The Research Paper Blues

Research papers are an inevitable part of life. Everyone who even attempts to stroll the streets of American Education knows that at some point, they will have to complete that 10 page argumentative essay that they are dreading. Picturing yourself crouched over the computer at 1 am, drudgingly tapping at your keyboard, and losing motivation can be quite the daunting image. However, with the beautiful invention we call the internet, at least you’re not crouched over a pile of books, right? There is an infinitely vast amount of information just craving to be discovered, at the tip of our fingertips, but it can often be hard to find accurate and reliable sources of information that you can actually use for your academic papers. Throughout my educational journey, my biggest problem has always been trying to find good, useful information and the website that I can heavily attribute my success to is Google Scholar.

I know, I know, it’s not really a website, it’s a search engine. But after spending some time searching with it, you will come to realize its helpfulness. It is imperative to find reliable sources of information when doing research of any type and Google Scholar is an incredibly good channel to hunt through because all of its search results come from scholarly articles and journals. Scholarly articles are a really great way to find dependable information relating to your topic and provide you with good material for direct quotes. A lot of sites that you would normally go to for research are a compilation of many individual’s ideas, but scholarly articles give you a solid, single author to quote and discuss. The Google Scholar search engine has a lot of features that can help narrow down your search results as well. On the homepage, you have the option to search through not only articles, but also patents and case law. Under case law, there is yet another option to choose between federal cases, state cases, or a plethora of other case options. Just like with any other search engine, Google Scholar will potentially surface with a million results pertaining to your topic, but not necessarily relevant to your paper. After your search, on the left hand side, there are even more options to narrow your results by the years they were published, or more specifically, sorted by date. This website will be helpful in class and in research because since all of its search results are published scholarly articles, the information you find will be reliable and easily utilized for essays. So, next time you become anxious at the thought of sifting through unreliable sources while trying to write a sound paper, just remember that Google Scholar is there with access to all the scholarly articles and case laws that your heart could desire.