Using Google Scholar For Research

Google Scholar, as many people know, is a specialist search engine which searches only for academic research material on the web.

Google Scholar should never be your starting point for research! You should begin your research with DISCOVER, the libraries' resource discovery platform.

DISCOVER covers a vast amount of material and has lots of options to allow you to focus your search results to find the most relevant material for you topic. Filters of DISCOVER include:

• Publication date
• Source type
• Language
• Geography (country of publication)

Additionally, DISCOVER contains lots of full text material which you can read online or download straight away.

In contrast, Google Scholar has very few features to allow you to focus your results - date is really the only option available. It will also find lots of material whcih isn't available in full text and for whcih you will have to make use of the Document Supply Service (this will involve a wait for the material to arrive).

For those working on dissertations and research projects I would recommend using Google Scholar in addition to DISCOVER.

Google Scholar does have a few useful features which can help you with your research, as follows:

• Under each search result you'll notice a link that says cited by 87 (or similar). This means that there are 87 other articles in Google Scholar which have cited your article (the more times an article has been cited the more important it is). Clicking on this link will show you links to these articles. This can be a good way of discovering other useful material on your topic. You can also search within these citing articles by ticking the "Search within citing articles box" for your keywords to focus on the most relevant articles.
• Google Scholar allows you to set up search alerts - so that you'll be sent an email everytime a new article matching your keywords is added to it. Just click the "Create alert" option to the left of the screen.

There are also a couple of things you can do to make Google Scholar more like a database to make it easier to manage what you find:

• On the Google Scholar home page click on the settings pinwheel, then click on Library Links. Type in "University of Bedfordshire" and you'll be given an option to select "University of Bedfordshire - UoB access". Tick this box and click Save. Next time you do a search you'll find a clickable option of "UoB access" appear beside those materials owned by the University which will take you to them. (N.B. This feature is only available when using a networked computer).
• If you're using RefWorks to manage your references you can add an "import into RefWorks" option to your results. From the Google Scholar home page, click on the settings pinwheel and then under Bibliography Manager select "Show links to import citations into RefWorks" and then Save. You'll now see an Import into RefWorks link under every search result which works in exactly the same way as when importing references from DISCOVER.

If you'd like some help with finding material for your dissertation / honours project please feel free to email me. I'm happy to help!