Scholarly Google

Google seems to have more than just Gmail up its sleeves in Beta Testing. I found out about this nifty tool called Google Scholar that searches through the net for only “scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. ” I find it extremely useful when one is looking for a particular article by a certain writer about quite a general subject. For example, searching for ‘Multimedia’ in Google Search will turn out all sorts of useless resellers and company sites. Using Google Scholar I can be sure to find some published journals and educational research materials.

Wow, Google really understand researchers. I wouldn’t say everyone will definitely benefit from this tool, as not all the results found have the actual paper for download. Sometimes, it’s just the abstract or a link to another site that requires payment. Nevertheless, for those that are freely available, it is fantastic enough. It just makes my life easier.