Explaining article search to newbies

Each semester I will get a few students who have had very little experience in finding journal articles. I usually begin by explaining how to do a GoogleScholar search.

I get them to go to https://scholar.google.co.nz/

We will pick a topic, then brainstorm some keywords. I will explain some very elementary parts of Boolean searches; such as using plus marks, and putting double quote marks around any terms which need to go together. For example, "career development"+Assessment+Testing.

We also need to remember to set the date (in the left-hand side-bar) as - e.g. - after 2019.

I try to get the students to come up with the key words, because then they will be more likely to remember the process the next time they need to do a search.

I explain that if we don't know what keywords we should be looking for, we go back through some journal articles we have previously read on our topic, and harvest the keywords from those.

Some of the articles we find in GoogleScholar we may be able to directly download. For example, there may be some hyperlinks out on the right-hand side of the list of articles (see the illustration accompanying this post) which - if we click on the link - will allow us to download a copy of the article our search has turned up. These tend to be in publicly available repositories, such as: government departments such as the Ministry of Social Development, the US Department of Education or the National Health; ResearchGate or Academia.edu, where other scholars have uploaded copies of their articles; or Open Access databases like Frontiers in Psychiatry, or PLOS One. 

So we can download our articles... and then we have to work out how to USE them appropriately. We need to learn how to cite them within our text, and how to reference them at the end. Luckly, there is a way to get the APA reference from the articles we are interested in in GoogleScholar. Watch the video below (Young, 2022):

Anything we can't download directly from GoogleScholar we should be able to look up in our institution's databases, and see if they are available in those.

If we have enough for now, we can start writing. If we don't, we can mine each article's reference list for any articles which contributed to key paragraphs in our article which is really on the button (i.e. go through the reference lists looking for the source articles which look like they fed into the relevant parts of our useful articles), and look for those using specific GoogleScholar searches.

I hope this helps!

Sam

References:

Google Scholar. (2024). https://scholar.google.co.nz/

Young, S. (2022). Finding complete GoogleScholar references & Cross Ref DOIs [video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/0CW49QzJb7s