INFORMATION LITERACY :
DATABASES :
INTERNET: SEARCH: TOOLS :
RESEARCH: TECHNIQUES :
EDITORIAL:
Googles and Databases: Where to Do Your Search for Scholarly Sources:
Some Issues to Consider


This post continues a discussion on EDTECH and my first comments on this
topic may be found in this Net-Gold post.


INFORMATION LITERACY :
DATABASES :
INTERNET: SEARCH: TOOLS :
RESEARCH: TECHNIQUES :
EDITORIAL:
The Power of Databases for Scholarly Research and
Provision of Full Text Output
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Net-Gold/message/20937>


Bruce Moon has posted a second excellent post on EDTECH that further
explains his views regarding Google and Google Scholar as tools of choice
for his research and I have responded with some observations found below.
Bruce Moon's very thought provoking observations may be found here:


From: Bruce Moon <bmoon@...>
List Editor: EDTECH Editor-Eiffert <edadmin5@...>
Editor's Subject: Re: For College Students Time Management is Biggest
Research Issue, says ProQuest Study
Author's Subject: Re: For College Students Time Management is Biggest
Research Issue, says ProQuest Study
Date Written: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 11:13:51 -0500
Date Posted: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 11:13:51 -0500
<http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=
EDTECH&month=0711&week=b&msg=lhuwr1%2b83d/2rTrNxyPpwg&user=&pw=>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/362h4p>


These are the comments I made in response to this post:


Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2007 04:40:25 -0500 (EST)
From: David P. Dillard <jwne@...>
To: EDTECH - Educational Technology <EDTECH@...>
Subject: Re: For College Students Time Management is Biggest Research Issue,
says ProQuest Study



First of all, I would like to thank and commend Bruce Moon for two excellent
posts regarding his methods of tracking down information sources for his
research. He has made some excellent points. I am the last person to
discourage the use of Google, Google Scholar, Google Government, Google Books,
Google News and other "Googles" in conducting searches, I use them every day to
help students, for my own curiousities and for content for the posts I provide
on Net-Gold.


Indeed, at the outset of 1999, I electronically penned a post as we got more
and more journals full text online. I noted in that post that there would be a
wonderful result if the same digitization and database aggregation happened to
books. I noted that very miniscule topics would be findable via searches in
books if such aggregation were to occur. In that post I noted that one could
find topics like the impact of Ronald Reagan on the jelly bean industry.
Another librarian asked permission to quote me in his article, liking the
example I selected.


Title: The E-Book: Pipe Dream or Potential Disaster? Authors: Dorman,
David
Source: American Libraries; Feb99, Vol. 30 Issue 2, p36


Around one o'clock in the morning, I discovered an email to me from the editor
of Online sometime in December 2005 requesting that I write an article about
Google Books for publication in Online. I had posted quite a bit regarding
Google Books and Google Print, the first name for this Google book aggregation
database. By 3:30 that morning, that article was in the editors email box.


Title: Librarians, Jelly Beans, and Google Book Search.
Authors: Dillard, David
Source: Online
March / April 2006 v. 30 no. 2 p. 20-21


These tools are very important and valuable and occasionally, I find more in
searches of Google Scholar than are findable in the databases accessed for the
same topic. Nevertheless, many search topics that I encounter are both very
complex and the individual facets of the topic describable by a number of
synonyms. The complex boolean and multi-step capabilities of search systems
like EBSCO, OVID, Dialog, Databstar, First Search and Datastar facilitate very
complex search statements that can be combined and limited to key fields like
subject heading, title and so forth. These kinds of searches often do not fare
well in search engines and they comprise a major portion of the search requests
I work with. In a World Usability Day session at Temple, a web designer at
Temple suggested Google as a rich resource for the topic search engine
optimization. He also noted the need to wade through a great deal of dot com
promotional links in the search results. I approached him at the end of the
session and suggested Google Scholar, Google Books and Google Government for
the same search as sources to find a far purer result of educational material
on this topic. He immediately modified his notes. In this case and in
searching in general, I am not opposed to using Google or the other Googles, I
am much more, however, in favor of using databases in addition as they usually
find important sources not found by the Googles. Nevertheless, the Google
"Book" project is digitising libraries, not books, hence articles in journals
are also getting digitized along with books and these are showing up in search
results of searches conducted in Google Books, so Google Books is becoming a
database for articles as well.


Furthermore, and perhaps in the time period you used EBSCO, EBSCO had versions
that were very inaccurate search tools and from the time we got EBSCO until one
fateful day that I learned they acquired the CINAHL, a nursing and medical
database, and I learned that EBSCO would have exclusive rights to make that
database available, I went off the deep end. Within a month of my post to the
MEDLIB-L list regarding that matter, Find Line searching became the universal
interface to EBSCO and I had personal passwords to the Find Line searching the
next day after my post and after a long talk with Chris Terlizzi the day of the
post.


DATABASES: DATABANKS AND SEARCH SERVICE PROVIDERS :
DATABASE: SEARCHING TECHNIQUES: EBSCO:
Customer Service Past and Present and Learning Better Ways to Use EBSCO
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Net-Gold/message/11695>


It could be that the problems faced by Bruce Moon in searching EBSCO prior to
the time of the above post were in part at least due to the fact that various
versions of EBSCO searched very inaccurately when proximity searching and
boolean searching occured in an individual search dialog box, the later with
the use of parenthesis as discussed in the post cited immediately above. That
problem is corrected in EBSCO and the search interface is usually very reliable
(all computers have bad days). The same problems in searching, however, are
extremely alive and well in Google as noted in a post that I sent to the
University Web Design group yesterday.


Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 16:39:15 -0500 (EST)
From: David P. Dillard <jwne@...>
Reply-To: University and College Webmasters <uwebd@...>
To: University and College Webmasters <uwebd@...>
Subject: [uwebd] Re: Is the Hidden Web Invisible to the Class of Google



The text in that post is my own writing with the exception of the quotation at
the top of the post taken from an EDTECH post.

There has been a very interesting response to my post on that list at this URL:

<http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=
EDTECH&month=0711&week=b&msg=lhuwr1%2b83d/2rTrNxyPpwg&user=&pw=>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/362h4p>

One thing I can say regarding the use of Google is that it is very erratic.
First of all in some searches I execute the results by the end of the pages
with documents shown as Google search results, the number of results has shrunk
and are very small compared to the initial number of search results shown with
an invitation to

"repeat the search with the omitted results included."

All search results shown below are with omitted results included.

If I search this in Google:

"net-gold" and temple.edu"

I get this result.

Web Results 1 - 10 of about 11,700 for "net-gold" and temple.edu".

I was only getting around 800 or so documents for this search over a long
period of time as recently as two or three weeks ago. Net-Gold's content is not
growing that fast.

One of my posters, Sean Grigsby has contributed a huge collection of posts and
I send them to our various archives, and temple.edu is in my signature lines
and in the address FROM line of the repost I am sending.

Web Results 1 - 4 of 4 for "net-gold" and temple.edu" and grigsby.

These searches both included the omitted results.

At the time I found only 800 posts for Temple.edu and Net-Gold, Sean Grigsby
had posted over 6,000 of those posts, both including the omitted results. I am
simply amazed that one of my posters can send over 6,000 posts from a total of
800 posts, he must have studied multiplication very well when in school.

It gets better.

Net-Gold is publically archived on Temple Listserv, Yahoo Groups, JIGLU and
Yahoo Groups as well as on Google Groups. All these are public archives that
are indexed by search engines. Google finds over 11,000 Net-Gold posts from all
of these sources and beyond.

Here is a short example from Google of the diversity of places that Net-Gold
shows up in combination with temple.edu (.)



Archives of NET-GOLD@... of
NET-GOLD@.... Net Gold Listserv List. Search the archives Post
to the list Join or leave the list (or change settings) ...
listserv.temple.edu/archives/net-gold.html - 11k - Cached - Similar pages



H-EDTECH Discussion Network[Net-Gold] Broadening Participation.. by Albert
Einstein David P. Dillard <jwne@...>. -, Re: Database Server Hardware
Recommendations? ...
www.h-net.org/~edweb/ - 9k - Cached - Similar pages



Law-Lib: [Net-Gold] UNITED STATES: GOVERNMENT: FEDERAL: DOCUMENTemple
University Net-Gold Archive <net-gold@...>,
myarchives1@yahoogroups.com, MediaMentor Discussion Group
<mediamentor@yahoogroups.com> ...
lawlibrary.ucdavis.edu/lawlib/Feb05/0376.html - 7k - Cached - Similar pages



Law-Lib: [Net-Gold] LIBRARY: WEBSITES: When the Power or ServerFrom: David P.
Dillard <jwne@...> Reply-To: Net-Gold@yahoogroups.com To: Net-Gold
<Net-Gold@yahoogroups.com>, Temple University Net-Gold Archive ...
lawlibrary.ucdavis.edu/Lawlib/May05/0055.html - 8k - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from lawlibrary.ucdavis.edu ]



NET-GOLD Archives -- November 2005 (#415)Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 05:49:22 -0500
Reply-To: Net Gold Listserv List <[log in to ......
<http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/net-gold.html> <http://www. ...
https://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0511&L=net-gold&T=0&P=59614 - 186k
- Cached - Similar pages



NET-GOLD Archives -- June 2006 (#379)Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2006 10:31:19 -0400
Reply-To: Net Gold Listserv List <[log ...
<http://diamond.temple.edu:81/search/> Here is a view of Paley Library from ...
https://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0606&L=net-gold&T=0&P=54344 - 29k
- Cached - Similar pages



LibGuides @ Temple University: General Internet & Print ResourcesDavid Dillard
Temple University (215) 204 - 4584 jwne@... Net-Gold
http://groups.yahoo.com/ group/net-gold Email Me My Subject Specialty: ...
guides.temple.edu/content.php?pid=1282 - 53k - Cached - Similar pages



TEMPLE: LIBRARIES: RESOURCES: Barbara Wright: Blackboard Resources ...Temple
University (215) 204 - 4584 j...@...
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/net-gold>
<http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ringleaders/davidd.html> ...
groups-beta.google.com/group/net-gold/browse_thread/thread/
d9a01e7a8f3174c0/1dbf64f720ccf97a?q=%22barbara... - 45k - Cached - Similar
pages



HISTORY: MEDIEVAL : DATABASES : RESEARCH: TECHNIQUES: Finding ...Temple
University (215) 204 - 4584 j...@... Net-Gold
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/net-gold>
<http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/net-gold.html> ...
groups.google.com/group/net-gold/browse_thread/thread/19d54fdab782f398 - 48k -
Cached - Similar pages



[DDN] [Net-Gold] Instant Messages, Lingering Paper Trail : Some ...[DDN]
[Net-Gold] Instant Messages, Lingering Paper Trail : Some Thoughts About ...
<http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/net-gold.html> General Internet ...
www.mail-archive.com/digitaldivide@.../msg06138.html - 11k - Cached
- Similar pages



Nevertheless, it turns out that Google Groups, that indexes only Google Groups
content, and Google Groups did appear in the above list, is an even richer
resource for the search results of this search "word" combination. Google
Groups finds more exclusively Google Groups Net-Gold posts than Google found
for all sources combined including Google Groups.


Groups View all web results Results 1 - 10 of about 15,700 for " net -
gold " and temple . edu "


Hence Google Groups has 15,700 of the entires for this search combination of
the 11,500 items total that Google can find that correspond to temple.edu and
net-gold (.)


Including omitted results, Google can only find less than half of these results
from Google Groups:


Web Results 1 - 10 of about 6,880 for "net-gold" and temple.edu" and
"groups.google"


The same kind of problem occured in EBSCO databases in the past and when I
finally reached the right person in EBSCO by indirection, this problem was
emphatically resolved for my institution and a whole bunch of other
institutions.


DATABASES: DATABANKS AND SEARCH SERVICE PROVIDERS :
DATABASE: SEARCHING TECHNIQUES: EBSCO:
Customer Service Past and Present and Learning Better Ways to Use EBSCO
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Net-Gold/message/11695>


The bottom line is that for those doing dissertations, thesis at any level or
research in preparation for the publication of articles or books, trusting the
searching of a tool that is this erratic is a very risky proposition in my
humble opinion. Certainly there is nothing wrong with using useful sources
found by one or more of the various Google search tools, but reliance on Google
without the use of other tools such as databases pertinent to the subject of a
serious research project is a very dangerous move in my view.


By the way, a search of Yahoo Groups Net-Gold site search engine shows that
Sean Grigsby has posted this level of content:


Matched Messages 1 - 10 of 1696

<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Net-Gold/msearch?
query=grigsby&submit=Search&charset=windows-1252>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/y2tsby>


Thanks to Skip Knox for his kind and interesting response to my original post.


------------------------------------------


The field that Bruce Moon was conducting research has also been a hard one
of the humanities that perhaps far less than fields like business,
medicine, law, psychology has been able to get their content full text
online. For years we had the print index version of Linguistics and
Language Behavior Abstracts, a rich resource in this field along with MLA
(Modern Language Association) in print only and only in recent years only
have we had Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts online in CSA and
to the best of my knowledge without full text in the database itself.
Hence language studies have lagged behind some other fields in being
sources for full text journal content online, part of the reason being the
humanities as research fields are not flush with money and the demand for
journals in this field, as compared say with journals like the Harvard
Business Review is small. Now the open access movement and authors placing
their articles online full text themsevles may contribute to the greater
success Bruce Moon has noticed of searches in Google Scholar in language
fields over databases for full text, not only in linguistics, but also in
other similar fields, particularly in the humanities. My solution, use
what works on a specific topic, but try databases as well as Googles and
other search engines for a better mix of results much of the time for the
research and writing one is doing.


Net-Gold on Google Books

<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Net-Gold/msearch?
query=%22google+books%22&submit=Search&charset=windows-1252>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/24bwx8>


Net-Gold on Google Print
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Net-Gold/msearch?query=%
22google+print%22&submit=Search&charset=utf-8>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/2yuo2u>


Net-Gold on Google Scholar
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Net-Gold/msearch?
query=%22google+scholar%22&submit=Search&charset=utf-8>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/2ce79d>



Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jwne@...
Net-Gold
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/net-gold>
<http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/net-gold.html>
<http://groups.google.com/group/net-gold?hl=en>
<http://net-gold.jiglu.com/>
General Internet & Print Resources
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Net-Gold/message/20309>
<http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ringleaders/davidd.html>
Educator-Gold
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Educator-Gold/>
K12ADMINLIFE
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/K12AdminLIFE/>
Nina Dillard's Photographs
<http://homepage.mac.com/neemers1/PhotoAlbum3.html>
Nina Dillard's Photographs on Net-Gold
<http://tinyurl.com/36qd2o>
Net-Gold Membership Required to View Photos



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