Would you mark someone down for using Google Scholar to find additional articles when the usual databases didnt produce many?
showing initiative if you ask me
knowing where to find relevant information is the important thing
On my course we are encouraged to use it.
Academics can be such arrogant tosspots. They probably marked you down for not quoting their own articles enough, and beefing up their ranking.
Er actually Kimbers, knowing where to find the info is a long long way from the most important thing, there are these places called libraries with very friendly people called librarians. Figuring out what is good and what is cack, and assembling it into a vaguely sensible argument, is the most important thing.
Should be no problem using this as a research device, provided anything obtained has been attributed correctly and there are no palgiarism issues. Wikipedia is the big no no.
hels - haha, bitter are we?!
Google scholar is DEFINATELY a legitimate search tool.
However, when you reference whatever you find you should not reference google scholar, but reference the JOURNAL the article has come from.
If it doesn't come from a Journal then you MUST aask yourself if you trust the source, if for instance you use a quote which comes up on "Joe blogs' website of interesting facts" Then you are very likely to get marked down!
Not quite Dr Dom
Yip, I limited the search to peer reviewed articles yet still got marked down for it. Having a "feedback" session on a failed essay tomorrow.
whats a library?
why on earth would i want to go there and wait while they figure out if they subscribe to a particular journal or whether they have to order a copy in, so that eventually youll get a photocopied version from the british library
in the meantime you can use the internet to find whatever articles you like
yes youll have to make a judgement on whether the information is accurate/useful
id also recommend people sign this petition...
[url= http://thecostofknowledge.com/index.php ]The Cost of Knowledge
Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier[/url]
SBZ - as per DrDomRob's post, how did the marker know you obtained the article from Google Scholar?
They marked down my search strategy part of the essay for saying that I'd use Google Scholar in addition to the usual sources.
It sounds to me like you put "Google Scholar" down in your reference.
This would be wrong... I don't have time to give you an example but a quick google search (ironic) on appropriate referecing in academia should provide some guidance, ie
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/referencing/referencing%20skills/page_01.htm
They marked down my search strategy part of the essay for saying that I'd use Google Scholar in addition to the usual sources.
This is your issue.
You may use google scholar to do the search, but actually you used Web of knowledge, elsevier etc.
Google just did the boring bit of going to the relevent data base on your behalf.
Yes Kimbers, you can find whatever you like on the internet, as long as what you are not fussy about facts.
Academic journals can only continue to publish as long as people continue to pay for them, which in a nutshell means the good stuff is never free !! Unless you find it in a library... many libraries now have online journal subsrciptions too so you won't even have to remember how to work a book.
It would be inappropriate to mark you down in my opinion.
Although in my field (geography) i'm reasonably sure any legitimate article would also appear on a search in Web of Science.
Yes - Google Scholar isn't a resource in it's own right, it's a search engine that gives higher ranking to academic sources.
But they are quibbling. And it's quite sad that they have to give out students credit for using proper research sources. But I guess that ship sailed a long time ago.
Hmmm - not convinced that was the issue either. In the subject area you get lots of articles which only have the abstracts available in the usual academic databases, but go to Google Scholar and you get the whole thing. You can also use the same search terms in GS and a database and get articles which didn't show up in the databeses search results but which are in the database when GS searches it.
P.S go on an publish the essay so we can critique it - is it interesting ??
But if SbZ stated he limited the results to peer reviewed journals then why be marked down? Twentieth century attitude to 21st century working.
Maybe put Jstor in there too under the "other search engines are available" proviso?
References pointing to "informal" sources rather than the copyright holding publisher? Cheeky refs.
Thats interesting - maybe stuff has been pulled, come out of copyright etc before/after google bots have been through ??
I manage an Academic repository and our stuff gets set to become available once the publisher's copyright conditions allow, which varies with every single article. So I could see how that might happen.
You will never win this one by the way, the tutor has no doubt heard it all from students who think they are clevererer.
hels - not unless you want to read about the complete lack of evidence to show the effectiveness of one method of stroke rehab compared to another.
The search engines within academic databases are crap. Why use a second rate search engine.....
GRRRRRRRR.
If you're working through a University's network Google Scholar often provides a link to the full text of the article in the library.
As with all research, the most important thing is the quality of the article. This is usually measured indirectly by looking at the quality of the Journal (read up on 'Impact Factors' and see how good your sources are).
Increasingly, citations are being used as a measure of the quallity of individual articles and your library should be able to help you find this data for each of your sources. If you want evidence of how ace your sources are, take this data to your feedback session.
If you referenced everything properly (and didn't just look at the abstract) you shouldn't be marked down for this.
hels he did say he was talking about articles so i assumed that he was referring to ones only in journals
i think the ops problem is that he didnt reference his journal article correctly ?
and libraries are dying on their arses at the moment,
partly because an annual journal subscription costs thousands and individual articles are 20 quid a pop
you already pay a few hundred+ to get an article published yet you write it yourself and peer reviews are free
exactly why should elsiever, springer, wiley etc make 36p profit! out of every pound it costs to read an article?
not to mention that most science funding comes from government spending or charity donnations
in the USA if you take money from the NIH you have to put your articles in a public database
and PLOS etc publish for free too
Funding cuts mate.
I virtually always use Scholar rather than Inspec or Web of Knowledge- assuming you're looking at the stuff published in reputable/mainstream places and not www.bonkersnewscience.com I don't see what the problem/difference is.
Everything was referenced properly.
We're veering well OT here, but
nd libraries are dying on their arses at the moment,
partly because an annual journal subscription costs thousands and individual articles are 20 quid a pop
Public libraries don't subscribe to academic journals.
Hels, that's not the issue with Elsevier.
The issues include their bundling pricing policy, the fact they they publish publicly funded research but charge massive amounts for it, and the way that reviewers are expected to work for free.
In effect, they are lending their name out to scientists for a fat fee.
PLoS1 provides an alternative model.
- I have worked with many STM publishers, I do know something about their operations.
It takes a while for citations to work through the system - so is not a good measure for recently published articles, which is what you should be hitting first. Anything less then a year old won't have much in the way of citations.
Apols, I know nothing about public libraries I have only ever worked in academic libraries.
BTW George - you can get a lot online at the NLS and I think it's free ? You just have to register.
SBZ,
Google Scholar didn't exist when I left the fine academic world, but I am a professional scientific researcher and peer review articles for a few reasonably respected journals. Google Scholar is my first (and often only) port of call for finding relevant work.
I've never seen an essay that had a "search strategy" laid out at the start, but each field has its own anomalies. Back in the days when library computers were in a different building and had green and black text I remember being given specific search tasks to undertake, obviously that was about showing you could use the specific tool you had been taught about, and the "correct" answer was targeting a specific paper. I can see how a modern better tool could undermine that exercise.
I suspect the problem is (s)he thought the field was quite narrow and so would have an easy essay to mark. You've opened up a can of worms and given him a difficult essay to mark which invites criticism on both why you deviated from the original (expected) specification and possibly arrived at a different conclusion than he expected.
No. Why would you mark someone down for actually searching for papers? Many of the citation indexes dont include certain volumes or journals (I have a paper which can only be found in google scholar for example, because its a chapter in a USGS book and that book is not included in science direct or web of knowledge etc.). Some journals are simply not subscribed to a citation service (I think it costs them money to be included) the usual sources arent necessarily comprehensive. By searching a range of database, of which Google Scholar is one, then you are more likely to find what you need.
So, if you found an actual book chapter or journal article by searching using google scholar then you should be fine so long as you reference the original article and its place of publication. I would never want to read that you have used google scholar (or science direct or web of science/knowledge) as the search tool is irrelevant. So long as the referenced article is a proper academic source and not some crap trawled from the internet then its all OK.
My guess is that there was a problem with your search strategy on the databases (Medline, AMED etc? through Ovid?). Don't want to sound patronising but they do exactly what you tell them, so quality of search = quality of results (generally). Google Scholar does clever stuff.
Worth sticking reference into google scholar to look at their "cited by" link, quite good way of widening your search.
Might just be that the marker doesnt really know what they're doing.
I have vested interest, medical librarian university/NHS.
Hels - thanks for that. I'll have a look.
Poly - that's an interesting idea. Possibly not far away from the truth either.
Colonel Wax - original search returned 4 papers - minimum of 6 was needed for the purposes of the essay. Google Scholar produced another couple from good sources which were either missing from other databases or not picked up by the search engine within the database itself.
For most reviews/ meta-analysis a search strategy would be part of the methodology. I think Poly may be right but I would say that it may not be the use of GS that is the problem but maybe the keywords you used to seacrh GS.
SBZ. I suspect that you have not referenced a vital paper or key publication. You may simply have missed it, or perhaps you rejected it as not being relevant. It's worth asking when you see your tutor. I doubt that using GS alone is grounds for a failure.
Wikipedia is actually a very useful resource, but not a source itself. It's always worth looking at the linked documents. Also, by clicking on the 'Talk' tab at the top of the page, you gain access to current debate on the topic - a great source of ideas.
As far as I am concerned any search engine is legitimate to find primary data. I've never marked a student down for search engine choice and do actually recommend Google scholar alongside WoK and Pubmed as GS often throws up refs that the others miss due to the different indexing methods.
How you assess, use and reference the results of a search is the critical part and entirely independent of the method used to find them (meta-analyses apart).
Sounds to me like your lecturer doesn't know the difference between Google Scholar and Wikipedia (again, not bad in itself, so long as you check the primary data and don't reference Wikipedia directly!).
If it was referenced correctly, I don't see how the reader would know you obtained the source from google scholar - just like ScotlandtheScared points out above.
To be fair, it was a poor assessment. We had to come up with our own question about a topic within healthcare. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to ask a question which had a closely related systematic review already carried out on it. Nowt like wiping out 99% of the potential questions now is there.
IanPV - part of the essay was to include a search strategy. I was marked down on this part for using GS.
I was also marked down for saying that there was no evidence that one method of stroke rehab was better than another, and saying that reviewing the current research raised more questions than it answered. The marker is a big fan of one of those stroke rehab methods....
Maybe the search didn't reveal the one classic article or source and the results were just derivative papers: e.g. like listing all the stuff on superconducting ceramics without mentioning Bednorz and Müller (sp), say.
Ha ha !! We are back around to my original hypothesis - ginormous academic ego.
Aye - one day I'll learn who to suck upto and who to needs their ego stroked.... Or maybe I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and keep my sanity.
Hope you get the marks back SBZ. One of the few enjoyable things about essay writing is arguing a point counter to the one that the setter expects. It's a shame that some academics can't handling though. If you're unhappy with the mark then certainly take it to the next up in the academic food chain so to speak.
If I was you I'd get in touch with your librarian and ask them to have a look at your search - after all they're the expert. "nd opinion to go back to the marker?
I suppose the approach to the assignment is a bit different in healthcare to some other sectors of academia, the search strategy is often an part of the work (esp Evidence Based Medicine) - how you find the information is important.
Although ironically in my Librarian MA I don't think I ever had to make my search strategy clear!
I was also marked down for saying that there was no evidence that one method of stroke rehab was better than another, and saying that reviewing the current research raised more questions than it answered. The marker is a big fan of one of those stroke rehab methods....
Are you sure you haven't missed a key paper that says "his" approach works better? If there IS a paper out there which he knows about I can imagine him saying "You missed the key point, and if you had got your search strategy right you would have found it" - hence the mark.
no such thing - only one which you don't exploit to your maximum learning potential. One way or another you will learn something here - if only about academic politics.to be fair it was a poor assessment
**** lol...I just use bog standard google to find my sources and then harvard reference them. I rarely bother with databases as they usually bring up the exact same matches.
Er actually Kimbers, knowing where to find the info is a long long way from the most important thing, there are these places called libraries with very friendly people called librarians. Figuring out what is good and what is cack, and assembling it into a vaguely sensible argument, is the most important thing.
Yes but the internet has made libraries (arguably universities as well) obsolete for academic research, what is the difference between using my universities electronic journal searcher/Athens to using Google? I don't read paper books using either!
Academic's need to click onto the fact that the internet is changing education, many institutions see (like the music industry) the internet as a threat as it opens up education to all for free reducing it's ability to be traded as a commodity.
I just wrote a project/dissertation challenging the classical mutation theory of cancer. Basically academic trolling, the literature review went down well with my tutor 🙂 So I guess I'm lucky. Any lecturer who marks you down for challenging the status quo should not mark you down if you have made a logical and reasoned argument, even if they do have counterpoints. These people are an affront to science.
Can't compare the music and research industries - very different models.
The internet hasn't opened up education, it has opened up information. Very different thing. It has also opened up mis-information.
It amuses me that your tutor is so sensitive to criticism, he or she will spend all day crying in the toilets if they progress any further in academia. They are a feisty bunch, very defensive and have to fight their corner to survive, and although "extremely busy doing crucial world class ground-breaking work" will take ten minutes out of their day to fight you on some really insignificant detail.
BS. Have you heard of The Open University, Khanacademy, MIT youtube lectures etc etc etc? Online education is the next big thing whether universities like it or not...... especially if they charge 10,000 pounds a year for an experience that includes:
1) Losing all my coursework and failing me on a module
2) Incorrect module handbooks
3) Lecturers that don't turn up
4) Lecturers that don't like any of their students
5) Lecturers who think the idea of education is talking in a monotonous voice and reading off slides.
6) Turing your campus into a building site and placing your exam rooms right next to that building site.
Etc etc etc
Which "university" was that bwaarp ? The term is so mis-used these days.
Yes but the internet has made libraries (arguably universities as well) obsolete for academic research, what is the difference between using my universities electronic journal searcher/Athens to using Google? I don't read paper books using either!
Once you've found your articles, you access them. Until there's open access to all publications, this is usually paid for by the library (assuming university here). The librarian's help choose which titles are included - remember there isn't an unlimited budget, and manage access. When it's not working who sort's it? The Library.
Using a database for an in-depth search will save you time. Try submitting a systematic review with the strategy "I used Google".
A good Library will help you get your research done more easily, through training or doing searches for you. Important stuff with the REF and funding bids.
I'm a Librarian and I barely have anything to do with books. I use the internet all the time. Don't think my job is obsolete.
Which "university" was that bwaarp ? The term is so mis-used these days.
Brookes which is ranked in the top third. I've heard just as bad stories about Russel Group universities.
Once you've found your articles, you access them. Until there's open access to all publications, this is usually paid for by the library (assuming university here). The librarian's help choose which titles are included - remember there isn't an unlimited budget, and manage access. When it's not working who sort's it? The Library.Using a database for an in-depth search will save you time. Try submitting a systematic review with the strategy "I used Google".
A good Library will help you get your research done more easily, through training or doing searches for you. Important stuff with the REF and funding bids.
I'm a Librarian and I barely have anything to do with books. I use the internet all the time. Don't think my job is obsolete.
I guess, but as I said I get the same hits that I do if I'm using a database. I only use databases if I don't know what I'm looking for, to have a browse. I might use Google Scholar instead if it proves easier to use. For some reason I find electronic libraries a headache and use google to find the journal entry and abstract and then I'll access it via Athens.
I'm biased though, I'd like to destroy the university system as we know it.
Good luck bwaarp, they are tough ****ers long used to feudal incursions, fiefdoms, sieges etc, and thats just at the monthly department meeting over who buys the biscuits. You chuck 10 dead bodies over the wall they will chuck 100 etc etc.
Meh don't care, I figure I want to become the libertarian of the academic world. I'm going to go down angering as many elitists as possible. Think Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens but instead of religion in my sights it's going to be university. The whole system is vile, it is devoid of little education. University is simply a ticket to a potentially more aspirational lifestyle, where those in society who can most afford it take money from the hands of the youngest and those who can least afford such expenses. It's a way of trapping you in debt from an early age. I mean I could have been taught everything for my Biomedical Science degree on the bloody job in a laboratory. But nooooooooooooooooooooooooo now you have to pay someone for it.
You might start by understanding what a library is, bwaarp, as of 2012. We want those elitists angered, not amused and giving you a pat on the head.
So when/what did you last use a library for? Go on....do tell. They have some uses, for example if my internet access has gone down. For journals, I just access them via Athens and if I want to try a book before I buy it I just download a preview of it onto my Kindle.
For journals, I just access them via Athens
Provided by the library.
You're confusing 'physically going to the bricks and mortar building called the library', which is obsolete for me (but shouldn't be for someone at your stage), and 'the library'. You're using the library every time you read a journal online - who holds the subscription? You're using athens and yet you think the library is extinct - come on now.
The internet has meant a lot of smaller library buildings have shut down, but on the whole it has fueled a great increase in library services; it has to have done given the exponentially greater availability of information.
Yes, the classic mistake of confusing content with delivery method. It's still a book, even if you read it on your kindle.
Ha ha !! We are back around to my original hypothesis - ginormous academic ego.
At least it's only an essay. Imagine if you submitted a journal article and one of the reviewers rejected it because you didn't cite their paper.
Since the peer review process is supposed to be anonymous, it ought to be difficult to be certain that an article was rejected because one of the reviewer's own papers wasn't cited. Something's gone wrong somewhere...
Pick your own title, reference at least 6 sources, section on data search?
Sounds like first year research methods to me...
Google Scholar is the best way to find papers in my book. You tell it what uni you're at, even when you're at home, and it automatically logs you into the right service to get the paper you need, and it occasionally turns up a paper that's available as a PDF somewhere but not via the uni's subscriptions service.
Anyway. You get some lecturers who will tell you to never use Google Scholar and never use Wikipedia. But Google Scholar is the best way to get your hands on paper, and Wikipedia is useful for a top line idea of a subject (obviously, you would never actually use Wikipedia as a source). It's far easier just use Google Scholar and then say "Yes, I logged onto JSTOR and then into Athens and then I searched Elsevier and then I finally slew the evil wizard of Oxford Journals, and finally I had the paper I needed".
Anyway. Here's something else your tutor won't like, but will save you a lifetime of pain. Download Zotero, it does you referencing for you. Bangs out perfect references in whatever format your Uni specify in seconds.
There seems to be a real thing in academia for complicated and unfriendly software. The lecturer spent years banging his head against EndNotes and JSTOR and he wants you to do the same is my theory.
Decided to ditch the feedback meeting today. Made it clear that there was nothing I'd like more than debating all the points I disagreed with in her marking, but that I fully realise that it would be a futile exercise and have decided to choose my fights carefully. She did not like that in the slightest. Human 1 - Chimp 0.