Google and other search engines are quick and easy ways to find answers to your questions, but you cannot rely on them entirely when searching for the evidence for your assignments.
Personal / social web surfing is different to academic searching so you may need to look in different places. Just because you use google / wikipedia to find out answers to questions you are interested in does not mean these should necessarily be your first port of call when producing an academic assignment.
You need to find trustworthy evidence for your assignments, and the major difficulty in searching the web is that you don’t necessarily have the background knowledge to do this. If you are researching a condition or a treatment that you have never heard of then it becomes very difficult to decide whether websites you come across are accurate and truthful and therefore suitable for your work. You really need to find sources of evidence that add to the quality and credibility of your work; using google might feel easier than learning how to use academic databases, but bear in mind the effort you then need to put in to evaluate what you find.
Google is not ‘bad’ – neither is wikipedia for that matter, but web based resources have their limits.
What does Google do well?
- Huge coverage and up to date information
- Easy and familiar search interface
- Options for advanced features
- Google Scholar allows you to search academic content & focuses on journal articles, if searching from on campus this will tie in to our Find It links to help you get the full text.
- “Define:” feature allows you to locate definitions of a term where they appear on the web.
- Domain searching (within the advanced options) allows you to search within an area of the internet, for example “.nhs.uk”.
What’s missing from a google search?
- Opportunity to build a systematic search structure or combine searches easily
- Facility to truly narrow down results using limits as you can in a database
- Features such as saving your search or specific results to return to at a later date
- A lot of academic material, such as journal articles, may not appear in a google search - Google Scholar is better for this as it focuses more on ‘scholarly literature’.
So what should i use google for?
- To find websites where they are needed, for example locating what patient information is available on a condition, or finding product information for a device or aid.
- To navigate to websites for professional / government / charitable organisations such as Department of Health.
Where else should i go for my research?
- Start with textbooks, encyclopedias and dictionaries to understand your key terms – if you don’t understand your topic you can’t research it properly.
- Find the latest research articles in academic databases; you may use something like google scholar as part of this (this works better on campus as it then links automatically to our full text resources).
- Search in subject gateways on the web - try Intute or NHS Evidence - these allow you to search as if you were somewhere like google, but the resources have been evaluated or checked to some degree to ensure you are not finding inaccurate or unsafe information.
- Consider web content that might be useful for example professional or government information.
How do I learn how to use these tools?
You can get help from your Academic Support Librarian on how to locate books / dictionaries etc and how to use the databases we have access to. You can find our contact information on the About Us page of our blog.
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