How Googling Affects Your Research Skills - Education - Study Techniques

Though the current generation of college students constantly engages itself with the internet and many other forms of technology, surprisingly, that doesn't make them experts in finding the right information they need for research papers. A two-year study by the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries Project concludes that students are so used to conducting simple searches on Google that they now find it difficult to do more sophisticated research either online or in the library.On interviewing students, librarians, and other academic staff at five universities, the researchers found that modern students often are unable to identify the right academic journals and databases they need to access to write a paper or complete a project. Even if they figure out the right database to use, they get stuck whenever finding the information requires them to do more than type in a few keywords and click enter.This inability to do serious research also has implications be yond campus. Elaborating about the research findings to the media, Andrew D. Asher, one of the authors of the study, said, " This isn't just about doing academic research, but also about being a savvy, reflective, and critical consumers of information. Many students are not gaining the information literacy skills in college that they will need in their future careers."Also troubling to the researchers was their finding that students tend to overlook the significance of libraries in providing useful information for research; students don't typically ask librarians for help, even when they know the resource is available. "Librarians are absent from most students' academic worldview," says Asher. "They don't realize that 30 minutes with the librarian could open up a whole range of scholarly research material and databases that aren't available through a quick Google search," he adds.So, with Google being such an indispensable source of information, how can students get the best out of it? Experts suggest that students must receive better conceptual training on how search engines organize and retrieve information. They put the onus on the colleges, asking them to conduct workshops on how to go about doing scholarly research. They also pointed out the need for individual academic departments to educate newly declared majors on how to properly access scholarly resources since so many databases and academic journals are specific to certain fields of study.Today research scholars Google more and access the brick and mortar library less. This has led to a certain kind of research that may not be as thorough and organized as it might be thought to be. A two-year study by the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries Project concludes that students are so used to conducting simple searches on Google that they now find it difficult to do more sophisticated research either online or in the library. Googling itself is a technique that needs to be used only with some training if the results are to be accurate and trustworthy to be added to a body of research. Should colleges step in to train their students in Googling? Is Googling leading to haphazard access to various resources that need not necessarily be the best for scholarly research?

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