Scholarly Searches

Google Scholar is a web search engine I turn to when I am looking for reliable, academic information.  I find that the information it contains is often too complex for primary school students but relevant for use with my university studies.  I feel students in high school would also benefit from using Google Scholar in their web searches.

Google Scholar is a citation database which means that I can click on 'cited by' at the bottom of the results and I will find people who have cited the article in their own work.  This allows me to trace how their ideas have evolved.  It also allows me to locate highly relevant, although older, material.  I also find using the 'related articles' function very useful as it helps me locate other articles based on a similar topic.

Google Scholar returned fewer results than Google for the same search ("scientific inquiry" "investigation" "primary science") although there were still too many at 271, 000.  I had used quotation marks to search exact phrases to help narrow my search.  Even though I used quotation marks, Google Scholar returned results for secondary school science when I searched for "primary science".  In Google scholar, instead of using the term NOT, you need to use a negative in front of search terms you don't want to appear in the results.  I used a negative in front of "secondary science" and "high school science" to reduce the number of results.  My new search went as follows: "scientific inquiry" "investigation" "primary science" "-secondary science"  "-high school science" and resulted in 11,500 entries.

Many of the results were not useful to me as they were either on specific topics not relevant to my ILA, not written in english, or were basic fact finding activities.  I used my information literacy skills to scan the results to determine which ones were relevant and useful.  I  only searched through the first couple of pages of results as I know Google ranks the pages according to their relevance.  This procedure helped me find articles related to my topic.

I found using the 'scholar preference' tab to add the Queensland University of Technology to my library links very helpful as it enabled me to see which results were available as full text documents from QUT. I feel this tab would have been very useful to activate at the beginning of my Masters course as it would have saved me lots of time over my studies.  I look forward to quicker searches in the future!