Can't Get to the Library?! Fire up Google!

Rachel Hanson, Contributing Writer

Updated: 3/14/2010

A large part of getting a college education involves ‘doing research’. Whether one has been assigned an essay or it’s time to start working on a bachelor thesis, doing research is something that will come up much more often than the average college student appreciates. One answer to this is to really get to know your university’s library and the staff who make the university library a cut above your high school library. However, there are also students who have difficulty getting to the library, such as those doing online degree programs. In those situations, there is an alternative to turning in your essay without any facts to back up your arguments. The solution is a website you probably already use several times a day: Google!

Remember that doing research for a college course is a serious thing; you can’t just go to Google and type in a topic and then trust whatever ‘authority’ pops up first in the search results. Instead, use trusted sources with proven track records: college professors who have their work published online.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a handy division of Google that caters to the search of scholarly material. You can find publications by university professors using this search as well as more general books on the topic (which you can then check to see if your university library has a copy of). To get started, simply go to Google Scholar and type in your topic. As with general searches at the college library, you should try multiple search terms. For example, if you are following a college course in Second Language Acquisition, you should also try the search terms Second Language Learning and Foreign Language Acquisition/Learning. This simple technique will help you get results from multiple parts of the field, whatever the field you’re researching might be.

Once you’ve gotten the hang of choosing search terms, navigating the results is another tricky part. What pops up on Google Scholar are mostly scholarly articles published by university professors. Most of these articles are accessible at your college library; however, more and more articles are available, publicly, online. Getting a college education has never been easier when it comes to the availability of study materials.

Search results show up as the titles of articles. If you click on the title (the link), you might be taken to the version of the article that was put online by the publisher, who does not want the article accessed online (except for paying members of the journal). Instead of clicking on the title of the article in the search results, click on ‘all # versions’. Sometimes there are three different websites who have the article on their website, and sometimes there are 20 websites with it posted; many scholarly articles, especially the most recent ones, can be accessed online this way. Sometimes the webpage is the staff page of the professor; other times the webpage is a specialized information site. In either case, professors are happy to have their work read by as many curious minds as possible; it’s the publishers who want access to the articles to be paid.

Back to Books

While Google Scholar is an excellent resource for students doing distance education or who don’t live on campus, there are still good reasons for all university students to hit the library now and again. Most libraries are arranged by topic, and there’s no substitute for going to the section of the library where there are shelves and shelves of books on your topic. Not only does this offer the broadest view, it also allows you to stumble across things you weren’t even looking for, which is one of the great joys of education.

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