Week 7: Google Scholar vs. Library Databases

While researching for the podcast episode I have had a lot of experience using Google Scholar and different library databases. Google Scholar provided scholarly articles and case law documents while library databases had a variety of sources that were both scholarly and popular. For the podcast I used both of these databases to search for scholarly journal articles and scholarly books. Though I had difficulty finding sources on either of these databases, for this podcast assignment I preferred to use Google Scholar.

Based on my experience researching the ‘I before e, except after c’ spelling rule I did not find many articles and books that were relevant to my topic on either database, however there were a few articles that I was able to locate on Google Scholar. When I found a scholarly journal article that I wanted to view that wasn’t available for free I would use the York University Library database and login to eResources to gain access to the same article. I continued the process of searching for scholarly journal articles on Google Scholar and then using my eResources account to find the article. I found that using them in combination was most helpful in the initial research process but I did not end up using these sources as part of my podcast.

I also found that the “advanced search”, content and search results of both Google Scholar and the York University Library database were the main differences between them. What was important to me was being able to narrow my search results to the most relevant sources and because of the limited “advanced search” that Google Scholar had, it limited my use of the database. Comparably, on the York library database, there were much more options for narrowing down search results. On Google Scholar the search results consisted of numerous pages but only the first few pages were relevant while on the York University Library database there was only one page of search results and they were not relevant at all. This surprised me considering that the York Library database had a range of sources from journal articles to films, whereas Google Scholar only had journal articles.

For the future, it is difficult to say which database I will rely on because for this particular assignment I found that, based on my topic neither of the databases were as helpful as JSTOR (jstor.org) and ProQuest, (search.proquest.com), however another topic may have created better search results. Google Scholar or library databases are useful in different situations, therefore my reliance on either of them would depend on what I am researching.