Guest post by D. Kelley, Faculty of Science
D. Kelley
Recently, my graduate student and I concocted a new scheme for a particular type of scientific analysis. As is often the case for those who scurry about in the research trenches, the work had no early element of “research” in the sense that the public (or a librarian) might understand the word. In particular, we did not begin by consulting the literature. We simply used all that we knew at that time, to try to address our challenge. (The cheeky dictum “some read the literature, others write it” is actually not a bad mantra for researchers.)
As initial tests of the method showed more and more promise, however, we started to get interested in the literature! We had to decide whether to cite someone on the method, or whether to write a new paper that others could cite.
This is where our story approaches the context of this blog.
How did we check whether our technique was new? The answer is that we used the Swiss army knife of lazy research: Google Scholar. Sure, we have other steps that we will follow, e.g. searching from within the websites of the key journals, and phoning friends who work on similar things. But these are second steps. The point is that our first step did not involve our university library. We did not visit the library website, we did not phone our friendly and skillful subject specialist librarian, we did not step one foot towards that building with the good coffee.
The question is: did we do the right thing, or did we short-change ourselves? Might we have found deeper, more reliable results, outside the Google comfort zone? Basically, has Google addled us? Have we been, to coin a word, “gaddled”?
Next post: Crown, Copyright, Common Wealth
Dan:
As University Librarian I’m the last to fault your approach. In fact, studies have shown 80% of researchers, students, etc., begin with Google (So do I!) The point is ultimately not to stop there. The Library has tools and expertise to help you further along when and if the need arises. Part of the problem, of course, is knowing when that is–i.e., knowing when you’ve been short-changed.
If you like Google Scholar then you will also like Google onepass: pretty soon you will also be able to get your hands on every article or book you might want without going through the library (http://www.google.com/landing/onepass/). Talk about disruptive technologies!
Dan: Google offers a powerful suite of tools (GoogleScholar, Googlebooks, GoogleDocs etc.) that David, the librarian, student and researcher, really appreciates. If I may be so bold, what you describe may fall more into the category of the “educated guess.” You are not a novice researcher; I dare say you have read a lot of the literature generally prior to this project. You obviously know your method is novel, and you didn’t just pluck it off a tree out back. I expect when it comes time to publish your work, your reviewers will insist you prove from the literature that it is in fact novel. Having said that, there is certainly room to wander off the beaten path in research; if more researchers did that it would be exciting to see what is discovered. Knowing there are paths to wander off is also helpful.
One thing is too clear. Google cannot provide any knowledge in depth. As an engineer, I never find anything useful for my report topics. Professional publications evade it.
Besides that, I discovered that Wikipedia provides different information in different languages.
If you accessed any articles via the Full-Text@Dal links that appear in Google Scholar than you did use the library of 2011. Also, many studies have been done on your very question including this from Google Scholar:
Comparison of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: strengths and weaknesses ME Falagas, EI Pitsouni, GA Malietzis… – The FASEB Journal, 2008 – FASEB