Google is often dismissed as being irrelevant to the academic literature search. However, changes to the nature of the dissemination of scholarly research and official information in recent years mean that a wealth of relevant information can be accessed via standard Internet search engines such as Google. Too often however such information is lost amongst thousands of irrelevant, spurious and misleading results.
Based on an understanding of how the Google search engine works this practical workshop will show you the basic techniques to quickly filter your results for high quality academic material.
A couple of other search engines will be considered briefly, including DuckDuckGo which has become a popular alternative to Google in the light of concerns about the privacy costs of a ‘free’ search within search engines such as Google or Bing.

Objectives. By the end of the session you will:

Be able to find high quality academic material using Google
Understand how Google works
Use alternative search engines including DuckDuckGo.