Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/eSbQNIjyG6U

Mysteries of the Library: Revealed! Google Scholar

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  ..everybody, here tonight to the Mysteries of the Library: Revealed! Google Scholar webinar. Tonight, we're talking about Google Scholar. My name is Kim Burton and with me is Anne Rojas, and we're both going to be presenting to you tonight.

 

So, a little bit of an overview of what we want to get to tonight, Google Scholar is a great resource. However, it does have many limitations, which we'll be going over. There are a lot of ways that you can use Google Scholar to enhance your research. However, since this is only a 30 minute webinar, we're not going to be able to show you all the tips and tricks there are to using Google Scholar, all of the resources and ways you can use it. Hopefully we will be highlighting some of the more powerful tools it has and how it can help you now as a student in your courses.

 

We're going to start off talking about some of the benefits and limitations to Google Scholar, especially as it is compared to the databases that we have at Walden. I have a question for Anne. What is one of the limitations of Google Scholar that really sticks out for you?

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  So I guess to me, one of the big drawbacks is that it doesn't have specialized collections the way the library databases have. So there isn’t any way to search specifically for education or health sciences or anything like that.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Absolutely. The benefit of it is the size. It's gigantic. It has so much information in it. It’s easy to locate a specific item. So if you are looking for an article and you have the title of the article, if you put that into Google Scholar, 9 times out of 10, it's going to pull that exact article. It works the same if looking for a specific author. If you put the author in there you will find all the articles that author has written. But as you mentioned, it searches across disciplines. This could be great if you want to make sure you're not missing out on any research that is on this topic but is focused in a different subject related area. However, if you are looking specifically for a business topic or a nursing topic, this can be pretty frustrating. Because you're going to get hundreds and hundreds of results, and there is no way to read through the business ones versus the nursing ones or education ones.

 

The Walden Library has subject specific databases. So these are collections that the librarians have curated to support all of the programs at Walden. So we have databases specifically for business. We have databases, again, specifically for psychology or nursing. So you can find relevant, subject specific resources in the databases.

 

Some of the other limitations is that Google Scholar cannot handle complex searches as well as the databases. The databases are designed to perform these complex searches to get very focused result, results that you can use right away. Google Scholar is much broader. It brings back a lot of results and you have to kind of go through them. We can get thousands and thousands of results in one search. That's a little bit overwhelming.

 

You also can't limit by material, so you can't just look for journals or books or videos. Again, this is something you can do in the Walden databases. Google Scholar also does not limit to full texts. So when you are searching in Google Scholar, you may not have access to all of the things it finds for you, even if Walden has some of those items. If you just pull up our Google Scholar and perform a search, articles going to be there and if you look at the title, a lot of times it will bring you to the publisher and they are going to ask you to pay for it. Walden may have those articles, but Google Scholar doesn’t know you’re a Walden student, so you have to make sure you're accessing Google Scholar through Walden and that you're using, [indiscernible] access to the databases.

 

Google Scholar also does not limit to peer-review. When you get your results, you have to take that extra step, then, to verify peer review. The database has a little button you can check to say I only want peer-reviewed, scholarly journals in my results list. Google Scholar doesn't do that. So if you find that article in Google Scholar you want to use, you then have to take another step and go through the process of verifying to ensure that article is verified peer review if that is what you are looking for.

 

One of the great benefits of Google Scholar is the citation chaining tool that it has. Citation chaining is a way to find more current research by searching for articles that cite a specific article. So let's say you have an article from 2010, you can actually find people or researchers cite that article in their research. Since this article was published in 2010, all of those articles would have to be published after that date, meaning they would be more correct. So it's a way moving forward in the literature, finding more current research on a topic. The databases can do this, but it's much more limited. They will only find articles that they have full text access to, that they can pull up right away and you can look at right then and there. So that's probably one of the favorite things I like about Google Scholar is the citation chaining ability.

 

Both databases and Google Scholar allow you to set up search alerts. This is when you do a search and find great results, you can set up an alert wherein Google Scholar or the database, depending on where you're searching, will automatically run that search every so often and then email you if it finds any new results. You do want to look at this with a little bit of caution in Google Scholar. Because, again, because it's so large, it's so broad, if you set up a search alert, it's probably going to find an article to fit, what it thinks it fits that search alert, and will inundate you with emails every day with articles that you may not really need or may not be of interest to you. So just be aware of that.

 

Google Scholar has the ability to offer you access to author profiles. This is sort of a cool thing they do, they allow researchers to set up profiles of themselves. Then you can search for that person, you can follow your favorite researcher. You can see what publications they have out there, see what presentations that they have done. The databases do not allow this. The only thing the databases will do is let you search for articles that specific authors have written.

 

The one thing that Google Scholar is a little limited here is that the researchers actually have to set up their profiles. If you're a researcher, you can set up a profile in Google Scholar and the people can follow you. But if the researcher isn’t interested and has not set that up, then you will not be able to access that.

 

Those are just some of the benefits and limitations that we see compared to the library databases. Anne is going to go through and show you how do those work in a demo. I'm just going to switch this over to Anne, so she can present for you. To you, I should say.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  Great, thank you so much. Let's go ahead and look at some specifics, then, of how Google Scholar works well as a research tool. As Kim said, it's really good at finding exact articles. It's great for citation chaining. You can set up alerts. You can look at those author profiles. We're going to look at all of these things. What we're going to do is actually pop in to the library to start looking at how it works.

 

First and foremost, if you're looking for a specific article, Google Scholar is a really easy way to figure out if we have it in the library and if so where it is. You don't have to know what database it in. You can just go to the Start your Research tab at the very top of the page. That's going to take you to a number of different options. You can search by database here and you can see that Google Scholar is one of the options. If I click on that Google Scholar link, it's going to give me a Google Scholar search box.

 

Thank you might ask why but I want to do that when I could just go to scholar.google.com. We go to the Google Scholar search box from the library, it's going to help you find full text in the library. So let's take a look at how that works. If I pop in an article title in that search, this is the one I’m looking for, Hope As a Predictor of Performance, that's going to give me the basic information, author’s information, part of the abstract. You can click on the title, but a lot of times, when you click on the title, most of the time, it's going to take you to the publisher's page or somewhere where it's going to request that you pay for it. You don't want to do that if we have in the library. What we have is this Find @ Walden link over to the right of the citation and abstract. What that's going to do is either take you into the database that has full text, or it's going to give you a list of suggested databases where you might find it. This one is to be found in Education Source. All I have to do is follow the links to continue on and voila, you've got the full text on the left-hand side. You have full information about the document, and a lot of times, you have the abstract and additional information, as well.

 

So that's just one of the ways that they might come up in Google Scholar. And again, that’s going to this Start your Research tab from any of the library website pages in order to get a Google Scholar option, and then you can run your search.

 

Let's look at one more example for finding exact article. Again, I am going to paste the title, and it's the same set up, it's showing me the Find @ Walden. Just to show you how this looks, if I click on the title it's going to take me into Taylor and Francis Online, which will give me an orange “Get access” button right here. What that's going to do is ask me to pay for it. And I know that isn't right, because we subscribe to Taylor and Francis in the Walden Library. So, if instead of clicking on the title in my Google Scholar results I click on that Find @ Walden, that is going to give me, in this case, a list of possible databases. And you can see here that a lot of them only have coverage through 2016, this one has the delay of a year. But this one goes all the way to the present and that happens to be the Taylor and Francis database, which is how we came up in Google Scholar before we clicked on the title.

 

Now, instead of an orange “Get access” button, we have a green PDF button. Green for go. That means we have access to the full text because it's taken us into the library databases to get full text for you.

 

So that access is really important and otherwise, when you're in Google Scholar it is showing you... Sorry I'm just going to go back to this page ... it's showing you open access, sometimes it will be available in PDF format here to the right, along with the Find @ Walden. Sometimes there will be no Find @ Walden, but there will be a PDF. So you can go there and take a look at the full text.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Anne, I have a question. What happens if there is no link there at all? No PDF, no Find @ Walden there in your Google Scholar?

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  Good question. If that happens, what you want to do is go to the library and Ask a Librarian. You can go up here to the Ask a Librarian page. That will allow you to ask us via email or chat, voicemail. You can leave us a message and you can make an appointment, too, although you don't really need to do that if you're just looking for full text. We do answer emails seven days a week. It is not 24/7, but it is seven days a week, except, of course, holidays. That is one way you can request it.

 

Otherwise, if you're really sure we don't have it, you can go to Services, from the top of the page here, the Services option. Under Student Services options, you will find our Document Delivery Service. This is interlibrary loan by any other name. You can sign into our Document Delivery Service by using this button on the left-hand side and fill out the information about the citation, the author of the article, the journal it comes from, the issue, etc. What we do is email you a PDF. That usually takes about seven days, so it's not really meant for weekly assignments and discussion posts. It's meant for people who are working on long-term capstone projects. That's how you can request things if you can't find things in the library. So, thanks.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Thank you.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  So let's talk a little bit about that citation chaining that Kim was talking about earlier. That's what we can do to find things that have been written since an article was published. You can see here, we've got the relationship between self-reports of college experiences, this was published in 1995, so it's pretty old. And if I'm interested in finding out if anybody's been reading that lately and the kind of research they've been doing, I can look for this “cited by” and I can see here that 437 researchers have cited that in their books and articles since it was published in 1995. When I click that cited by link, it will give me the full list.

 

Again, you can see where a lot of them are available in the library. A lot are also available online. You can access the full text there. You also want to note that a lot of these have been cited, as well.

 

Another thing the cited by can tell you is how influential an article has been, so that other article, the original one I put in was published in 1995 and has been cited by over 400 people. This one was published in 2001 and has been cited by over 1100. So that's been pretty influential. And if it's of interest to your topic, you can follow those threads of conversation forward in time.

 

There are other ways that we can narrow down the search, as well. You got 437, that's a lot to slog through. You can search within the cited articles to see which ones address a certain aspect of your search. So let's say I'm interested in female students. I can put in women, and I can bring it down to 230 results, instead of over 400. So it's starting to add a little bit of focus and being a more manageable list to work through -- although, again, it's still an awful lot. If you just want to look at who has been citing it recently, you can use these limits for the date ranges and look to see who has been citing it just in the last couple of years. Then, I only get seven results, which hopefully is a really focused list.

 

When you get to this point where you have a relatively focused list and you want to know if anything else is falling into their collections or their crawlers to find more, this is where you can create an alert in Google Scholar, is on the bottom left here. If I click on that, it's going to tell me what the other query is. It's looking for new citations of this particular article, including the word "women," and I would just fill in my email address there and create the alert.

 

As Kim noted before, it's really important that you make a very focused search only when you're doing alerts. I mean, it doesn't have to be only seven results, but certainly, not thousands. That's just because you don't want to be flooded with emails and articles. When you put in a lot of parameters in the search, you can put a little control on the number of emails that you receive through those alerts.

 

One of the other things we had talked about where Google Scholar is a really good tool is this author profiles. As you can see here, this article has three different authors. Just two of them are underlined. So the author profiles, you can tell, are only those that are underlined. If I click on that, it will take me to Dr. Grineski's page, what she has filled out. It will tell you she's in the Sociology department in Utah, it will give me a list of titles that she has been author or co-author on. And it also gives a profile of where people are citing her. You can see she's been on the rise and in 2019, she's been cited more than ever. If you decide this is somebody who's addressing a lot of topics you're interested in, you can click the Follow button to set up alerts for when anything new falls in that has been authored by Dr. Grineski.

 

Any questions, so far? Anything I need to go over again?

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON: I have been answering some questions, but they have all been taking care of. But please feel free to ask your questions as they come up.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  Let's go back, then, to a fresh start talk about doing general searches. We talk a lot about how it works really well for finding specific articles and for citation chaining. You can search in Google Scholar, too, you can search the way you do in library databases. Google Scholar will allow you to type in full sentences instead of stripping your topic down to keep words in Google as in library databases. But Google Scholar does work on the same basic strategy principal as any library database, in terms of search strategies.

 

Keep in mind its limitations, including the fact you can't limit to peer-reviewed. And generally less is more. So getting a lot of results in Google Scholar is not necessarily a better thing. If I look at, for instance, high school student discipline and principals, how principals are involved in that, if I put that in my search query, you can see that here I have over 900,000 results. I know I don't want to go through 900,000 results, and I'm sure you don't, either.

 

And you can’t use some of those of search results or, rather, narrowing things, you don't have an option to search within, but you can limit by date here. You can follow the citations. But there is also an advanced search in Google. If you go to where these three horizontal lines are in the upper left corner, it commonly referred to as a hamburger, if you open up the hamburger it’s going to give you an option for an advanced search. This will let you do a little bit more persistent searching the way we do in library databases. So if I want to search the exact phrase of "high school student," I can put that into and I definitely want to look for the word "principal." Then I can also look at discipline OR explosion OR suspension for the discipline piece of it, and it will search at least one of those words anywhere in the article. And you can put a date and authors in the advanced search, as well. But if we do it that way, a little bit more organized search instead of just random keywords, we bring it from over 900,000 to 23,000. It's still too many, but you can see where fine-tuning your search in Google, just like in the databases, really will help you.

 

Like I say, I think that less is more. If you do a similar search in a library database, whether it's multidisciplinary databases or something in education, it's going to give you a much more manageable list of results. Just a little self-promotion there for the library.

 

Then, other things that you want to look at when you're scanning through your results in Google Scholar, as I mentioned, you have those PDFs or HTML on open source, sometimes. Keep in mind it might be here today, gone tomorrow. You want to pay attention to that. Underneath, in addition to the cited bys, we have other tools. You can click on the little quotation marks for citation help and you can copy and paste that into a Word document. Is a little proviso, they're not always perfect. You do have to check them for APA format. But it does give you a good start. It cuts down on your topic. You do have your cited by and it will give you related articles. There are also a lot of different versions. Sometimes authors, researchers, will find in our research a little bit and republish something very similar, or publish some things in open access and others in specific databases. So you can use all those tools as well.

 

Another thing that's available here are these little arrows for more. Sometimes you will get that. You will see that this doesn't have access through Find @ Walden or an open source, but if I open it up by clicking on the little double arrow, it will give me a Find @ Walden option, so I can see whether or not it might be available. It's usually kind of a longshot, but you never know, sometimes it will pop up that way.

 

So those are just some of the more specific things you can use with the Google Scholar that we want to point out to you but we're not going to go into a lot of detail about them.

 

So what about that inability to limit to peer-reviewed? We happen to have a tool in the library to help you verify peer review. And is conveniently located from that start your research page right underneath the Google Scholar link. You will find Ulrich's Verify Peer Review.

 

And what Ulrich’s does is, it will verify peer review status of a journal, so that has to be entered by journal title, not by article title. Because journals either use the peer review article review process or they don't. When you put it in, what you're looking for and the results is this little striped shirt icon, it's a referee shirt. That's just because refereed is another term used to mean peer-reviewed.

 

When we follow it up in Ulrich's, you can see that the Journal of Education Finance does have a little striped referee shirt. That means that any research article that I pull up from the Journal of Education Finance has been through the peer-reviewed editorial process. Sometimes there will be opinion pieces or book reviews, that sort of thing, that don't go through peer review. But any research articles that you find there has been through the peer review process. And a lot of people get concerned about the fact that it's in here multiple times. That is really common. It's because they enter it once for every format, so it's once for print. Once for microform -- actually, twice for microform on this -- and once for the online version. That's the only reason it's in there multiple times.

 

I'm just going to go back, sorry, to my slideshow here and make sure I hadn't forgotten anything. Was there a question?

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  No, I've been answering questions as they come in. So we're good.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  Great. I like to emphasize that less is more, and then just what it's like to go through what you want to be looking for when you're decoding the results list and how to verify peer review. In the slide deck, we have a lot of links to additional resources. We have a Google Scholar guide, for example, also information about evaluating resources, and of course a link to that verify peer review and how to use Find @ Walden and even the Document Delivery Service for when you can't find what you're looking for. And don't forget that you can always Ask a Librarian for help.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Yep, we're always here to help.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  And that pretty much wraps it up, we're on the hour. Thank you so much everyone for coming.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Yes, thank you so much. I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording, but we will hang around a few minutes in case anyone has questions. So I just stopped the recording. Thank you so much for coming.

 

There was a question, “I know sometimes I go back to Google and the article is no longer there. Does this happen in the library database?” That's a good point that you're making. A lot of times, the articles that are available, are you saying that they're not showing up in your search result list when you're searching in Google Scholar? That is probably happening because Google Scholar has so many new articles every day that you can run a search one day and the next day you will run that search and you will get different results. Those articles are probably somewhere in there, you’re just not seeing them. They're buried somewhere else. With the databases, we don't get that many articles per day in there. We may get a few articles added into there, but it's not going to be as dramatic as Google Scholar. So when you run a search in one of the databases, if you run the search again you're probably going to get the same results.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  Somebody has mentioned that sometimes a link is broken. I'm not sure if you're talking about links in the classroom or links in the library or links from the course guide pages. If you find broken links for the library stuff, you want to let us know through Ask a Librarian so that we can fix the links. If the link is in your Blackboard classroom, that is not in library resources, so you have to let your instructor know that the link is broken. I hope that makes sense.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Then, someone had asked about downloading this. Since you attended and are registered for this webinar, you will receive a copy of this recording directly from GoToWebinar later on today or tomorrow.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  And the PowerPoint slide deck can be downloaded from the handouts section.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Umm hmm. Again, I think that the person who had asked the question about Google Scholar using.... wait where was this one... I'm losing it... Sometimes we go back to Google Scholar, it's no longer there because the link is broken or the link isn't working. Sometimes when you find something in Google Scholar that's available as a PDF online -- Anne, can you show your screen, your Google Scholar results screen so they can see the PDF?

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  Sure.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Sometimes when you have results in Google Scholar and there is a link to a PDF, you can link on there and see it. The next day, it may be gone. That's because those links are not permanent. They're not Permalinks. A lot of times it's because copyrights have changed, access changes. You definitely have to be aware that if you find something online today, it may not be there tomorrow. So we usually recommend that you download it to save it when you find something online there.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  And it doesn't change as much in the library databases, although sometimes coverage does change. You can always let us know if something like that comes up.

 

Someone asked if we could go over one more time how to order an article that is not available in the library. That was basically from any library webpage, I don't know, maybe I should make it a little bit bigger. We went to Start Your Research a lot, but you can go here to Services. Halfway between Start your Research and Ask a Librarian's Services, that has, under Student Services, the Document Delivery Service. There is a link in the slide deck, as well. Or, you can enter your question in the Quick Answers search box.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Great.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  Oh, good. I'm glad it's been helpful for you, for people who are making comments in the question box. That's great. [LAUGHS] That's why we're here for that. Especially if you're working on a document, I tell people you should expect to have to purchase a certain amount of stuff, but before you pay for something, you should be asking us if we can get you a copy.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Right. Don't pay for anything. Somebody is also asking a question about citing. The library does not do citing APA formatting and so forth, you would need to reach out to the Writing Center, they're the gurus, that is their website here on APA. And they have a lot of links and questions and information there. And you can email them, too, to ask your questions.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  And I am going to send the link to this page to everybody, in case you want it.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Great.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  That's the APA page for Walden Writing Center. Because we don't do the APA stuff. You don't want us to do that for you.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  No, you don't. Somebody else was just wondering how to get to the citation chaining tool. So I'm going to look at Quick Answers. Could you look up citation chaining and Quick Answers, and then we can just share that link?

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  Absolutely.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  I will look up the link when you do that, as well, because your screen is showing.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  This Quick Answers box on the left side, and this pops up in a lot of places for you, it has a list of frequently asked questions about the library and Writing Center and financial aid -- really, everything. So you can look that up here. What is citation chaining? This is going to tell you how it works. Then, it's going to tell you down here for more information, how do I find books and articles that cite an article I already have? That will give you those details.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Yeah, and I put those in the questions box for you. So people can look at that. Is that going through there? I sent it a couple times.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  Zotero is a whole different thing, someone was asking about Zotero. Again, what I would suggest you do for Zotero, and let me get to the Get Help page. We have a lot of different help including recorded webinars, library skills guides. I'm going to send you the link to the Zotero guide, because that has the webinar embedded at the bottom of the page, because Zotero has its own webinar.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Right. And the thing about Zotero is we don't have a licensing agreement with Zotero. The information we have is just for your information. We're not experts in Zotero. So if you're having a problem downloading it and working with it, the guide, physically, is going to send you to the Zotero website. You have to reach out to them to get answers to those questions. We're not experts in Zotero, we just want to show you this information so you know that it's available.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  It's really just to get you started.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Yeah. I think that's it. I think we ran through all of those. Thank you everybody, for coming.

 

>> ANNE ROJAS:  Great, have a great night.

 

>> KIMBERLY BURTON:  Yes, thank you. Thanks for coming. Bye-bye.

 

 

End Transcript

 

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