Hey there welcome back to this smart student my name is chelsea seaburn if you’ve been with me for a while then you already know that academic writing is one of my favorite things to teach because I wholeheartedly believe it’s one of the most important skills you can have as a college student but for today I want to take a step back from academic writing and I want to talk about academic researching because if you have a literature review to write a research paper to write any paper to write or who knows a test to study for how effective you are at researching directly translates into how successful you’ll be at the thing that it is that you’re trying to tackle so with that in mind I don’t want to talk about researching as a whole I want to talk about the world’s largest search engine for academic resources not google but its big brother google scholar research so if that sounds good to you come with me okay so google scholar research is a search engine but rather than housing all of the world’s information like google scholar research specializes in academic sources.
This is why it’s great if you’re writing a literature review a research paper is because it’s a reliable place to find credible sources now since google scholar research is a search engine there’s one key thing that you need to understand in order to operate it in the best way possible and that is so much like google google scholar research uses keywords to function think of keywords as the language that google scholar research speaks it’s important you understand this because you using keywords correctly determines how the conversation goes with google scholar research determines how effective you are with communicating with google scholar research because since you are responsible for inputting the keywords it’s up to you whether you have a great conversation with google scholar research or a not so great conversation now with that in mind there are two things I recommend doing before you even start your research okay so if you watch this video on google you’re going to be familiar with this first strategy but it’s important to reiterate it here so you’re going to get a little refresher because the first thing I recommend doing before you open google scholar research before you start your research is take your given topic and create a list of acceptable keywords based on the keywords in your topic so for example let’s say your topic is something like the impact competitive group sports have on the mental health of adolescents.
Great the problem is many of you will take that topic and type it into google scholar research verbatim that and only that and while that’s a great place to start searching for only that topic is inefficient research so let me show you what I mean let’s take that topic and type it into google scholar research and let’s see what results pull up so from my initial impression as you can see here the results are all over the board this first study is a norwegian study the second one is an observational study going down the list I see that they’re approaching this concept from how competitive sports affect self-concept in early adolescence this one’s talking about self-image.
start with adolescents my question to you is are there any other acceptable synonyms that you would use in place of adolescence yeah I can think of a few to name a few on the screen right here as you can see there are other words you can use to search in place of adolescence this is important because it’s going to help broaden your search results you’re not going to pigeonhole yourself into one keyword only on the other hand some of the keywords in your writing prompt may be too broad so this second tip is going to approach this from the exact opposite angle because take sports for example if you type sports into google scholar research what do you think google scholar research is going to pull up well you don’t know, so understanding which keywords that you want to use in those cases is going to help you narrow your search results it’s going to help you create very specific targeted searches for google scholar research so that way you have a solid foundation for your research so now after doing this exercise which takes about five minutes by the way keep that in mind but after doing this exercise and you’ve created your list of keywords your topic may be something like the impact competing and elite gymnastics has on the development of eating disorders and female gymnasts do you see how different that is matter of fact I have a feeling that if I were to type that into google scholar research we would pull up some really good articles just on that alone so as you can see here the difference between this search query, elite gymnasts fantastic that right there would be an article I would read all of these other articles i’m not going to go through all of them but as you can see just based on the bolded highlighted words alone all fall in line with that topic so this is a great place to start but now let’s talk about the second thing I recommend you do before you start your google scholar research searches and that is to simply take your topic and you type them into google scholar research google scholar research is going to pull up answers to those questions which again is just another great way of refining and defining your search results but now let’s go ahead and dive into google scholar research and break this thing down okay hello friends welcome to my computer so the first thing I want to pull up is let’s start with a new topic so now we’re going to talk about how management’s leadership styles affect their employees job satisfaction so i’m going to take this we’re going to copy it and let’s pull up google scholar research and you have all of your articles saved in your library creating your reference list is a matter of coming back to google scholar research and using the citation feature pretty cool huh but now I want to talk about gaining access to the articles that you want to read i’m sure you’re already aware of this but not all articles are accessible through google scholar research but don’t worry there’s a few things you can do so first of all you want to pay attention to the right hand side, as you can see all articles have different versions offered so this is usually a great way to gain access now before I move on to the next point I quickly just want to offer this up as well if you are unable to access an article through google scholar research or another means you can always take down the title of the article and I would really only use it for important cases so we just went over how to save organize and access articles effectively in google scholar research which is important that you understand that for the rest of this video just so you know the next two halves of this video I first want to talk about how to refine your searches with bullion operators and bullion operators are simply the functions that you use with those keywords to communicate with google scholar research, add in one of those other keywords that you’re willing to accept as well how you would do this is you would use the boolean operator or note how it’s typed in capital case it has to be otherwise google scholar research will not understand it’s a boolean operator.
Now let’s say you want to go ahead and if you notice that shaved about a million results off the search query because now google scholar research is going to give you articles that contain health benefits and so the way you would do this is use quotation marks double quotation marks.
Pardon me you’re going to find that double quotation marks are so beneficial when it comes to researching so let’s have a look at what happens you hit search and from almost two hundred thousand you go below two thousand the reason being is that because you just communicated to google scholar research that you want to pull up search results that contains this phrase verbatim in other words this pulls up an exact phrase match but let’s go ahead and when I hit enter this brings the poll down to 61 results so now you have a very targeted search query because what you told google scholar research is that you want to find these keywords health benefits of yoga but it needs to be contained in the title now if you notice health benefits of yoga are sometimes in that order and put those double quotations around this phrase now google scholar research is going to search for all in title and health benefits of yoga needs to be in that order so we’re going to go from 61 results down to 38. so this is great for finding very specific articles for your research so now you’re sifting through these articles and you need articles within the last five years well google scholar research can search for specific date ranges so in this case if you come over here to the left hand side and click since 2017 google scholar research is going to pull up search results for these keywords and the topic is the republican party from the united states excellent you start into google scholar research by typing in those exact keywords and it’s a good search results you have about 900 000 up here you’re sifting through these articles however let’s click on cited by 59.
Google scholar research is going to pull up those 59 articles for you so you can sift through these articles yourself now something to take note is notice how the cited by count skyrocketed with these new articles.
If you’ll notice they’re all in the 100s if not a few hundreds why did this count significantly increase simply put the reason being is that if these articles cited the previous article well then that makes them more current and it’s actually kind of genius so it’s simply that you can search by author so for example let’s say there’s an author you like or not even like but you know that they’re credible in their field so let’s look at this second article if you’ll notice in green we have a dj hess that’s the author who wrote this article so if I click on his name google scholar research brings you to all of the articles that he’s written now this is incredibly useful, you want to find more articles that they’re a part of or that they’ve written google scholar research will help you do that now that being said this search strategy may not be your number one approach but it’s important to keep in mind because it adds creativity to your research oh hey you’re still here right now that’s a good sign that means you didn’t go running for the hills with this academic researching video by the way let me know which one of those tips was your favorite which one are you going to use which one did you already know about or shoot just say hi to me down in the comment section below I love interacting with my subscribers but as always thank you so much for being here it means the world to me come join the smart student community either on facebook or patreon i’d love to have you at both places and as always be sure to give this video a big thumbs up share it with your friends and of course subscribe for more videos like this every week thanks guys you.
Researchers wishing to produce a research paper using Google Scholar may find Global Research Letters (GRL) to be a useful source. A great tool for doing literature reviews and locating research gaps is Google Scholar, a potent search engine that indexes academic literature such as articles, conference papers, and theses. Authors can be sure that their research work is based on the most recent and reliable scientific data by using GRL as a source of information.
Additionally, GRL can offer a platform for the research paper’s publication after it has been written. GRL guarantees that all articles published in the journal fulfil the highest standards of accuracy and quality in science as a peer-reviewed publication. Authors can make sure that their work is seen by the larger scientific community and received the recognition it merits by having their research paper published in GRL. For researchers trying to make a name for themselves in their field or raise their profile in the scientific community, this can be especially helpful. In the end, writers may make sure that their research work is based on the most recent scientific information and receives the attention it merits in the larger scientific community by using GRL as a resource and publication platform.