I attended a library workshop yesterday called “Googling for Scholars.” The session was very informative and helpful in various ways. The main tool that we focused on was Google Scholar. I’ve heard of Google Scholar in the past, but after having tried it out once or twice, wasn’t really too impressed with what it could do in comparison to other online databases available through American University’s library website. Fortunately, through this workshop I was able to learn how to use Google Scholar more effectively, especially now that it has been linked with American University’s library in some important ways. Here I will try to compare the potential strengths of Google Scholar with other databases available through the library’s site.
We mainly talked about how Google Scholar could be used for historiographical purposes or to learn more about individual authors and how connected their scholarship is to other contemporary scholarship. Google Scholar has a feature where you can search for an author, see what they’ve written, and then see how often that article/book has been cited by other authors. This is an essential tool for both building source lists and seeing what the most important work is in the field. Before, this was the primary use of Google Scholar, but now if you access it through the library’s Aladin website (Library’s main site, click on Research/Aladin and then Aladin homepage) you can actually access full text articles online if they are available through American University’s subscriptions. This increased usability makes Google Scholar a far more useful tool. You can also search for books in the American University library directly from Google Scholar since it is now linked with the library, just make sure to go through the library’s site to get to Google Scholar to use all these additional features.
So, how does this compare to what’s already out there in terms of historiographical tools? Currently, I tend to use a combination of resources for finding book reviews and historiographical essays. J-STOR is an excellent tool for finding these sources in full-text if the articles are at least 5 years old, but for newer reviews things get slightly more confusing. EbscoHost and Proquest search (both available through the American University Library) cover this time period, but are a bit more sporadic in bringing up reviews and giving you access to full-text versions of those reviews. Nonetheless, they often do the job. I’ve also used the History Cooperative (through the library’s site) to search for reviews/historiography on more recent books and it will often bring up reviews that were hard to find other places, but it is not exactly comprehensive. Two other online sources that I need to experiment with further, which were mentioned at yesterday’s workshop, are Project Muse and America: History and Life. I used America: History and Life in writing my thesis and it is useful for finding anything that has been written on a subject as it searches dissertations and unpublished works, but does not always provide easy access to these materials. I need to experiment further with Project Muse to see what it’s strengths and weaknesses are.
The library workshop on Google Scholar was great in that it showed me some great ways to use that resource and provided the vital information (which grants Google Scholar true usability) that it had been linked with the American University Library. The discussion about what sources to use at different points in searching was also quite helpful for future bibliography building as well as finding reviews and constructing historiographies.