As with all things, there are strengths and weaknesses to each of the research databases we used for this research activity. Google Scholar and the CSU Library database are both wonderful resources, and I am very glad to have access to both of them.

Starting with Google Scholar, I have to say that it’s my favorite research database. It turns up thousands of results, sometimes many more than any refined academic database. It’s rather user friendly, since its simply like doing a Google search. I really like how you can refine your results on the side by choosing which years you want the research to have been published in- which I didn’t do in my video, but if I were looking for an older foundational piece of research, I would definitely utilize that tool. At the bottom of every result, the number of times that article has been cited is listed along with other related articles. I have yet to click on an article that I have to pay for, since academic journals usually cost money, but I imagine they’re in there somewhere. Fortunately, there’s an option to connect it to a university database to see if it’s available at your own university before you decide to pay for it. On the other hand, people who don’t attend a university or whose university might not have the funding to pay for such things, might not benefit from that feature. Regardless, Google Scholar is a great resource for finding other articles and papers not listed in your school library’s database

Speaking of library databases, onto the next talking point. Our CSU Library database is more of a traditional database format, so I know a lot of people are more comfortable using that. What I think is cool about CSU’s database is that you can refine your search by a lot more than just publication year. You can narrow down results by the publisher, the source type, the language it was written in, and many other things. I have noticed, though, that sometimes it is hard to find the exact keywords you need to be using in order to turn up results. General searches of certain topics may only turn up a couple hundred results, which is still a lot to choose from, but probably not nearly as many as if you were to find the perfect keywords, which can take some fiddling around.