When it comes to authoritative source or fresh new thinking based on actual research, you just can’t beat academic research. Sometimes, you are looking for what the latest thinking or theories is on a particular topic or wants to know what academia thinks about a theory you want to apply in business. If you have been in those situations and have not checked out Google Scholar, then you are are missing out big time.
Google Scholar is an obscure search service that Google has been providing for a while that I was not familiar with until I was introduced to it by a professor. It indexes all well known and popular journal databases, publications and research publications (Harvard Business Review, etc), and allows you to search through the index using the same intuitive search interface as the general web search. From my personal experience and feedback from people who uses it extensively, the publications that it indexes is extensive and of high quality, and that’s important when it comes to scholar research.
In another word, Google has taken library catalogues searching to another level. Gone are the bad, old days when you need to go to the library and search through the physical catalogue of academic journals, gone also are the days when you need to log onto various academic database, learn the intricacy of their search syntax individually and collate the results together to compare them.
You can sort by relevancy or date in the Google Scholar search results , and Google uses a number of factors to calculate relevancy including how many times a particular paper was cited by other researchers.
There is a catch though. :+)
Whilst Google Scholar give you access to the index and allow you search for articles, getting access to the actual article is a different story. Whilst you will find a lot of publically accessible articles, most high quality papers have restricted access from the general public.
The good news is that most articles are in digital forms and are linked to directly from your Google Scholar search results, the bad news is that you will need to be affiliated or have membership to a library to gain access to them as most libraries have subscriptions to popular journal databases. As far I can see, there are two ways for you to get access to these restricted articles.
1. If you are doing any sort of undergraduate study or post graduate study, ring up the library and request access to their online library databases.
2. If you have a colleague or family member doing any sort of study (and there should always be someone studying around you !) ask him or her for access to their online library database
Once you obtained a valid library access account, you can even tell Google to automatically link to the article in the specific library that you have access to as shown here where Google Scholar is providing a link to the article from Macquarie University where I have access to their online database.
Once you set it up, it truly is an amazing piece of research tool.
There are a lot of hard core theory based content in Google Scholar, but if you search effectively, you ought to find exactly what you are looking for. Give it a go and as Google puts it, leverage the wealth of knowledge available through the research of others and “Stand on The Shoulder of Giants”!
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Didn’t know about Google scholar search, this is good stuff will definitely pass it on to people who is currently studying !!