Google Scholar search

[Guest guest]

Have you heard of Google Scholar <http://scholar.google.com/> ?

According to Google, it "enables you to search specifically for

scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books,

preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of

research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of

academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and

universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the

web."

[Guest guest]

I have used it on occasion. It works fairly well. There is still a lot of

sorting that you have to do to get to what you need. I find it very good for

medical stuff. Some of the databases will not give you access to the

articles unless you have an account you can use to get in, but at least you

will know the articles exist, then be able to find them elsewhere. I teach

English lit and some writing at the university level, and I had rather see

my students using Google Scholar than Wikipedia for their searches. Right

now, Wikipedia is very controversial and not reliable for anything but the

most general searches that give you an idea of where else to look. Some

exceptions to this exist: they seem to be most useful for things like hip

hop and popular culture, but it is still necessary to come up with reliable

sources if writing for scholarly purposes.

Darla