Tricks to know about Google and Google Scholar - The art of being scholarly [Voice-over] It’s Thursday, late morning. It looks like Anna is working, but in fact, she’s sleeping. Sometimes Anna shows her true colors. [Dialogues] Anna: I must have caught something./ It’s not possible to be so tired. [Voice-over] Since Anna is a bit of a hypochondriac, she thought that for once she would like a scientific explanation on the matter: Depression. No. Stress. No. Unbalanced diet. No. Pregnancy… pregnancy? No. Narcolepsy… [Dialogues] Anna: Narcolepsy…/ Well yeah, that’s it./ I must be narcoleptic. [Voice-over] Surely not narcoleptic! Hypochondriac, maybe. But above all Anna, you must know that search engines (like Google, Yahoo, or Bing) are useful but not always reliable. If these tools’ primary goal is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” (if we believe what Google says), then they were designed to give us the greatest number of results hits and respond to market forces. So the way they organize and rank results content is not necessarily the same as academic tools. You must be aware that the search results vary greatly in quality (you can find both academic articles as well as unverified and subjective content), coming from countless sources (from recognized institutions, commercial sites, or special interest sites), and in diverse forms (wikis, encyclopedias, forums, blogs, social media, etc.). This type of search engine can be a good starting point, but you must also be aware that this step can be time-consuming and can drown you in an overabundance of information. To directly access academic sources and limit your search to scientific publications, Google Scholar is an appealing ally, as long as you use it efficiently with its helpful advanced search: • Search the title of a source with “intitle” • Search the names of authors with “author” • Exclude terms from your search with NOT • Limit to an exact expression with quotation marks You should always follow up this research by using specialized tools. Google Scholar is obviously not the only way to find scientific documents.