Improving the quality of your information using Google Scholar

Do you ever get frustrated with web searches? When your students do research do they come back with unimpressive sources? Even when using advanced search strategies the Internet can feel like a barren place as you paw through endless pages of returns. That’s because Google and other current

search engines are only skimming the surface web (Goodman, 2015). The algorithms that direct
web crawlers identify metadata through hyperlinks and then index the site.
They don’t have access to the proprietary content that lives in the deep web which consists of:

• Results of database queries
• Subscription-only information and other password-protected data
• Pages that are not linked to by any other page
• Technically limited content, such as that requiring CAPTCHA technology
• Text content that exists outside of conventional http:// or https:// protocols

A commonly cited statistic is that the Internet that we access using search engines is made up of only .03% of overall web content (OEDb, 2015 and Goodman, 2015).  That’s why it is important
to know how to use databases and alternative search engines, like Google Scholar.

Google Scholar web crawlers work differently because they target university repositories,
scholarly publications, academic publishers, professional societies, and other scholarly publications
to find articles, books, abstracts and court opinions (About Google Scholar). It also allows a user
to create a personalized library of scholarly materials. I really like the “library” section
of Google Scholar where you can build a personal collection of articles and create and assign “labels.”

A side-by-side look at a search on “close reading strategies”  on Google and Google Scholar reveals
the following:

Table 1

Comparison of search returns

Google About 22,100,000 results First page sites: WeAreTeachers.com, ASCD.org, WritingCenter/Fas/Harvard.edu, Scholastic Common Core, TeachThought.com, and an image return.

Google Scholar About 3,940,000 results Academic journals: Pergamon (Elsevier), Journal of Educational Psychology, Reading Research (Wiley), a number of scholarly articles indexed by JSTOR

The Google search returns aren’t bad, and there are certainly some good sources from reputable
sites, but everything you can access on Google is part of the free, surface web.
Google Scholar helps us peer into the deep web, and thanks to the BPL we can get access
to material that would otherwise be inaccessible, behind paywalls.

If we analyze a search return from Google Scholar you can see the following:

Table 2

Analysis of a return

1. By clicking the “ icon you can grab the citation to copy/paste into your document,
NoodleTools, or whatever citation platform you are using.

2. You can see how many others have cited this source in academic publishing, providing a

sense of its value/trustworthiness in the field. By clicking the “cited by” option you can access

the articles that cited the one in the search return and investigate the scholarly discussion in

multiple journals from experts in the field.

3. Related articles allow you to drill down deeper into the search and uncover additional

scholarly resources.

If the article is freely available as a PDF you will see the pdf icon to the right of the search return.

If it is JSTOR then you can click and login using the school's credentials.
If it is another organization you can usually get the article, but you may still hit a paywall.
If there is no PDF icon then you don’t have access to the article.

However, I can get it for you!
The Boston Public Library (BPL) is the official library of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,
and I am able to submit requests for articles and books through ILLiad (Inter-library loan).
BPL has access to the scholarly databases that we can’t provide. They also have a vast print
repository and will send a librarian to remote storage areas with a scanner and scan the article.
The turn around is generally 1-2 days although we did have a request that took almost two weeks
because they had to contact a library in India, and they had to scan it from their print repository.
Pretty cool!

Bibliography

Goodman, Marc. “Most of the web is invisible to Google. Here’s what it contains.” Popular Science. Last modified April 1, 2015. Accessed March 29, 2018. https://www.popsci.com/dark-web-revealed#page-3.

Google Scholar, ed. "About Google Scholar." Google Scholar. Accessed March 29,

    2018. https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html.

Open Education Database, ed. “The ultimate guide to the invisible web.” OEDb. Last modified 2018. Accessed March 29, 2018. http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/invisible-web/.