Search Engines…Regular or High test

Posted on March 25, 2012 by darren732

In looking about on the search engines of Yahoo, Google, Google Scholar and Refseek I found a distinct difference in the content shown. With the standard Yahoo and Google searches you will get mostly blogs, articles by anyone (usually duplicated from site to site) and news. Both Yahoo and Google of course show Wikipedia as a source.  When I looked upon Google Scholar and the other specialized reference sources the search was more focused. No repetitive articles or blogs. This was a nice change to bring in actual books and pdfs with authors indicated and sites to go to.  A digital library such as HEIN Online that was not indicted in the regular searches amid the plethora of Wikipedia and duplicated articles and news was exceptionally nice to see.

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Searching for Scholarly Research

Posted on March 25, 2012 by mbottaro

In class we used many new search engines for scholarly information for our research projects.  One search engine I used was Google Scholar.  I’ll admit, it was very hard to find information using this search.  After typing in search keywords four or five different ways I still could not find much relevant information.  When searching on Google, it is much simpler to find examples, but not easy to tell if the source could be considered scholarly.  A constant difficulty I encountered is law cases.  Since my topic has to do with teachers and plagiarism a lot of searches ended up with 50 page court cases describing legal situations in perfect detail.  So it’s not going to be easy, but I am going to have to look harder for better research.

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Giving Google Scholar A Try

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Liza

After reading about Google Scholar in Research Strategies and then seeing it in action in class, I decided to give Google Scholar a shot. I find it ironic that a search engine that is known to provide  users with the most frequented sites regardless of relevancy or usefulness would create a separate search engine that actually does the exact opposite: provide me with websites that have the highest relevance to what I’m searching.

I guess Google isn’t one to give up any opportunity to stay on top of the search engine game, eh? Anyway, I tried Google Scholar and I was pretty surprised to find A LOT of results compared to the small results I got from using EBSCO. However, Google Scholar isn’t perfect, so I had to sift through some of the websites from the result list to find the ones that would help me in writing my research paper (and that’s even when I used the advanced settings to narrow down my results list!).

What I like about Google Scholar is that I get the option to sift through legal opinions and such and that’s a big help for me and my research topic.

When I used Google to do a regular search on my research topic, I got news websites at the top of my list and they were mostly reporting about my research topic in general, which is nice for background research but not very helpful as sources for my bibliography. And surprisingly, I have the same problem when it comes to using Google and Google Scholar: how to come up with the everyday search terms compared to the ones that the Library of Congress came up with, since my research topic has terms that were predetermined by Congress already.

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Research Journal #2

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Ian Pei

Using the search engines have been very useful after knowing how to input the keywords I need. However, I am finding difficulty on which documents to use and how to incorporate them into my research paper. There is so much information that we can use, it is kind of overwhelming. But the list of information I found on Google is slightly different from the info I found on sites that archive the info by publishers and writers who are paid. As in, Google displays more information that is produced by common everyday people like you and myself. Well, I guess all I can really do is try multiple documents and websites to see how they fit into an outline for my paper with credited writers and or publishers.

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Research Journel: Searching

Posted on March 25, 2012 by egonzalez

One issue I encountered while searching for scholarly articles through Google Scholar is that I kept encountering the pay wall. It would be convenient if they added the option to exclude or include articles that must be paid for. A  difference I noticed during my searches is when I searched just on Google  I did find many related articles, but  I wasn’t able to easily find any scholarly articles even after  searching through 5 pages of results. Using Google Scholar eventually lead me to about 2 articles that related to my topic about of 25,000 results.

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Search Engines

Posted on March 25, 2012 by itohanedoloyi

Well, when I’m using Google to search for information pertaining to my research question, I find it easier to use shortcuts such as parentheses, truncation, and phrase searching because your results are shorten and you’ll end up getting exactly what you searched for. I didn’t use any other search engine besides Google, but the way I was searching, I didn’t find the need to look elsewhere if my results were going to change. The only challenge I had during this whole searching process was looking for a news article that spoke about my topic.

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Search Engines

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Guzman Kiara

While researching on my topic on Google scholar, I found a lot of useful information that can help me. But it does put you throw trouble because you have to know what exact key words to use yo find the right information. The information I found here was the different then the one in Google or Yahoo because in Google you come across a lot more information that was published by regular people without knowing if the information is useful or not or true. The difficulties that I encountered were that not a lot of text would open fully and it would take me to different pages.

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Search Engines

Posted on March 24, 2012 by cj

When i was searching for a good source for my research topic i did come across some good searches on Google and Yahoo about information and privacy regarding professional sports. I had about one thousand or more search results that came on my screen regarding my topic, it seems to me that it will be very helpful towards what i am going to write about. The only thing that i have to do now is learn how to use Library catalogs and Journal databases, as Badke stated in chapter 5 of his book he says “Books tend to create fogs of misunderstanding, because they’re blunt instruments.” To me i believe he is trying to say that in order to write something and make it big you need a lot of information about the topic in order to write your book or story, because if you don’t then people will be confused while reading. I will try my very best to find good sources to help me develop a good paper for my research project even if i do have to find books, catalogs, magazines, Journal, and more. I feel that if you can find excellent sources regarding your topic proposal then the better off your paper will be.

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Notes from today, and reading/blogging for Monday, March 26

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Anne Leonard

Today we got a late start because of the mysterious fire alarm, and in the time remaining discussed advanced internet searching and specialized search engines for scholarly content, such as Google Scholar, CiteSeer, Scirus, and Microsoft Academic. I hope you all found at least a few potentially useful scholarly sources during your searches in class today. Slides from today are available here.

On Monday we’ll discuss searching (& finding!) in library catalogs. Read Badke Ch. 5 pp. 71-76 (3rd edition), and review the Library of Congress Classification Outline. Remember that your annotated bibliography is due on Wednesday, 3/28; please get in touch with questions as they arise. There are many examples of annotated bibliographies out on the internet: a few of my favorites are from the OWL and the City Tech library.

For Monday, please write one research journal blog post in which you address the following:

•In class on Wednesday you tried out advanced search strategies and scholarly internet resources from the Badke reading to search for sources on your research topic.
•Describe 1 advanced strategy or scholarly resource you used.
•Did you find different information sources than you found doing a regular internet search (just using Google, Yahoo, etc.), and if so, how are they different?
•Did you encounter any difficulties that you haven’t encountered in a regular internet search?
~Prof. Leonard
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Research

Posted on March 21, 2012 by evortega

The only problem in doing a research paper is finding the topic to write it on. I finally decided to write about Internet privacy and came up with the question “do we truly have Internet privacy or is it all a charade?” As I worked on my proposal the only problem I faced was trying to find the topic. There are several topic one can wrote about. Any strategies I used were elimination. I eliminated all that didn’t catch my attention. I don’t have much questions about the assignment. I have written several research papers before and I pretty much have the idea on how to do it.

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