Google Scholar

 This edition of #22 for ‘22 is not a disaster recovery resource per se, but it is a gateway tool to a bunch of research that can help us in our roles.

Everyone knows how to use Google (although according to this piece, most of us are only using a few of the many functions that are available). But lots of people don’t know about Google’s nerdy cousin: Google Scholar.

There are two tricky issues with academic publishing that Google Scholar can help with. The first is access to publications and the second is access to a searchable database of research.

One of the most vexing things about the world of academic research is the strange, strange world of publishing. We don’t really have time to get into it here (see here or here or here for explanations of the weirdness that is the academic publishing industry), but basically academic research careers are very contingent on publishing in academic journals. The fancier, the better.

Researchers usually have two choices when publishing their research work: a) they pay a fee usually between $2000-$6000 to make the work ‘open access’ meaning that readers don’t have to pay to access it, or b) they don’t pay a fee to publish it but the readers will probably have to pay to access it.

There are some exceptions to this rule, but paywalls remain a major barrier for people who don’t have access to university libraries to accessing scientific research papers.

The second problem is access to research databases. Most people who aren’t employed or students of academic institutions don’t have access to research databases.

Google scholar doesn’t exactly fix either of these issues but it does help. It’s just like normal Google but for research publications. You can type in your topic into the search bar and (hopefully) relevant articles will appear. Where they are free to access or the author has made a pre-print version available, you can see it at no cost.

Google Scholar isn’t perfect of course and there are still loads of other issues regarding knowledge translation that academic publishing doesn’t solve. But… it is a pretty good alternative for people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to a lot of research.

Have a look at some search terms that might be relevant to your work and see what comes up – you might find that this is a new gateway to accessing research that otherwise might be hard to access.