Speaker 1: Hello there. In this video, we'll be talking about how to find significantly more academic resources on the web. While we've all heard of Google, we may or may not be familiar with Google Scholar, which is what we're going to talk about in this video. So let me go ahead and put my Scholar hat on. If you want to have some sense of how big of a nerd I am, I legit bought this at a Renaissance festival. So let's get academic. Okay, so the best way to show you what Google Scholar can do is to actually perform a comparison search between Google and Google Scholar. So let's say that you are trying to research the topic of coronary artery disease. So let's go ahead and type that into Google. And let's just scroll down and see what kind of titles we're getting for these articles. We've got Coronary Artery Disease Symptoms and Causes, Coronary Artery Disease, Coronary Artery Disease Symptoms Causes Diagnosis, Coronary Artery Disease, Coronary Artery Disease, Coronary Heart Disease, Coronary Artery Disease Causes, Symptoms, and Treatments, so on and so forth. So obviously, some of these sources are going to be reliable ones and some of them will not. So when you're doing these things first, you have to make sure that you're only picking from the reliable sources that you're getting in your Google search. But even if your source is reliable, the issue here is that the information you're going to be getting from one of these sources is going to be very general, broad background information on your topic. And that's fine. Sometimes you need some more general, more broad information for a paper. But in a college-level paper, you also want to make sure that you have more specific, detailed information. So right now, you can probably predict whatever you're going to see in any of these articles. Any one of them that you click on, you're probably going to find information on symptoms, risk factors, treatments, diagnoses, et cetera. So when you perform the same search in Google Scholar, you'll see that the kinds of sources you get are very different. So the URL for Google Scholar is simply scholar.google.com. So this is what Google Scholar looks like. And let's go ahead and try the same search here. Coronary artery disease. And now let's look at our titles. So we've got genome-wide association study in Han Chinese identifies four new susceptibility loci for coronary artery disease. Percutaneous coronary intervention versus coronary artery bypass grafting for severe coronary artery disease. Inflammation, atherosclerosis, and coronary artery disease. Pathophysiology of coronary artery disease. Now I don't have to continue reading these for you guys to be able to tell that these articles are going to be significantly more academic than the ones that we were looking at in our basic Google search. So let's go ahead and try to open one of these. Let's see. Let's try this one here. I'll open this in a new tab. Just so we could see what one of these articles might look like. So we see this comes from the New England Journal of Medicine. And if we scroll down, these academic articles will always have an abstract. So the abstract is basically just the summary of the article. So when you're doing your research, you want to start by just having a read through the abstract, which ends here. Sometimes you see it as just one big paragraph, and sometimes you see it like you do here, divided up into little sections. But it's never really longer than a page. So that abstract should let you know whether or not this is going to be a useful source for you, or if you can eliminate that source. And then if you keep scrolling down, you see how detailed the source is. We've got graphs, we've got data. So that's what an academic source looks like. Sometimes in Google Scholar, you will also get hits for books. So you might get books, and you might get scientific articles such as this one. Back to our basic search. So why is Google Scholar getting us these kinds of sources, as opposed to the more broad sources that we were seeing in our regular Google search? Well, that's because Google ranks sources based on basically a popularity contest. So whatever's getting clicked on the most is going to move up. And that's usually more general information that the average everyday person is looking up for personal use, not for academic purposes. But Google Scholar is ranking sources the way that researchers do. So it's looking at things like who wrote the article, where was it published, how many times has it been cited in other academic literature, etc. So that's why we're getting these kinds of sources here. Now since we're here, I wanted to go ahead and point you to this feature, which basically allows you to customize the range of years for your sources. So you might be working on something where you want to make sure that the literature you're using is recent. So let's say you don't want it to be any older than 2015, you can click on custom range and make sure that all of your sources are between that year and the present. Now the last thing that you need to know about Google Scholar is that you don't necessarily have access to every single article that appears in your search. When you see these little links to the side, that normally indicates that when you click the article open, you will have full access. However, you're also going to find sources such as these, for example, where you see nothing here. Most likely when we open those, we might have access to the abstract, but in order to access the full article, we would have to pay for a subscription to a scholarly journal or pay individually for that article. Now please do not do that. There is no need to purchase any academic sources. You've got plenty to use within Google Scholar that is fully accessible, and you also have your library databases. And we'll talk about that in more detail in another video because that's a whole other topic. So there you have it. Google Scholar, true to its name, provides us with a really user-friendly way to seek information online that's not just reliable, but also truly scholarly. Hence the hat. Farewell.