Students frequently ask instructors about where they should go to find previous high-quality research on specialized topics. For a high-quality literature review, you should always begin with Google Scholar.
Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/ )
mostly restricts its search engine results to academic
scholarship, and it allows you to identify most of the
published research on a topic in just a fraction of the
time that it would take to do individual searches through
Smith Library's catalog of holdings or its main electronic
databases: Proquest, Ebsco, Jstor, Lexis-Nexis, etc.
Google Scholar also provides access to many governmental
and organizational reports and studies that are not
available through any of the major article databases, and
it is fully integrated with Google Books ( books.google.com ).
where you can often read out-takes of material relevant to
your research to see if it is worth your time to obtain
the book via Smith Library's vast e-book collection or
generous inter-library-loan program,
One of the advantages to using Google Scholar's
default settings is that the search engine orders its
output by sources' relevance to your search and the
frequency they have been cited by other authors. In
general, this means that you will find the highest quality
sources at the top of your search returns. Keep in mind
that the fact that a
source has been located with Google Scholar does not
guarantee that this document is high-quality or
peer-reviewed, so you always need to exercise
good judgment to ensure that the materials you are
summarizing and citing are closely linked to your needs
and are appropriate in the context of your assignment
instructions.
Specifically, be wary about using materials that have not been peer-reviewed and that present conclusions in the absence of evidence. Also, you should know something about an organization's biases before you rely heavily on its research. That said, you should get a lot less junk science in a Google Scholar search than would be the case using Google's standard search engine.
Google Scholar doesn't just list sources; it also links you to many of them. If you use Scholar while on campus or connected via an HPU proxy, many of the sources uncovered in your searches will include links (see the right-hand side of the screen) to one of the various journal and book databases to which High Point subscribes. If you use the regular version of Scholar, you won't be able to access these HPU holdings unless you are on campus, in which case Scholar automatically recognizes that you are affiliated with HPU. If you are off campus, you can access the HPU-enabled resources if you connect to Google Scholar via the Smith Libraries website (or try this link: https://libproxy.highpoint.edu/login?url=https://scholar.google.com/ ),
If Google Scholar uncovers a promising book or
article that is not accessible from the library or through
its databases, please see the library staff to inquire if
the resource can be obtained through inter-library loan.
If your needs are limited, it is not unusual for our
library staff to arrange for an electronic copy of an
article to be available within a day or so.
Google Scholar won't do all of the work for you, but it allows an industrious student to put together a decent research bibliography in a few hours versus the weeks or even months that many of your more-seasoned professors committed to this same exercise when they were in college. You can get even more out of this search engine if you take the time to learn how to do several things to make your searches more efficient (incidentally, some of these work with the regular version of Google, as well). You can use these "tricks" individually or in combination with one another:
It will help you to find what you are looking for more quickly if you enclose search whole phrases like "public opinion" and "Latin America" within quotation marks. In this example, you would now find more articles focused on public opinion in Latin America instead of sources that have each of these four words individually. One of the ways to quickly narrow down a search on a broad topic area is to identify a couple of key phrases that are specific to your narrow topic.
To find only sources that contain all of your search terms, add AND; for example: "Latin America" AND "public opinion" AND Brazil will only return sources that have all three terms/phrases.
Use asterisks (*) if you want to use wildcards in a search. A search that has the term politic* will return citations with politics, political, and politicians.
Add a minus sign to exclude sources with a certain term from a search. For example, searching "proud to be an American" -Greenwood, will return sources with the indicated phrase, but remove most of the sources related to Lee Greenwood's song that includes this wording.
You can use an AROUND(#) search to look for pairs of words within a given number of words of each other. So I could use this search if I was looking for work on women leaders: female AROUND(4) leader* (This will return any entries where the word female is within four words of any other word that starts with "leader," such as leaders and leadership. If I were actually running this search, I would probably combine it with an OR command to tell the search to also look for material on "women" leaders: women OR female AROUND(4) leader
Once you have found a good source, use the "cited by" search feature to find more resources like it. Most of the entries returned in Google Scholar search will have a "cited by" option at the bottom. Once you have found a source that seems particularly useful, follow this link to see other works that have cited it This is the most efficient way to find lots of very specific research quickly, especially if you then use Google option's to do narrower phrase/word searches for just those citations (to do this, check the option at the top of the page to "search within citing articles").
For your most promising sources, also take a look at what comes up if you click on "related articles" if that option is available.
If you are looking for the latest--or at least reasonably recent research on a topic--make sure to use the advanced search settings on the left-hand side to restrict your search to items published in the last few years. While you could just check the box asking Google Scholar to order its output by dates instead of relevance, you generally are better off to search for publications from a certain time range, leaving them ordered by relevance.
Those same "advanced settings"
can be used to look for old articles, which is
something you might do if you were trying to examine
early work on a topic before it became overly specialized.
Google Scholar can usually
assist you in formatting bibliographic citations of
sources you end up using in your research. The options
at the bottom of most entries will include one that is
labeled with a set of quotation marks (this icon used
to be labeled "cite"). Click on it, and Google Scholar
will list citations for the source in several
different formats. Pay
careful attention to what you are copying and
pasting since these citations are automatically
generated and sometimes are missing required
information. If information is missing, you
will need to locate in the document you are citing.
The fastest way to do so typically is to do a regular
Google search that includes bibliography and some of
the information from the partial citation generated by
Google Scholar. For example: bibliography mark setzler
women leaders