Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Academic credibility...say wha?

Tuesday, 8:30 A.M., Sleep deprived college students. Go.

Chris Nolan, a Trinity University Librarian came into our CSCI class to preach the power of website evaluation. He showed us just how easy it is to find credible scholarly sources on public search engines like my old pal Google. Though we've been close friends for what seems like a decade...or actually a decade, I found out through Mr. Nolan that Google has a smart twin, Google Scholar. The website searches for specifically peer evaluated articles from venerated journals and such, making research a little bit less hectic when trying to find sources at 3 A.M. without caffeine. Even more surprising are the capabilities of Google's cyber twin and its connection to local research networks, including Trinity Library! I can now look up an article online and then see if Trinity has it in stock! I also didn't know prior to the info session what the "cached" link was beneath every Google search result (displays a screen shot of what the webpage looked like the last time Google indexed it) or that when typing in the search bar you can specify the type of domain or even what country you'd like information from, and all you need is a colon. I plan on using Google Scholar the next time I write a paper, it's legit.

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