Where to find online information Dr Meriel Patrick

Google for academic work

Google search basics (AKA stuff you probably already know) Boolean terms and brackets can be used AND is assumed - before a word can be used instead of NOT Double quotation marks for exact phrases

Other Google search tricks I’m looking for the Epistle of Someone-or-other to Diognetus. Asterisks can be used to replace a word *

Other Google search tricks It’s called “The Quest for the Historical Jesus” … or was it “The Quest of”? Vertical bars can be used instead of OR (even inside quotation marks) |

Particularly useful for Google Books Google search tools Particularly useful for Google Books

Google alerts https://www.google.co.uk/alerts Let the information come to you Set up alerts for your favourite search terms You’ll be emailed when there are new results https://www.google.co.uk/alerts

https://scholar.google.co.uk/ Google Scholar https://scholar.google.co.uk/

What is Google Scholar? A tool for searching scholarly literature available online Finds articles, books, abstracts, and theses Searches output of academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other websites Includes some items that wouldn’t be in other bibliographic resources

Citations or full text? Lists every version it can find From journals, JSTOR, repositories, indexes, websites, etc. Bibliographic records and full text versions Reasonably good at grouping versions together

Citations or full text? Will try to identify full text versions But only PDFs or HTML copies Will try to provide links to institutional resources (e.g. links) Advice on getting Google Scholar to show links to institutional resources is available here: https://scholar.google.co.uk/intl/en/scholar/libraries.html

Citations or full text? If there’s no linked copy, you can click ‘All n versions’ This will sometimes yield a full text version E.g. a Word document in an institutional repository But hunting can be a frustrating process

What else can I do? Filtering and sorting options in left sidebar Create an alert to be emailed about new results matching this search

What else can I do? See which other works have cited something Find related articles Copy or export a citation Save the reference to your personal library

What else can I do? Set up a personal profile and track citations of your own works

Advanced search

https://scholar.google.co.uk/ A quick demo… https://scholar.google.co.uk/

Pros and cons Compiled via automated algorithms rather than by people Broad spread; rapid updates But can be prone to some odd errors This article was attributed to the author of the preceding work

Some surprising results…

Some surprising results… Broad disciplinary coverage means you may not always get the results you expect Ranking of results can be hard to fathom

Verdict Not as good at getting straight to relevant material as specialist subscription resources like the ATLA Religion Database But can be better for tracking down open access copies, even if does take a bit of work And it’s free!

Other online resources (Also free)

Gateways Curated collections of links Get the benefit of someone else’s expertise But… they date very quickly Look for a ‘Last updated’ date Check a selection of links and see how many are broken

Gateways Wabash Center’s annotated links for Religion on the Web Mark Goodacre’s directory of academic resources on the New Testament Torrey Seland’s links for biblical studies and Philo of Alexandria

Text collections and bibliographic resources Lots of primary texts freely available online Not always scholarly editions – but some are Thanks to open access policies, also an increasing number of articles

Text collections Huge collection from a wide range of traditions Apocrypha, Gnostics, Church Fathers and more Best critical texts of OT Pseudepigrapha

Text collections Large collection of classic Christian texts 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, Aquinas’s Summa, Church Fathers, and more Public domain ebooks

Text collections Digitized books and articles – over 32,000 works available Resources for biblical and theological studies Over 80,000 resources, including books, periodicals, and audio recordings

Text collections Key texts, ‘translated’ into contemporary English Bibliography, index, and open access archive Comprehensive reference work

Manuscripts Hill Museum and Manuscript Library - thousands of images and resources for manuscript studies High resolution images and background information Digital images and transcription

Bibliographic resources 1.6 million titles for theology and religious studies Biblical Bibliography of Lausanne Biblical, historical, sacramental, and systematic theology

Any questions?