This entry, is all about me figuring out how to use Google Scholar. Oh, and having a play with it to see if I could find some quality material for the assignment. If you're unfamiliar with 'Google Scholar', you can find it at http://scholar.google.com.au/. This is what it looks like, very much like the standard 'Google' screen:
From what I can see, the real benefit of the Google Scholar search engine, is the "cited link" on the search results. This link, is a link between this document and other documents connected to it through using it as a citation. Very useful! At first, I didn't realise how great this particular tool could be...
My first search: [ "inquiry based learning" & "university"] returned 8400 hits.
I realised pretty quickly, that a lot of the material retrieved wasn't directly related to my topic. I narrowed the results down:
[ "inquiry based learning" and "at university level" ]
The results were a much more manageable 64 hits.
On viewing on particular document, I noticed that there was some brilliant material referenced to a "Levy, 2009". So, I thought I'd throw Levy into the search engine:
[ "Levy, 2009" and "Inquiry based learning"]
Up jumped "43" results, but the really good bit is that fact that the search results contained material written by "Levy" in 2009, that was particularly pertinent to my assignment. Then, by hitting the "Cited by" link in the search results documents, I found a bunch of other quality documents containing the work of Levy and other people on Inquiry based learning at university level.
I was impressed with Google Scholar, from 8400 documents, I managed to get the reslults down to 43! Wow. And then, thanks to the cited link I was able to find a whole bunch of stuff directly related to my topic.
I must say, I'm really impressed with Scholar as a tool, and hope to use it again soon in a research context.
As a fairly new user of Google Scholar I will have to try and use the 'cited' tool more often. Sometimes when you are onto a good thing you want to find out as mush as possible and it seems that this tool will facilitate the process. Thanks for mentioning it- it is good to know that someone has used it and found it helpful.
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