Knowing the academic bent of Troppo readers, I thought I would advise that Google has a new offering – Google Scholar.
The aim is:
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
So there you go.
Thanks very much, Scott. In twenty seconds I found three very useful papers I hadn’t seen before, if that’s any indication of this engine’s power.
Though no amount of search engine power can get around the academic practice of rarely using first names, making it hard to do an efficient author search.
Though no amount of search engine power can get around the academic practice of rarely using first names, making it hard to do an efficient author search.
Just to make sure any undergraduate student readers don’t get the wrong idea, keep in mind that there are numerous subscription-based bibliographic databases which index and abstract a huge range of scholarly publications, to which your university no doubt subscribes, and which should generally be your first port of call when searching for relevant journal articles in your discipline. For law, AGISplus is probably the best place to find articles about law in Australia, South Pacific and S-E Asia, while Wilson’s Index to Legal Periodicals is probably the best starting point for US and Europe.
You’ll almost certainly be able to identify many more relevant articles by searching a bibliographic database than by using Google Academic. That said, it’s certainly a welcome innovation and a useful backup facility. It may well be possible to find useful material that hasn’t been published in a refereed scholarly journal, and therefore hasn’t been abstracted by the bibliographic databases. But you should also be wary about using such sources as primary references for undergraduate essays.
I second James’s comment.
for the pseudo-intelligent like myself this is a fantastic resource as it seperates the wheat from the chaff that inhabits ordinary google.
actually it seems to be either crap or broken – I did a search on myself and it came back with zip – no really!
As Homer pointed out, it’s only for the pseudo-intelligent.