Google Scholar

When students think "Google," they think just about the front page search engine. If we think about Google merely as a Web search engine, we're ignoring many of it's many, many products that have been engineered for decades for uses' success.

For community college students, a powerful product called Google Scholar to help us not only deep academic resources, but also how to maintain our own information literacy through your account. As from the Scholar page:

From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.

Notice that Scholar limits resource beyond trendy news, cat LOL videos, celebrity cultish worship, and confusing "news" that are likely strongly prejudiced against mainstream critical thinking. NOTE, that this doesn't mean some blogs cannot be very, very useful for current theory and analysis of social concerns, but Scholar specifically looks for "disciplines" through academic journals and books. Most are "peer reviewed." 

Features of Google Scholar

• Search all scholarly literature from one convenient place
• Explore related works, citations, authors, and publications
• Locate the complete document through your library or on the web
• Keep up with recent developments in any area of research
• Check who's citing your publications, create a public author profile (Google, "About")

Why Community College Students Need Scholar

I notice that many community college students lack management skills for their projects. They often find a resource and then lose it. We'll talk elsewhere about document management, but Scholar already provides multiple collectors to track your reading and access in your Scholar Library. The search engine is simple when you select careful keywords and time limitation.

Google Scholar library

Google Scholar library is your personal collection of articles. You can save articles right off the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar search to quickly find just the one you want - at any time and from anywhere. You decide what goes into your library, and we’ll keep the links up to date.

You get all the goodies that come with Scholar search results - citing articles, related articles, formatted citations, links to your university’s subscriptions, and more. Best of all, it’s easy to quickly fill up your library with the articles you want - with a single click, you can import all the articles in your public Scholar profile as well as all the articles they cite.

Your Alerts

Once you have your topic, you can set an alert where Scholar will a) track your topics or authors and b) send you alerts when new important topics or authors are updates. I use three strong and very precise alerts when my favorite scholarly authors write new work so I can be engaged with their research, engaged reading, and responding in public works. Being "current" with your research is important for information literacy -- this demonstrates how academic conversations change across time and space. With Alerts, you'll always be more aware.

Access to These Works

Many of these articles are available on PDF and some are available in Google Books. Note, however, that these PDF documents don't necessarily mean that access is ethically, meaning sometimes some other users have posted documents without permission, but you can talk with your college librarian for concerns.

If these documents are not provided already, you can export this citation, walk to your college librarian, and he will help you find the article through databases or InterLibrary Loan.

Resources

Google. "About." Alphabet, Inc. 2016. Web. <https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html> 

Parker, Adriana. "Google Scholar Tutorial."12 July 2011. YouTube. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPeBSXGa70Q>