At the LCRM project, one thing we are doing is examining existing online research tools and thinking about how they can be better used in scholarly communication and research. One thing that we found is that Google can be used in some interesting ways, particularly if you use the Advanced Search to generate your results.
If you’re like me (and most internet users), when you want to find something on the internet you enter a few keywords into Google, hit search, and you’re quickly buried in search results – most of which you will never look at. And if you’re trying to put together a list of resources for your research or to share with others, once you’ve gone past the top few results you discover that most of the results are not “what you really wanted to find.”
But by using the Advanced Search to include extra information beyond keywords, such as the web domain you want results from, you can greatly improve the relevance of your results and create some useful lists. For example, if you are interested in finding articles in Raleigh’s News and Observer referencing the NAACP a Basic Search gives you about 30,000 results and only 4 links on the first results page actually go to the paper’s website. But by using an Advanced Search, you get over 600 results that all send you directly to the newspaper’s site. Or if you’re collaborating on a reading list on the practice of lynching in America and wanted to include some of UNC Press’s books on the list, a Basic Search yields nearly 100,000 results, most of which you would never look at. An Advanced Search, however, gives you just about 80 results, a much more manageable size to browse through. And you can use a link (like the ones above) to share the results with your collaborators and get their input.
The examples above are just a fraction of the ways scholars can take advantage of Google’s Advanced Search. If you are not familiar with the Advanced Search, Google provides a handy help page explaining the features and telling you how to run an Advanced Search in any Google search box. Besides the Advanced Search, Google gives scholars many other tools to use. (Other scholarly tools include Google Docs, Google Books and Google Scholar. And don’t forget to check out the Advanced Search options in Google Books and Google Scholar.) If you have other ideas on how Google can be used in research or scholarly communication, we would love to hear them!
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