'Googling' for research papers made easier

For college students, researching is about to get a whole lot easier. \nThe popular search engine www.Google.com has announced it will be adding a new feature for result sorting. Alongside 15 other universities, IU-Purdue University Indianapolis will be adding its collections of scholarly papers to the bank.\nStudents who often find themselves frustrated by sifting through irrelevant results when doing a paper or project will now be able to research more easily. \n"When I'm doing my homework, I get so mad when all that comes up is personal Web pages," freshman Gretchen McKibben said. "I can't use them in projects, and it wastes a ton of time."\nMany students share this frustration, though the new system could present some problems.\n"Results could be a concern unless (Google) says that the articles are put up by professors and have not met criteria for publishing in academic journals," said David Gonsoroski, a student reference assistant at the Main Library. \nAnother problem is the limited amount of data available for search. IUCAT, IU's online library search system, allows students to search the many academic journals to which IU subscribes.\n"It would probably be limited unless Google pays millions of dollars to subscribe to all of the journals we do at IU," said Gonsoroski. \nSteve Lawrence, a researcher for NEC Research Institute, said online articles are far more likely to be cited than those published in scholarly journals, according to an article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. \n"The mean number of citations to offline articles is 2.74, and the mean number of citations to online articles is 7.03, or 2.6 times greater than the number for offline articles," Lawrence said last year in Nature.\nBut the biggest payoff seems to be the students' work. Freshman Renée Farina often has trouble finding what she needs on Google. She said her biggest problem was looking up a book for class online. Her returned results included online stores that sold the books but no actual information about the book.\n"It's a good idea," Farina said, "and I think that students will take advantage of it. If I need to use it, I will." \nGoogle is currently testing the addition to its search engine, but if all goes well, it could be up for use in a few months, said Mackenzie Smith, associate director of technology for MIT's libraries. \n"If it makes student access easier," Gonsoroski said, "then it's a good thing." \n-- Contact staff writer Cecelia Wolford at cwolford@indiana.edu.