Gelóczi Eszter: Google Scholar

Digital media earned an indispensable role in our lives since the modernisation of the world mainly covers the improvement of online surfaces and programs, along with the production of electronic devices which are the tools to reach digital media. Digital media can be created, distributed, downloaded or modified because it concerns images, videos, sounds, web pages, e-books and journals and so on. The aim of our project was to explore the differences between online databases and find out which leads us to the most relevant results when searching in a certain topic. My search engine was Google Scholar and I would like to give some information about its features as it can appeal to those who are about to write home assignments or their thesis.

First of all, it is important to mention that it is very user-friendly and easy to understand its options. It is possible to search for only „Abstracts” or to access „Everything” that are full texts. We can sort the results by a chosen year or type a time interval in which we are interested in. It will sort the hits from the latest to the oldest ones but my problem was that I was not able to find the oldest of all as there is no such option on the website. I just tried to figure it out by going through all the pages of results but when there are thousands of results it is impossible to get to the end. We can also search „Everything” by relevance which turned out to be much better, even if we get thousands of results not only a couple. Sorting them by relevance means that the program sorts the results by their citation numbers which show how many times it was cited. The bigger the number is, the more relevant the source might be and these appear at the beginning of the list. This search option was much more accurate than searching abstracts by dates. The program also has an Advanced Search option where we can add the author whose works we are interested in and add expressions or words that we would like to appear in the title of the document or anywhere in the text. We can also add words we would like to avoid or give a book in which the article was released. This detailed search speeds up the process of research to find the most proper sources. What is more, that it is possible to search documents in various languages. You can choose whether you are searching in only one or more languages. It is perfect when you are searching sources for your Spanish or even Japanese paper because you will definitely find something that helps you.

In conclusion, I would highly recommend Google Scholar to anyone especially to students who ran out of time and are looking for a good site to save some time. The results that the site offers are quite reliable as they are based on librarian catalogues just like the Hungarian MOKKA , thus it only contains peer-reviewed documents. Of course, it is not a perfect site as it will also offer documents that are not accurate at all but by searching by relevance offers quality sources which will perfectly cover your topic.