Guest post by D. Kelley, Faculty of Science

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”?

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