SOCL 490: Honors Colloquium (Beard): Using websites effectively

Google Scholar is a great tool for doing a broad search of scholarly literature on your topic:

• Google Scholar searches across many disciplines. 
• Your search results will include a broad range of sources, including journal articles, conference papers, theses, dissertations, academic books, pre-prints, and abstracts. 
• Results come from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. 
• Google Scholar also includes court opinions and patents.

You'll just want to keep some things in mind:

• Coverage is not comprehensive. Many sourcess are hidden in publishers' databases and journals that Google can't search, so you'll want to look at other databases as well. 
• Search results can include links to things like course syllabi and high school term papers, so you'll want to evaluate what you find. 

You can access advanced search features by clicking the arrow in the right of the search box. These features allow you to refine your search.

Look for the words Get Full Txt @ Holy Cross next to an article. You should be able to access any of these articles through the library's subscriptions. If you come across a source that Holy Cross does not have access to, remember that you can request the item through Interlibrary Loan.

Scholar Settings When you are on the Holy Cross campus, Google Scholar will automatically show you those Get Full Txt @ Holy Cross links next to articles that Holy Cross has access to. If you are off-campus, you can set your Scholar Settings to show the links for accessing sources through Holy Cross. You can modify your settings by selecting the Settings link in the upper-right corner of Google Scholar webpage.

Click on the Cited by and Related articles links at the bottom of a search result to find more relevant articles and books.

Google is a great tool--just make sure that you evaluate the websites in your search results.
Questions to help you evaluate the websites that you decide to use for your research.

Author
Who is the author?
How is the author qualified?
Is the author an expert?
Does the author have bias? (Remember that a bias may not be directly stated.)
If no author is listed, why?

Host
Who hosts the site?
What is their purpose?
Does the host have bias?  (Remember that a bias may not be directly stated.)
What is the domain extension? This can help you determine how reputable a website is. For example, .gov is the domain for United States government sites and .edu is for US Educational institutuions.

Sources
Does the site provide its sources?
Does it refer/link you to other credible sources?
Is the information able to be cross-referenced?

Currency
Is the site regularly updated?

Take advantage of Advanced Search. 

Make your search more specific by using quotation marks around phrases. 

You can limit your search to a specific website by adding site: url of website here. You can also use this strategy to limit to specific domain such educational websites or government websites by addingsite:edu or site:gov to your search.

Use the minus sign (-) to subtract terms you do not want to appear in your results. For example:  tap dance -ballet

Google Scholar is a great resource for searching scholarly content online. For more information on Google Scholar, go to the Scholarly Sources tab.