full articles using those connections. Two additional ways I have found to get the entire source article include: simply searching for the full title of the article (put it in quotes) on the main Google search engine site, or finding an email address for any one of the authors (surprisingly easy to do in many cases!) and sending a polite request for an emailed copy of the article. I particularly like this second approach as it has resulted in connections and interesting discussions for me that have ranged far beyond the original request.

Another feature of Google Scholar that I particularly like is “Alerts”. When you initially search Google Scholar for a particular topic, you will see an envelope icon labeled “create alert” in the left sidebar. Click that icon and you will be walked through a simple process that will let you enter your email address and specify how many articles you would like to see at any time. Periodically (in my experience this is usually two, or sometimes three times a week) you will get an email that provides a brief description and link to the most recent articles that have been posted to Google Scholar, and match your search criteria. This is particularly valuable if you want to know the latest research on a topic of interest, or if you are positioning yourself as a content expert on a specific subject and want to be always up to date.

Google Scholar has long used the tagline “Stand on the shoulders of giants” to emphasize how this specialized search tool helps users to be not only informed, but informed in meaningful ways that resist impeachment. Whether you need good sources for a particular time and place and topic, or want to be known as someone who continually keeps up with important developments in your field, Google Scholar is most definitely worth your time!