Googlin'

My Google Scholar experience:

Having only heard about Google Scholar once from a friend, I decided to go to the library workshop to learn more about how I can search for scholarly papers with this search engine. Prior to going to this workshop, I was unaware that Google Scholar provided access to papers ranging from all sorts of topics. My friend had used this search engine for her physics research paper, so I thought that it would only provide access to scientific papers. The instructor taught us several ways to maximize the effectiveness of our search results. First, when searching for a particular author, we must be careful in entering the author’s name in its entirety. On the left side of the screen, Google also supplies a column with all the authors published in the searched articles, so we must narrow down the desired author’s name. As long as we are using Google Scholar using WUSTL’s proxy server, we can directly search the articles that Washington U. has access to and acquire the articles in full text. The instructor also gave us a brief explanation of how Google ranks its articles. According to the instructor, the articles are generally ranked based on the number of times they are cited. She also made it clear that when writing research papers, we cannot solely depend on Google Scholar, as WUSTL’s server does not have access to all the published articles in the world. So, Google Scholar is only useful when we only need a couple more secondary sources that would complete our paper. With this in mind, I tried searching for articles related to Edward Scissorhands. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of articles I came across that were related to either the film or Tim Burton. I feel that what I learned in the workshop will be very beneficial for my search for possible secondary sources.

You guys should try using Google Scholar. It's pretty cool.