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Using Google in College - Part I

October 3, 2007 |

When I started teaching my first college classes, the first thing I told my students was not to use Google for their research. Why would you trust a simple web site, after all, when our tech folks supplied us with a huge number of specialized databases full of peer-reviewed articles ready to be cited in that next paper?

Times have changed, though. Today, I tell my students that they are free to do research using some of Google’s tools: Google Books, Google Scholar and for good measure, I tell them to think about using the Google Notebook as well to keep tabs on what they find.

Keep in mind, though, that Google is not the end-all for your research - to get a good overview, though, it is very useful.

One general idea - consider installing Zotero to manage your research. It’s a nifty bibliographic tool that will nicely integrate with your research and makes writing those pesky bibliographies easy.

Here are some tips for using the different tools:

Go to Google Book Search HomeGoogle Books

While some librarians think this is the end of the world, Google Books is a great resource. Google has teamed up with some of the most renowned libraries in the world (and some publishing houses) to make their collections available online. Need to read up on Hamlet - at least some of the Sparknotes are online. I say some, because a lot of the newer books only come in excerpts. If a books is out of copyright, you might be lucky and get the whole text - even as a pdf to download.

Content Area ReadingHere are some tips for using Google Books:

Even if a book isn’t available online completely - do a search within the book (on the right side of the screen). Often, this will at lease allow you to read some of the pages that use your search term. Take this book on Shakespeare - for example. Note: More on this hack can be found here.

There is a handy “Find this book in a library” button in the right sidebar. It will take you to Worldcat and you will be presented with a list of nearby libraries that have the book, organized by distance. Very handy. Note: for some reason this function is hidden behind the “Buy this book” link.

Under “More about this book,” you can find a list of references to this text, references from this text and a list of other editions. This can be very useful if you are trying to compile a bibliography and are working with the snow-ball method of research.

If you find a good book, also use the “Find in this book” function to see if there are other references to your topic in the book or footnotes that you might not have seen at first glance.

Most texts in full-view are from the early 20th century or late 19th century. For a lot of scientists, that might not be useful, but if you are in literature and just need to have a quick look at a Shakespeare play, Google Books is your friend. Always remember that a good number of texts you are looking at are pretty old. Depending on your topic, they might be of historical value, but the research might have moved on and the information can be outdated. See this book on physics, for example.


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