Tips for Using Google Scholar

One of the most convenient and useful tools that I've come across has to be Google Scholar. For those unfamiliar with it, Google Scholar is a free service provided by Google (the lord and savior of university students. Praise be to the almighty Google!!!) which allows access to a universe of free online scholarly articles on just about any subject you can think of.

Fig. 1:- Google Scholar Home Page (Scholar.google.com 2016)

Usefulness of Google Scholar:

As we're all familiar with, almost every project at university and any piece of academic research will usually be considered invalid unless it references credible sources. Usually this means scholarly articles. We all know that accessing these scholarly articles can be quite the chore as it involves either going into the university library and searching for printed copies or using a cumbersome online database and shifting through it for hours. You can subscribe to journals and databases on your own if you want, but this often costs a substantial amount of money, which may not be ideal for the student researcher on a budget.

Google Scholar will allow you freely search for these articles from any location with an internet connection. The convenience of this cannot be overstated as you often do not have to interrupt your research to go to the library to look something up for a last minute reference. And unlike some of the other databases, you can do this without having to log in to a separate website or go to the library at your school. This post will show you how to use Google Scholar effectively by taking you through an example search.

Narrowing Your Search to Relevant Articles:

First thing you'd want to do is word your search properly. You should be as specific as possible with your wording in order to narrow the list of articles you have to search through. This can save you from browsing through a slew of irrelevant articles before finding what you want.

For Example: I've grown tired of paying a premium for bacon and have decided to undertake a research project which will aim to develop cheaper methods of farming pigs. I'm looking for articles on pig farming techniques for the literature review so I entered the keyword, "pig," into the search bar:

Fig. 2:- Google Scholar Results for, "Pig," Keyword (Scholar.google.com 2016)

Notice that I got 2510000 results. Also notice that the first article, highlighted in orange, is possibly relevant to the topic at hand (pig farming) but the articles highlighted in green are probably not. Clearly I need to narrow my search more.

Fig. 3:-Google Scholar Results for, "Pig Farming Techniques," Keywords (Scholar.google.com 2016)

Now look at the amount of results I got only 63500 a huge reduction with only the addition of two more words. Additionally, the articles at a glance appear to be more relevant to my research topic.

In addition to wording a query properly, you can narrow your results further by selecting a relevant time range using the menu on the left-hand side of the screen. Generally speaking, one should try to avoid articles more than five years old when doing a literature review as the older an article, the less current its research becomes. So with this in mind, I will now reduce the range of my article to five years (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4:- Adjusting the Range of the Articles (Scholar.google.com 2016)

Since there was no default setting, I had to enter a custom range for the search. Now look at the results of the new range

Fig 5:- Google Scholar Search With adjusted Time Range (Scholar.google.com 2016)

Now the results are down to 16400, a much more manageable number.

One final step you can take to narrow your search even further, will be to un-check the, "include patents," and, "include citations," boxes on the left-hand panel. Citations simply refer to citations of an article in another article which may add unnecessary clutter to your search results and patents refer to patents which have been filed across the world, which may not be useful to you. By un-checking these boxes, the results now reduce to 16000, much smaller than the previous pool.

Selecting Articles:

While many articles appear in Google Scholar searches, not all of them are free-access and as such selecting them will usually lead you to a payment page. Fortunately the ever thoughtful developers (or wizards depending on your level of technical expertise and whether or not you believe in magic) have added a feature to help you with this.

Fig. 6:- Google Scholar Article which is Freely Available (Scholar.google.com 2016)

The red box in (Fig. 6) highlights the download link provided by Google if the article is freely available. Just click on the link and you'll be taken straight to the article.

To make sure the article is relevant to your topic without reading through the entire thing you might want to read the abstract first. An abstract is a paragraph or two located at the top of the article which summarizes its contents. If you've read the abstract and determined that the article is useful to you after all, then go ahead and download it.

A word of caution though, do not simply download and read a series of articles and then try to shoehorn then together into a literature review, rather take a more targeted approach. Try to find articles which are related to each other by showing progress over time in a particular research area or providing two different perspectives on the same theory. While it may look impressive to you if you summarize a bunch of junk articles and call it a Literature Review, your colleagues and lecturer may feel differently about this.

Limitations of Google Scholar:

As with many of the tools on the list, Google Scholar does have some limitations. The most obvious of which is that it doesn't provide access to articles which are not free or have not been released into the creative commons.  This may prevent access to some of the best or most current research in the field you're interested in.

Additionally, the search function can be a bit sensitive at times and may necessitate being as specific as possible with your wording lest you be bombarded with a slew of articles.

Also, it sometimes might show up irrelevant articles, which can get annoying if you click on a few in a row and you have a paper due the next day and are just now rushing it down (shame on you for leaving your assignments that late if you've ever done that).

Conclusion:

Despite some shortcomings, Google scholar is a useful tool and one of many free services provided by the virtual Swiss army knife that is Google for the student or researcher to use. I highly recommend it and much prefer it to some of the other databases out there.

Thanks for Reading,

Barindra

References

Scholar.google.com,. 2016. "Google Scholar". https://scholar.google.com/.