You need to start your research and most people just start typing words into Google, but that s not the best way to start.

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1 Academic Research Using Google Worksheet This worksheet is designed to have you examine using various Google search products for research. The exercise is not extensive but introduces you to things that you may not know exist. STEP ONE You need to start your research and most people just start typing words into Google, but that s not the best way to start. Write in this space a topic you d like to know more about. The first step in research is to develop a topic statement. Here are some examples: o I need to find statistics on transportation in New Jersey. o I am studying the U.N.s response to the crisis in Darfur o I want to find other countries immigration policies. In the space provided, write a topic statement based on the previous topic you just indicated:. Now, in the spaces provided, write some key words that you think might help you find this information on Google. STEP TWO 1. Go to 2. When you get there, locate the box where you normally type words for a search. To the RIGHT of that box is a link called Advanced Search. Click on that. 3. On this page locate the + sign down toward the bottom left and click on it. Now your page is set up to use for searching. Always get in the habit on Google of going to the Advanced Search page.

2 On the Advanced Search Page you have the main section that is divided into four area. In the spaces provided, write these section titles (The first has been provided for): Find web pages that have + There are options on this page that enable you to further refine your research. Explore the Advanced Search page and see what these are. STEP THREE Conduct a search. 1. From the Advanced Page, take one of the search phrases you generated the end of STEP ONE and put that in the first box on the page. 2. In early stages of research it is often helpful to use three (3) fields on the Advanced Page to refine your search. o Go to the filed labeled Search within a site or domain. You can place a specific web address or even domain extension (.com,.gov,.org, etc) in this. For this type.com. o Next find the field labeled Date which is below the previous. Click on the drop down box next to it and see what options you have. For this exercise, type past year. o Finally, locate the field called, Where your keywords show up. Click the drop down and see the options. Click on the option in the title of the page These three previous are the most common ways to refine early searches in Google. 3. Click the Advanced Search button at the bottom of the page and you ll get your results. STEP FOUR 1. Go back to the Advanced Search page. 2. clear and reset all of the search fields. 3. Go back to STEP ONE and find a another keyword or phrase and put that in the first field on this page and go to the bottom and click Advanced Search. 4. You ll arrive at the results page. 5. Toward the top of your search results in the upper left just before your search results begin you ll find the words Show Options and a + sign next to it. Click the + sign and you ll see a

3 column appear on the left. (PROBLEM: you may see a sign and the words Hide Options. If you do then there s nothing to click) 6. Explore the items in the left hand column and see how your search results change once you click something. In the space below, write the options that exist in the left hand column. EXPLORING GOOGLE SCHOLAR Released in November 2004, Google Scholar ( allows you to search across many disciplines to find scholarly sources, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. To do this Google Scholar: o Crawls publicly-accessible documents that are thought to be scholarly (i.e. come from universities, research institutes, academic associations, etc.). o Partners with publishers to provide access to online content. o Generates references by mining the sources crawled for additional citations. Google Scholar allows for a great deal of flexibility and can find journal articles which are available in certain university libraries. However, there is no provision yet to allow for requests of articles through Google. Let s Explore a little bit more of Google Scholar 1. Go to 2. Find the Advanced Search link to the right of the search box and click on it. 3. Explore this page and write in the space below the different ways that you can refine a search in Google Scholar. Let s Search with Google Scholar 1. You are on the Advanced Search page (if you aren t then navigate there)

4 2. In the top field type nuclear energy and click the submit button. 3. On the results page you see what looks like normal Google search results. Click on the first item. When you get there you see a page summarizing the document. This is one of the common issues with Google Scholar. While access to scholarly articles is increasing, many articles are NOT available unless you have special passwords and accounts. 4. Go back to the Advanced Search page and type nuclear energy in the first search field. In the Date field type the range of Click search and you ll go to the results field. 6. The first search result has a link to the right that says arxiv.org. If you click on that then you have the actual document. One other thing. Go back to the Advance Search page and look for the area titled Articles and patents. You ll see that you can narrow your search results to various disciplines. Google Scholar is particularly good at finding resources in the sciences and medicine. One final thing. 1.Conduct any search you like in Google Scholar 2. on the results page, look toward the top where there is a search box. Next to it you will see a link that says Scholar Preferences. Click on that link 3. On the next page scroll down until you see Bibliography Manager toward the bottom. 4. Show links to import citations into, and then chose Endnote from the drop down menu. 5. Click the Save Preference button at the bottom right. 6. Look at the very last line of links associated with every search results. At the end of the last line you will see the words Import into Endnote. By clicking this you can import a citation directly into bibliography software like Endnote or other similar software programs. EXPLORING GOOGLE BOOKS Since late 2004 Google has partnered with several major research libraries to digitize many of the works in their extensive collections and make them accessible via Google Book Search ( Google Books finds a variety of books for all researchers but still has limited ability for scholarly research. Google Books Search allows you to: o Search the contents of books using keywords and phrases. o Limit your searches to the title, author or publisher.

5 o Search by the publication date or the book's ISBN number (if you have it). 1. Go to 2. Find the Advanced Search link to the right of the search field and click on it. 3. Just like other Google products, you have more options from this screen. In the space below, list the ways you can modify a search in Google Books. 4. Type Immigration policy into the search box and run the search. 5. On the results page you get a number of results. Look at the summary of these results and you ll see different kinds of previews that are available: o No Preview only bibliographic information o Limited Preview a few pages o Snippet Preview only a few lines 6. Click on any of the books in the results list. Explore what happens on the page. 7. Go to the left and see the section titled Get this book You ll see that you can buy the book at some online stores or even find it in a library and request it there. 1. Go back to the Advanced Search page and type immigration policy into the search field. 2. Go to just below the blue area at the type and find the Content option on the left. 3. Choose the Magazines option and then run the search. You have just looked for your phrase in magazine. Google books allows for word searching in a large database of magazines. 4. Click on any one of the options and explore what you find. OTHER GOOGLE PRODUCTS There are two other Google products that you may want to utilize in your research. The first is Google News Go to

6 Explore the various options that are available to you. Many researchers find Google News (news.google.com) a useful tool in research. The results one gets are not scholarly in nature, but a search using Google news can reveal what coverage a certain topic has received in recent days and weeks. Google news excels at finding articles that appear in print sources that are available on the web. Essentially it searches news sources like newspaper and magazine web sites as well as web sites associated with news outlets like CNN or FOX News. While Google news will show results from stories on electronic media sites, it does not search audio or video and present those results. The basic advanced search page allows for news searches within the past month but there are archives that can be searched that go back further. It s possible to have personalized search terms and have these terms placed on the Google News front page so you can access them quickly or alerts can be set up to send the latest news of interest to you to your or even a mobile phone Another Google product some researchers find useful is the Google Blog Search Go to Explore and see the options that exist. Always remember that the content of blogs can be problematic for researchers since much of the information is opinion or unsupported. One should never cite a blog in academic research. However, a search of blogs can be useful because often blog authors cite other online articles or sources that can prove helpful to researchers. They can call to mind resources that have escaped traditional search engines. Many people in the academic community have set up blogs as a way to share research or insight on research. The problem with Google Blog Search is that right now there is no easy way to limit search results to academic or scholarly blogs. Once might be able to search with a.edu domain, but that may eliminate a good number of blog with academic relevance that do use that specific domain.