1. WISER Social Sciences: Google and beyond
Penny Schenk Angela Carritt
Bodleian Law Library

2. Tips for evaluating web resources Citing web resources
Overview
Search engines
The Google family
Clusty
Searching forums using Omgili
Searching blogs and feeds using Technorati and Google blog search
Tips for evaluating web resources
Citing web resources

3. URLs

4. Gives you greater control over your search terms
Useful for Countries, organisations, concepts
Specify that terms must appear in title, links to…
Limit your search to a particular web site or group of web sites e.g.
.ac.uk to search UK University web sites
.edu for US University web sites.
gov.uk for UK government website
.uk for UK websites generally
Go to
I’m going to talk about Google and some of its specialist search engines. Not going to show you this screen because I don’t believe that there will be anyone here who hasn’t used it.
I am going to talk about the Advanced search though …and after that I’ll go on to talk about Google Scholar and Google Book search which are two parts of Google.
Googles advanced search – apologies to those who use this already.
Googles advanced search allows you to search exactly the same content as the regular search screen but allows you to be much more specific about what you are searching for.
Top four boxes at the top allow you to specify phrases and words which must appear in your search results, words which shouldn’t appear and
Phrase is particularly useful – for example for countries “South Africa”, United Kingdom, organisations, United Nations, “International Monetary Fund”, “World Bank” and for concepts which are always phrased in a particular way, “Human rights, “Balance of payments”, “glass ceiling”. So phrase is very useful
All words is also useful as it specifies that all the words entered must appear rather like doing a Boolean And. Whereas at least one word is like doing an OR – you are saying this word or that word must appear – useful for synonyms.
Not – is difficult.
Women, female
Human rights
Iran
Look relevant. Out of interest you can see how it has done this search by looking in the single box at the top. You can see for example that its put human rights in quote marks. Instead of using google advanced you could put the quote marks in yourself.
Show restrict to title, show restrict to links to.
Show restrict to pages from a particular country – don’t know how good that is
Domain is very useful if you only want to find things from particular organisations or particular types of organisations
e.g. if I want something scholarly I could restrict my search to Universities .ac.uk .edu (can’t do both together)
You could also restrict to a particular oraganiation – maybe I’m only interested in what the UN has to say on this topic.
This can also be quite useful for more trivial matters
Which link to – useful perhaps if you have a web page of your own or if you have found a page which is particularly useful – you may want to use this page to broaden your search

5. Advanced search gives you more control over your search terms
Scholar preferences
Library links – allows Google to link to full text within Oxford subscriptions
Bibliographic manager – allows you to set defaults for exporting to Endnote, RefWorks etc

6. Link to abstract or full text
Find other “versions” in the group e.g. related pre print, article, conference paper.
Check Oxford databases for full text version
Times this item (or related items in the same “group”) have been cited
[citation] – Google hasn’t been able to locate full text. However, full text may be available in one of Oxford’s subscription databases. To check choose “Oxford Full Text”
Google Scholar
Searches
peer-reviewed papers
Theses
Books
abstracts and articles
from academic publishers / professional societies / preprint repositories / universities and other scholarly organizations
Ranks results according to author, insitution, times cited
Choose Preferences
This is very important as it will allow you access to the full text held in Oxford’s subscription databases
Download into Endnote
Choose Advanced
Same options for specifying your search terms - “occurs in” is now at the top
Also can search by author
Limit to a particular publication
Date
And choose broad subject.
I’ll to the same search as before
Iran “human rights” female women 1990-
What do I get?
For each result
Title which links to the full text if this is available on the web or an abstract. This one has gone to full text not in fact because its free but because Oxford has a subscription. How did it know? In this case just because we were in the Oxford domain.
Bibliographic details
After title the first thing to notice is the versions. This is because Google groups items which it considers to be the same or related to one another. For example it will connect a pre print, the published journal article which arose from the pre print, a conference paper etc. If you click on the versions link you will see each item within the group. Worth looking at particularly if the full text didn’t appear of the result you chose- maybe you’ll get access to the pre print
Times cited – how many times this article and articles in the same group have been cited.
Related items – similar items
Web search – just does a normal google search on the article title / author
Import into Endnote – puts the details into your Endnote library
This one is a book – going to look at Google Books separately so I won’t look at that one now. Third one down doesn’t take you to the full text. If I click on FindatOxford then it will take me to Oxford University e-Journals – its asked SFX and tells me it is in Swetswise
Authors – who have come up

7. Google books What does Google books search? Which books?
The full text of books
Which books?
Library collections digitised by Google
Book submitted by publishers and authors
What do you get?
Full text – if the book is out of copyright / Google has permission
Preview – a few relevant pages
Snippets – v small amounts of relevant text
Bibliographic details
What if I want to read the whole thing and its not available?
Google provides links to find it in a local library / buy it online!
Google Books
Google books is like Google Scholar but only searches books. What is the difference between Google scholar and Google books? – only books (not preprints, journal articles) etc, not necessarily scholarly although many are.
Google books – last night I found Sheep in a Jeep!
Google books searches the full text of books available on Google. Once its found a book it may give you:
the full text of the book – you can read the whole thing,
it may give you a preview (just a few pages that wil help you to decide whether you want the book or not) or
it may just give you three snippets showing the context of where your search terms occurred)
Or if may just give you the bibliographic details. However, it will have searched the full text even if it isn’t giving you the full text.
Whats on there? Books digitised as part of Googles’ Library project – so for example here in Oxford the Bodleians collection of 18th century books has been digitised and they are (or will be) available in full text to everyone. There are also collections from many other libraries being digitised for example New York Public Library, Harvard, Princeton etc. With some of these books you’ll get the full text – for example all the books digitsed in oxford are included in full text – because they are out of copyright. Some of the other libraries have digitised copyrigthted books so for these you will just get a snippet or preview.
In addition to these projects Google publishers and authors submit books to Google for inclusion in Google books. Of course with those submitted by publishers and authors in particular you are not going to get full text. Publishers and authors include them so that you are tempted to buy them.

8. Google Blog Search Choose more >> from Google home page
See what bloggers are saying on a topic
Advanced options allow you to choose specific authors, dates, sites etc.

9. advanced options restrict by words in blog title restrict by site
search for words contained in posts
restrict by words in blog title
restrict by site
restrict by blogger
restrict by date range
restrict by language

10. Date options available on results page

11. alerts based on blog search
Several options available for receiving ongoing updates when search terms are matched in blogs – , gadget on Google homepage, subscription in feed reader

12. Google Image Search Available on Google home page
Can choose file format, size of image, content i.e. faces
Can narrow search to a particular site

13. Restricted to grayscale, containing faces

14. Clusty Sorts results into related “clusters”
Useful for zeroing in on what you were looking for and ignoring irrelevant results
Can view results by type of domain, i.e. .com, .edu, .org

15. sub-categories on left

16. View results sorted by a specific sub-topic

17. results sorted by domain suffixes

18. Omgili Good for sampling general online discussion of a topic
Can generate graphs of what’s being talked about, gauge popularity over time

19. search a particular forum

20. advanced search options

21. Results from chosen forum

22. Technorati
Full-featured blog searching
Popular and recent searches, Top Blogs
See which blogs link to a particular site
Search by blog post tags

23. advanced blog search

24. See what bloggers say about a site

25. Evaluating web resources

26. How reliable is the web page you are looking at
How reliable is the web page you are looking at? …how much does it matter? …don’t get caught out.

27. Are key web sites web sites?
Who’s linking to it?
Are key web sites web sites?
Is it on Intute / other portals that you trust?
Is it mentioned in key research guides?
How up to date is it?
Last updated statement
Last event mentioned?
Last article cited?
Could it be a hoax?
Check
Who wrote it? (person / organisation)
How knowledgeable are they? (check their facts against what you know)
Why did they write it?
Do they belong to an organisation?
Look at the URL of the web page
Do they belong to an organisation you trust?
University (.ac.uk, .edu)
Government (.gov)
Pressure group (biased? Reputable/Alarmist?)
BBC?
Who are they? (If its really important do a search on their name)
Library catalogue
Indexing and abstracting service
Google

28. Citing electronic resources
…some general tips and examples
…some specific examples using Harvard and Oscola
…be sure to check the style guide suggested by your department …even if you are using Harvard

29. Make sure you give enough information for the reader to find the resource
Giving the URL is not enough…the web page may be moved or deleted

30. Citing online journals
If the online version is exactly the same as the print version (including pagination) cite the print version
Useful for databases carrying scanned versions of print journals
If not, cite in the same way as a print journal but add the name of the database and/or URL

31. Citing web pages: general
Author (personal or corporate)
Year published / last updated (if available)
Document / page title (if available)
Title of the complete work/website or type of document
URL
Date you accessed it

32. BBC 2007 Musharraf vows polls in February (BBC News) Available at [Accessed 8 November 2007]

33. Wikipedia, last updated 8 Nov 2007 Pervez Musharraf (Wikipedia) Available at [Accessed 9 Nov 2007]

34. Musharraf, P 2005 President's address at international seminar on global terrorism (Presidential Speeches on President of Pakistan web site). Available at [Accessed 9 Novembr 2007]

35. How do you cite a quotation if there are no page or paragraph numbers?
According to APA
Cite the heading and the number of the paragraph following it to direct the reader to the location of the material
e.g. Beutler, 2000, Conclusion section, para. 1

36. Two examples
Harvard
Author, Initials., Year (given on site or if not available accessed date). Title of document or page. [type of medium]. [Online] Website Address Locating details (eg. Breadcrumb) [Accessed date]
Oscola
Author, title, type of document (if relevant), date of issue (if available), web address and date of access (if the document / website subject to change)

37. Harvard
BBC 2007 Musharraf vows polls in February (BBC News) [online] [Accessed 8 November 2007]
Oscola
BBC ’Mushaffaf vows polls in February’ (BBC News) 8 November accessed 8 November 2007

38. Harvard
Wikipedia, last updated 8 Nov 2007 Pervez Musharraf (Wikipedia) [online] [Accessed 9 Nov 2007]
Oscola
Wikipedia ‘Pervez Musharraf’ (Wikipedia) 8 November accessed 9 Nov 2007

39. Harvard
Musharraf, P 2005 President's address at international seminar on global terrorism (Presidential Speeches on President of Pakistan web site). [online] [Accessed 9 November 2007]
Oscola
Pervez Musharraf ‘President's address at international seminar on global terrorism’ (Presidential Speeches on President of Pakistan web site) accessed 8 November 2007