Mastering Research with: Google Scholar

1. Introduction: Hi everyone and welcome to mastering research with Google Scholar. My name is Tom. I've designed this course. Anyone who engages in research for work, school, we're just doing their own time. This course is for anyone and everyone who has an interest in research. And he wants to really improve their research skills while using Google Scholar. 2. Why this course?: So why would you want to watch this course? Well, through learning to implement Google Scholar, you can find materials faster. You can improve your research technique and crucially free up more time for that all-important writing process. Will you produce your research for others to read? 3. What will you learn?: So what are you going to learn in this course? Well, we'll start with Google Scholar basics. We'll look at basic search terms. Then we'll look at more advanced search terms using the advanced search feature, but also Boolean logic. Looking at how we can implement different coded terms in order to refine our results. And finally, we'll look at setting up alerts so that you can be notified of the latest research in your area and stay up to date. So I hope you join me and let's get started. 4. Basics 1: Layout and Tools: Welcome back to mastering research with Google Scholar, part one, the basics in this module, we're going to learn how to use Google Scholar at a basic level. Looking at the site layout and the basic tools you need to get started. Let's jump right in and open up Google Scholar on our web browser. So as you can see, I have Google Scholar open here. Let's take a look at the basic layout. You'll notice it looks a lot like regular Google. And that's because in a lot of ways it is just a more refined and specialized version of it. We have a few notable exceptions that you won't find on the regular Google. Down here. We have two options, articles and case law articles is what you're gonna be using the majority of the time. It searches for scholarly articles and scientific papers. If however, you are a lawyer looking at case law, primarily an American systems, you can select the case-law button and it will not show you regular articles. This is a great way of refining our results, which we'll look at in the final module on this course. For now, we're just going to stick with articles. Now, up in the top left-hand corner, we'll see a drop-down menu with a number of options, which gives us various tools that we can use in our research. My profile is useful for researchers themselves as it allows you to attribute work to yourselves from Google Scholar. So for example, if you have published an academic paper, you can go through Google Scholar, find it, and select it as your own. Linking it to your profile, allowing others to see your full catalog of research that you have published. My library allows you to save papers that you find on Google Scholar, to find them later for your research. Alert is an incredibly useful tool in which you can set up email alerts for topics that you're interested in. And you get an email every time a new paper in that area is published. Metrics allows you to see what is trending and popular in your research field. And Advanced Search allows you to search using multiple terms, something that we will look at in another part of this course. So that's the basic layout of Google skull. In the next module, we'll look at basic searching. I'll see you in the next one. 5. Basics 2: Simple Searches: Hi everyone, and welcome back to part two of the basics. Well, we're going to introduce you to a basic search. Now. Let's say we've got a research project. Let's say that research project involves looking at vegetable consumption for adults who live in poverty. How are we gonna go about starting to research this topic? Well, the most obvious thing to do is to search the exact terms of our research. So let's take a look, shall we? Let's have a look at vegetable consumption. There we go. Vegetable consumption will see here that we have lots of articles that relate to vegetable consumption. We need to narrow it down further because not just what we're looking at, we're looking at vegetable consumption. And I can see it already here. In adults. You can see that Google Scholar gives you lots of predictions for what you might want to search. And this is an advantage of scholars who've other website and research platforms is that a lot of the time it uses Google's algorithm to predict what you might want to look for, making it extra simple to find these things. So what have we got here? Well, we can see that we have fruit and vegetable consumption among adults. Factors associated with the vegetable consumption. We want to go further. So what are we going to do? We're going to press comma space. Then let's just put our key term in poverty. Now, we can see beneath, much like in regular Google, we have these words highlighted with a small abstract. So we can read that small sentence here and see if a paper is relevant or not. This saves so much time because you're not having to read a 100 page paper to determine is this relevant to my research because the key words are highlighted in a summary directly below. So here we have this first result, household income disparities in fruit and vegetable consumption, state and territory. And we can see it's in our field. We can see has the keywords were looking for. But let's say we want a more contemporary study. Let's say we want something in the last few years. Well, if we look to the left here, we have a date range. We can take it from just this year, 2022, last year since 2018. Or we can have a custom range. For example, if we want a study that came out no time before 2012, no time after 2015, we could enter that custom range here and allow us to refine our results even further. But let's take a look at stats since 2021. And you can see here we have a paper, the role of the built environment, food prices and neighborhood poverty in fruit and vegetable consumption, published in 2021. So here we have it simply by putting key terms in the search box, refining by year. We've found a number of relevant papers that we can use in our research. In the next video, we're going to look at more advanced search terms to see how we can refine our results even further. To thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 6. Advanced Searching 1: Advanced Search Tool: Welcome back to part two, advanced searching. In this, you're going to learn how to use the advanced search tool built into Google Scholar. And then later, in the second part, we'll look at Boolean search terms for far more advanced, refined searching. So let's dive in and get back to Google Scholar. Now. We have our previous search from the basic search up in our window here. Let's say we're looking even more in depth with further into our research. And we realized that actually we want to look more specifically at not just poverty, but low-income households. And since we're looking at adults, we're finding a lot of papers talking bout child poverty. We want to exclude those results to just focus on adults. So how can we do that? Well, we click up here and we can click Advanced Search. And you'll see it's filled our initial search already in for us. Let's start with the term adults. Now, if we want to search purely for adult related research, we can exclude terms here. So we can put child comma children. And it will exclude all searches with papers that refer to either of these terms. We can also use exact phrases. Now, let's say we're no longer looking at purely at poverty, but we're looking specifically at the notion of low income. You can simply type low-income into our phrase box here. Our search now goes for all words containing vegetable consumption in adults using the exact phrase low-income, but excluding child or children anywhere in the article, or we can search by title. Now searching by title is mainly useful if you have a paper in mind already. But for more basic research, more broadly, anywhere in the article is our best bet. Now we can change our date range. So perhaps we found that 2015 is a good year. We could put 2022, but leaving it blank, simply searches up until the current date. So let's click search and see how we do. A pilot fruit and vegetable prescription program improves local fruit and vegetable consumption nutrition knowledge. We can see here health screenings for low-income adult patients and vegetable consumption here. Does the importance of dietary costs for fruit and vegetable intake vary by socioeconomic position. And here we see low income and low education consuming less. So we can see that there is a direct relation between our search terms and our results. Now if we look at the top, we can see that it is formatted in a certain way. And this is the Boolean search terms that we'll look at in the next part. So instead of using this advanced search feature, we can simply learn to quickly type out exactly what we want into these boxes and search directly. So that's what we'll look at in the next part. Thank you for watching. 7. Advanced Searching 2: Boolean Terms: Hi everyone and welcome back to part two of the advanced searching with Google Scholar. Now, we've just done a basic advanced search using the inbuilt advanced search feature in Scala. But what if we want to do it in a more simpler fashion with a few more options. Well, for this, we're going to need to understand a basic research search function known as Boolean operators or Boolean searching. What are Boolean searches? Well, this is George Boole. He was an English mathematician from the 19th century. And he developed something called Boolean logic, which allows you to combine certain concepts together and exclude others when searching on databases. This is much of the foundation of advanced searches. This is a basic set of Boolean terms. We have AND OR and NOT. So if we searched for puppy or kitten, we would receive both terms. So we would get paper results that would have puppies and kittens in the term. If we use the operator or we would get either term or both terms. So puppy or kitten would receive results of puppy, results of kitten, and results of puppy and kitten. The term not excludes the term. So if we put puppy or kitten, we would only receive results that included puppy. And we wouldn't receive any results that had kitten. Important to note that each Boolean term must be capitalized and can be employed in a number of different databases. Now, let's look specifically at Google Scholar because it uses these terms, but in a slightly different way. Now some people will tell you that Google Scholar does not use Boolean terms. And this is only partly true. We can still use boolean terms, but we simply have to use slightly different terminology in order to receive these results. But we're still employing the same logic in Scala instead of the word and is always presumed through a gap or space between two words. So if you write puppy, space, kitten, that is the same as a Boolean search of puppy and kitten, not requires you to use the subtract sign. X here represents anytime you want to search for. So if you wanted puppy, not kidding, you would type puppy minus kitten. Nice and logical. Or is very simple, simply a capitalist or the same as the regular Boolean term. And phrases need to be in double quotation marks. This is because scholar recognizes a space between words has an end. So for example, if you wanted puppies and kittens, raise rather than puppies and kittens, you would put that in quotation marks, meaning that the search results you would receive would have that entire phrase in them, rather than simply the two separate words appearing differently in the text. So let's hop back into Google Scholar and see how we can implement this in practice. Okay, so we're back here with Google Scholar and let's try to employ those Boolean terms. What are we searching for before? We were looking at vegetable consumption in low-income areas, specifically in adults. So how can we employ our Boolean terms in Google Scholar? Well, first off, we want to look at vegetable consumption. We don't want to look for papers that say vegetable and consumption elsewhere. So we need to search for it as a phrase, which is using the double quotation marks. So here we have vegetable consumption. Now. We also want to look for in adults. So we can either write and in capital letters or if we remember, Google Scholar sees the end term as a space or a gap. So we can simply write adult or adults. We know that we do not want the word child or children to appear in our results. So we can simply press the minus sign and rights child minus sign and right children. We might also want to search for low-income. So we have our space, which is, and we won't low-income as a phrase. So we put it in our quotation marks. Now let's see what our search retrieves. Factors associated with fruit and vegetable consumption among adults. Vegetable consumption, low-income. First result here. Perfect for what we're looking at. 2011 might be quite old. So let's search since 2018. Here we have a pilot fruit and vegetable prescription program, which I think we came up for in our last advanced search, low-income adults, vegetable consumption. So as you can see here, we have a very similar layout to what we would have had had we gone through the advanced search feature. But this simply allows us to put our own terms as long as we would like. Multiple terms longer than the boxes in the advanced search allow. But also speed. It might not seem it right now. But once you get to grips with how these terms work, it is much faster and having to open a new menu, insert the relevant words in the relevant places where you can simply type it out logically as a regular search. So I hope this has been useful for you. In the next section, we're going to look at creating email alerts for your research. And I'll see you in the next one. 8. Setting Up Alerts: Hi everyone and welcome back to this final part is going to be a quick one. This one, It's alerts. Now this is an incredibly simple tool, but a very, very powerful one, especially if you have any ongoing research. So let's quickly dive back into Google Scholar and I'll show you how it works. So here we are back in Google Scholar. You can see we still have our advanced search from the last topic. Now let's say this is a summary of our entire research project and an ongoing project. We want to get the latest data in. We want to be notified when new papers come out. Well, it's very simple. Here. In our search window. At the left you can see create an alert. Simply click and you'll come to this page. Here we can see our query so that all of our search terms that we've used Boolean logic for a placed here, meaning that our results of our emails will be incredibly refined. Simply put in your e-mail and click Create alert. This will create a notification. Every time a new paper comes out straight into your email inbox. It's incredibly useful to get up-to-date searches on the latest research in your field. These alerts can be managed through the Alerts tab here on the left. Now as you can see, these are some previous alerts I have set up for my own research. And you can cancel your alerts or create a new one from this page. An incredibly quick, incredibly basic tool, one that is very, very powerful. And I hope it will be very useful to you. In the next lesson, I'm going to go through the task that you're set for this course. And a summary of everything we've talked about, talked about. See you in the next one. 9. Linking to Institutional Libraries: Hi everyone and welcome back to the course on Google Scholar. Today, I'm going to show you how to link to your institution's library. Now that could be a work institution. It could be a university or school, whatever your institution. This tool will help you to draw from directly that library and allow you to use it within Google Scholar. And I'll show you what I mean. So in the top left-hand corner, we go to our dropdown menu. We can select Settings. From here. We go to the left hand corner and select Library links. Now, very simply, you can type in the name of your institution. Let's say for example, we're at Yale University. We can search. Yale. Yale University Library comes up by taking this box. When we go back to our search results. Now let's search for something such as light. We can see on the right-hand side here, Yale links full text. By clicking through to this link. If you have a login for Yale University or your particular university, you'll be able to directly go to that paper without needing to go through the login process, which you would for any other link. I hope this has been useful for you. And I'll see you in the next one. 10. Other Useful Tools: Hi everyone, and welcome back. In this little bonus video, we're going to talk about some extra features that you might find useful when looking at Google Scholar. As you can see, I've had a basic search here for plant life. Now, we can see that a paper that's arrived at the top is quite significantly old in 1988. But what we can also see some of the metrics, which gives us an idea of how important the papers Here cited by 400 would indicate that 400 different papers have cited this source, meaning it could be potentially a significant paper. What's nice about scholar is that you can click through. You can see all the articles listed, ten whole pages in this instance that have cited this particular paper. So you can go forward and read the latest literature which uses the information from that seminar paper. Similarly, you can see related articles. By clicking here, you get articles, come up through the same keyword search, thus making it easier to find related articles to your topic. Finally, we have a version history. This gives you different versions of the same paper, potentially giving you access to other and more extensive versions or versions in different languages. So I'd like to thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one. 11. Course Summary and Project: Hi guys, welcome back to the final part. Here we're just going to summarize everything we've been talking about briefly. And then look at the task that you're set for the completion of this course. So to begin with, we looked at the basics. We looked at the layout or Google Scholar. We looked at creating a basic search. And we looked at the site layout and the tools that are available to us. We then looked at advanced searching using both Google Scholar as advanced search feature, but also Boolean searching, Boolean search terms and the way in which these are implemented in Google Scholar. Finally, we looked at alerts and how to set them up and how to use them for your ongoing research and to continue learning how to do this. I've set up a task for you. So as you can see here, I've created a very simple document. Not the point of this task is to get you to start using those advanced search terms in an area of interest to you. And to put them into this bibliography. What this will help you do is to match up the kind of paper that you've managed to discover with the terms you use to search it. And hopefully by doing this exercise, you'll begin to spot patterns in what works and what doesn't work. When looking to refine and search for different things. Once you've found a paper, simply place the author's surname and for name, The year of that paper, the title of that paper, the publisher of that paper, and the search term you've used. Then once you've completed this, you can reflect on how well the search term you use to find the paper reflects the reality of the paper itself. By comparing the two, you'll be able to better understand how you can alter your search terms in the future to be more efficient. So I'd like to thank you for taking this course. I wish you the best of luck with all your research in the future. And I hope you'll join me again. Please leave any feedback you have in the common section and until next time. Thank you very much.