🧑🏽‍💻️Doing Research with Google Scholar

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is another great way to find high quality resources.

Besides providing links to resources in MRU databases, Google Scholar links to online repositories that contain articles the author has been allowed to upload, including  Academia.edu and ResearchGate.

Click on the Settings icon and select Library Links to show library access for up to 5 libraries (type in Mount Royal and click save).  If you are logged into MRU library, links should automatically populate if you are running a Google search in another window. 

Helpful Search Operators to Use in Google Scholar

Google Scholar's Advanced Search is found by clicking the menu icon in the top left.

You can also add search operators to Google Scholar searches to build your own custom advanced searches in similar ways to LibrarySearch:

• Use quotation marks to keep specific phrases together:

  • "social work"

• Avoid using AND to combine search terms with Google Scholar, as the search engine automatically creates ANDs between concepts and sometimes adding an additional AND can confuse the search syntax.

• Use OR to connect two or more similar terms:

  • "climate change" OR "global warming"

• Use intitle: to limit your search to search terms only appearing in the title of a resource:

  • intitle:"social work" intervention

⚖️Evaluating Information

RADAR stands for

Relevance

Authority

Date

Accuracy

Reason for Creation

We can ask the following questions to help us assess each criterion:

Relevance:

• Does this source fit my topic?

• What is this source's intended audience?

  • Is that intended audience appropriate for my use case in this assignment?

Authority:

• Is/are the creator(s) of this source clearly identified or known to us?

• How important is it in this use case to trust the source's creator(s)?

  • If it is important, why should we trust the source's creator(s)?

  • Is the source's creator credentialed or an expert in their field?

Date:

• Is the creation or publication date of this source identified or known to us?

• Is this source too old? Might the information be outdated, or no longer accurate?

Accuracy:

• Do this source's facts "check out"? Does this content align with what you're seeing in other sources?

• Does the source have references of its own? Does the creators of this source cite evidence to support their arguments?

Reason for Creation (take your best guess at this question using judgments from earlier criteria):

• Why was this source made? To sell a product or service, to inform/educate, to entertain, etc?

Figure 1

Peter Steiner's Famous 1993 New Yorker Cartoon Illustrating an Issue Central to Information Evaluation

Note. From "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" [Cartoon], by P. Steiner, 1993, Wikimedia (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg).

📖Scholarly Sources

A scholarly publication contains articles written by experts in a particular field. The primary audience of these articles is other experts.

Many of these publications are also referred to as "peer-reviewed," academic, or "refereed." They all mean essentially the same thing and refer to the editorial and publication process in which scholars in the same field review the research and findings before the article is published.

Some Helpful Questions for Identifying and Evaluating Scholarly Sources

1. What are the author’s credentials and affiliations? Is the author an expert on the topic?

2. Was it published in an academic journal? Can you tell if the journal has a peer review process?

3. Does it use academic or technical language? (and would an average person understand it?)

4. Does it includes a reference list of sources that it is citing?

5. How long is it? (Scholarly articles are typically longer than popular or news articles.)

6. Does it have a "Received" and "Accepted" date on it?

7. Is it an actual article? (Sometimes other types of content are included in scholarly publications, such as editorials/opinion pieces and book reviews. Make sure you are looking at an article.)

🤷🏾Why Do We Cite?

1. To credit other thinkers’ ideas where credit is due.
(Self-interested side of this: it protects us from charges of plagiarism!)

2. To support our own ideas and claims.

3. To establish our own credibility and authority as a thinker, writer, speaker, professional, etc.

4. To allow interested readers to identify and retrieve other thinkers’ ideas that we have used in order to explore them more.

(Photo from futureatlas.com on Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

🆘 Citation Help

• Use the "cite" tool found in most databases to get you started (you will need to review and correct the citation).

• Cite Sources: Learn the correct way to cite sources by using the guides on the Cite Sources page on the Library website.

• Academic Success Workshops: APA: An Introduction and APA 2: An Online Escape Room. Academic Success Workshops are 75 minutes long and are offered both in-person and online. Registration is required.

• Appointments: Personalized online or in-person 30-minute appointments with a Learning Strategist at Student Learning Services located on the 2nd floor of the Riddell Library & Learning Centre.

• Use the Service Desk on the 1st floor of the RLLC for assistance as well as the library chat feature on the library website for quick citation questions.