There are many ways to compile research articles for your literature review. One can either use their university’s prepaid research databases or the publicly accessible Google Scholar. There are many pros and cons to both research databases and Google Scholar, some of which I’ll outline in this reflection and show via my screencast video.
Research databases were created for use by the academic community so they’re ideal for in-depth research on many complex and specific topics. All the information provided in databases are thoroughly studied research written by professionals or experts in their fields. As shown in my screencast, research databases also include “Advanced Search” as a helpful tool to narrow down a search result; researchers have to be very specific in their search to yield the results they desire. The biggest advantage to using research databases is that your institution’s library pays a yearly subscription for their faculty and students to access it at no cost. It feels like a waste of money if no one uses these respected databases. However, there are some downsides to research databases. One’s literature review is limited to the articles they find in a journal’s database. To fix this, researchers usually have to search their keywords in multiple databases to find a variety of articles that apply to their research question. Sometimes, especially when out of range from their campus’ Wi-Fi system, a researcher can’t access a full-text article without going through an extensive log-in process or contacting a librarian to help them access the article. This quickly becomes really frustrating because a thorough literature review cannot be performed based on an abstract. Finding articles on a research database takes a lot of time, patience, and energy from the researcher.
Google Scholar was created as a resource for the general public to access scholarly articles. Similar to it’s normal search feature, Google Scholar is easy to use and yields thousands of academic results in milliseconds. A handy tool that databases don’t include is the “Cited by” feature, which gives the number and an analysis of the papers in which this resource was cited. Next to the “cited by” link are two helpful buttons: a star that represents saving a particular article and a quotation mark that represents an easy citation of the article. Such saved articles and citations are incorporated with your google account and can be accessed at any time. Google Scholar also tells you which articles are open-access or free for you to use through your institution. In my screencast, this is evident by looking at the right sidebar of my search; the ones provided with external links are free full-text articles. This helps determine which articles you have full-text access to, which is critical when conducting a literature review. Despite the usefulness of Google Scholar, there are disadvantages to using it. Not all the included articles are scholarly so one has to personally review and access the credibility and reliability of the published article and authors. Additionally, not every article is full-text and/or free to the public - if an external link doesn’t appear on the right hand side of an article, assume that you have to pay to use it. A researcher should rarely, preferably never, pay to access an article.
There are many advantages and disadvantages to both research databases and Google Scholar. It’s ultimately the researcher’s preference when deciding which platform to use while conducting research. I personally enjoy using Google Scholar because it compiles a list of academic articles that varies with particular keywords and (in the right sidebar) provides me with the articles available full-text via my institution.
This assignment taught me how to utilize both Google Scholar and research databases. I've always used databases provided through my institution, as I was taught this was the only reliable source for academic articles. Until this assignment, I had never used Scholar, let alone taken it seriously. Now, I prefer it because it pulls articles from all over the internet, regardless of the research database it originates from. As shown in the screencast below, I know which articles I can access via my institution by viewing the right-hand column for an external link. Additionally, Google Scholar encourages general use of open-access journals by labeling them as such and by including them in the advanced search tool. Like I discussed in Research Activity 2, I support and promote open-access articles, so using Scholar supports the open-access community. For my final research project, I found all my lit review articles through Google Scholar, which proved itself to be both easy and reliable once I specified the exact keywords I was looking for through the advanced search tool.
The only revision I did for this assignment was to make it website friendly by changing the APA paper format.
Below is my screencast and comments when finding articles on both Google Scholar and Cleveland State's Library Research Databases. I compare the two in the video as well.