(from personal collection)

Dear friends, I write this post related to the previous post:

1. Bibliography Part 1: One more thing about Bibliography
2. Bibliography Part 2: Playing with your keywords

Our subject today is Google Scholar. It was a a freely accessible web search engine that specialises in indexing scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. The beta version of it was released in November 2004.

What it does? It indexes peer-reviewed online journals of Europe and America’s largest scholarly publishers, books and other non-peer reviewed journals. Then its scope was broaden to literature entries from across the globe.

The following list is the complete list of what will show up on your screen as soon as you hit enter:

1. Articles in conventional¹ peer-reviewed journals (eg: Journal of Hydrology, Journal of Environmental Earth Science, etc).
2. Articles in open access² peer-reviewed journals (eg: Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Environmental Research Letters, etc)
3. Books and or e-books (eg: Time Series eBook, Forecast eBook)
4. Articles in conference proceedings (eg: European Geosciences Union, American Geophysical Union, etc)

All the above three entries are called published materials. Number 1, 2 are your main targets and number 3 is the next best thing. You can use number 4 only if it has the full paper, not just the abstract. However, you can always cite them if you feel like you understand the abstract completely.

Whereas the following list is the non-published materials:

1. Thesis, dissertations. Authors have all the rights to upload their thesis on their blogs or other website.
2. Project reports. Some institutions make their reports available for download. Some are in the form of executive summary, but many times you would find a complete report uploaded in pdf format.
3. Newspaper articles.
4. Personal blogs (eg this blog, Budi Rahardjo, Waskita Adijarto, Kieran Healy’s blog, Rob Hyndman. This is another thing that I want to say. Everyday I find more and more prominent researcher maintains a blog about their work.

See you in the next post: Google’s Anatomy-2

— This post was written using: Re-Text on Ubuntu 13.10 —