As I mentioned in the first minute of my video, I am heavily biased towards Google Scholar over the CSU Library databases, mainly because I have more experience using Google Scholar, as I used it throughout most of high school. Both sites obviously have their own strengths and weaknesses, and I am going to delve into both in this reflection.

Google Scholar is relatively easy to use. The left sidebar allows the researcher to select custom publication year ranges, sort articles by relevance, or sort articles by date. While I didn’t use it in the video because I forgot it existed, it actually offers an “Advanced Search” option, in which you can narrow-down on keywords, authors, and publication dates. Unlike the CSU Library, the layout of Google Scholar is easy to navigate and isn’t “clunky.” Typically, many of the articles and journals within Google Scholar are open-access, but sometimes it isn’t that easy. I always look to the right of the page for a PDF link and if there isn’t one, I typically don’t even bother with trying to access the article. In my recording, I started to run into this problem at about two minutes in; many of the articles didn’t have links to PDFs next to their titles, so I had to change some keywords to find relevant, open-access articles.

The CSU Library is a very comprehensive site when it comes to finding existing research-- however, with its hundreds of databases and “clunky” setup, it can be difficult to navigate. Typing keywords into the OneSearch search bar is a good way to start the search for an article, narrowing the results down as you go. Akin to Google Scholar, it is relatively easy to refine results and select different article options. One perk of using the CSU Library is that there are actually more options available to you as you narrow down your selections; for example, you can toggle publishers, databases, and source types. The CSU Library contains a lot of databases, but sometimes too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. When I tried to use one specific database to find an article, I ran into a lot of issues, many of which I had to cut out of the video to save time (00:05:44).

Using both Google Scholar and the CSU Library, I managed to find an article in under a minute. I ran into some troubles with both sites-- sometimes involving keywords, sometimes involving bad WiFi-- but I also managed to find relevant articles through both of them. Overall, both sites are excellent resources that I plan to further utilize as I prepare to write my research paper.