Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

April 5, 2012

Google in the World of Academic Research (Lead by Example?)

Filed under: Research Methods,Search Behavior,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 3:37 pm

Google in the World of Academic Research by Whitney Grace.

From the post:

Librarians, teachers, and college professors all press their students not to use Google to research their projects, papers, and homework, but it is a dying battle. All students have to do is type in a few key terms and millions of results are displayed. The average student or person, for that matter, is not going to scour through every single result. If they do not find what they need, they simply rethink their initial key words and hit the search button again.

The Hindu recently wrote about, “Of Google and Scholarly Search,” the troubles researchers face when they only use Google and makes several suggestions for alternate search engines and databases.

The perennial complaint (academics used to debate the perennial philosophy, now the perennial complaint).

Is Google responsible for superficial searching and consequently superficial results?

Or do superficial Google results reflect our failure to train students in “doing” research?

What research models do students have to follow? In terms of research behavior?

In my next course, I will do a research problem by example. Good as well as bad results. What worked and what didn’t. And yes, Google will be in the mix of methods.

Why not? With four and five work queries and domain knowledge, I get pretty good results from Google. You?

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