Lexis-Nexis, the academic search engineApril 29, 2005 
Google and Yahoo are great search engines and they are used every day by students researching an important paper or presentation. However, you should not automatically trust the first set of results of a Google or Yahoo search. The questionable reliability of the Internet as a whole has led to more specific, scholarly search engines. The most famous, Lexis-Nexis, provides "authoritative legal, news, public records and business information, including tax and regulatory publications online," according to its Web site (lexisnexis.com). Lexis-Nexis has changed the way people do research. The new talk of the town is Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com). It searches for your key words the same way that Google does, but confines that search to serious academic journals.  When you type something like "gender theory" into regular Google, you'll get a lot of blogs with rants and pop psychology. When you type it in Google Scholar, you'll get serious articles from American Psychologist. While many of the results that come up cannot be accessed without paying, through the University, most of those journal articles should be easily found for free, Google worked with scholarly journals that are only available through subscription, but they are not all available. Some of the articles are not available online at all. In such a case, Google Scholar directs searchers to a library search that may appear next to the article, which means that the article is available at a library. Google Scholar is more of a starting point for scholarly research. It allows researchers to know what is out there, but to actually read most of the articles, students will have to go else where. Luckily, university libraries usually pay for subscriptions for most of the online journals, so if you find an abstract on GoogleScholar, you might be able to read the article through the Hopkins library system.  As a Hopkins student you are also able to use JSTOR, available through the library Web site if you use an on-campus computer. JSTOR grants you access to full journal articles, something that GoogleScholar can't always promise. JSTOR does not make money by charging customers; the money goes to pay the publications for the articles. Luckily, Hopkins, like most colleges, covers the JSTOR cost, so students can take advantage of it for free (minus your tuition, of course). There are other academic search engines that are hit or miss. Some are great for psychology but will give you little on literature, while other have strengths in history but lack any scholarly information in the sciences. Search Colossus is a good Web site because it divides up your search depending on your academic area, but there are a lot of advertisements, and it could be layed out better. But it is worth a visit at http://www.searchenginecolossus.com/Academic.html. DirectSearch, although it allows for a detailed search, has a very limited range, and sometimes shows only two or three results for broad topics (http://www.freepint.com/gary/direct.htm).  The Web site http://www.allacademic.org is another search engine that students should look into, but they will have to pay for this one (although most of the journal articles can probably be accessed through other library search engines). If you are interested in the politics of search engines, http://www.searchenginewatch.com is a Web site that has more information than anyone has ever wanted to know about search engines. All these search engines provide a better filter than the average Google or Yahoo!. When paper writing or researching, students should use an academic search engine to be more confident that the facts are correct. Source: JHU Newsletter Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.  Tired of receiving unwanted spam in your in box? Get SpamArrest™ and put a stop to all that SPAM. Click here and get rid of SPAM forever! Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it. Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.
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