One of the biggest buzzwords of recent years is digital capabilities. Wait, you haven’t heard of it? Here’s a quick explanation: the assumption that most people make is that in the age of smartphones and artificial intelligence (AI), everyone is digitally literate and digitally capable. Yet the huge numbers of people who fall for scams – whether it’s a job, a parcel, or a romantic connection – tell us all otherwise. We can search on Google and purchase off Amazon – we don’t live under rocks and I’m pretty sure we’re not dinosaurs – but that doesn’t mean that we’re digitally capable.
I’ll give you an example. I go into classrooms every week and teach students how to use Arden’s Library Portal on the Learning Success Hub. In every session, at least one student tells me that Google Scholar is easier to use. So, when I was contextualising a referencing session for psychology students and I wanted references from psychology articles, I decided to try it out for myself. I went to Google Scholar and searched for articles on the Stanley Milgram experiment. Milgrim’s experiments are well-known and well-discussed in psychology circles. Asking an academic database for work on Stanley Milgrim is a bit like asking a music writer if they’ve ever heard of The Beatles. I ran the search on Google Scholar and I was appalled. Google Scholar not only presented me with irrelevant articles but really old articles – some were 26 years old. It’s also not easy to limit the years unless you want the last few years. I immediately switched back to the Arden Library Portal and it presented me with up-to-date, relevant articles. These articles are kept behind a paywall on Google, but fortunately, you have paid to access them as an Arden student (that’s what your student fees are for).
This is what we sometimes forget when using public databases – they “scrape” the internet searching for available content but not necessarily relevant or useful content and sometimes what they present you with is due to the exchange of money. The truth about Google Scholar is that we simply don’t know why some results are higher than others because no-one knows what algorithm it’s using to rank its results (but we do know that they are ranked). Arden’s Library Portal is, by contrast, much more transparent. Even when you use the Natural Language Search function – which allows you to search a question rather than keywords – the library will always tell you exactly how it has interpreted your search and what exactly it has searched for. Google will not do this.
I’ll give you another example. It’s a new tax year, there’s a war in the Gulf, and it’s the last year to invest £20000 in a cash ISA. Every few days, I google “mse savings cash isa” because I want the latest recommendations on cash ISAs from the Money Saving Expert website and not once has it been the top result on Google search results. Google knows what I want but unfortunately Hargreaves Lansdown is paying it more money to be at the top of the page. This is the problem with some publicly available search engines and databases – they know what you want but they want money more.
There’s a third element here, too. When we advise you to use Arden’s Library Portal we discuss using credible sources. When Google Scholar “scrapes” the internet, it doesn’t care about the quality of sources that it finds. Some of these sources are what’s known as “predatory journals” – these are journals which ask authors to pay for the publication of their articles which they’ve written for free. There are also a lot of AI written articles here, as well, which further reduces the credibility of the sources on offer.
Lastly, and probably the most overlooked aspect of this issue, is that as a graduate employee you will be asked to use databases and systems which you do not like. Learning to use Arden’s Library Portal is the same as using any specialised system at work – whether it’s Adobe Connect, Substack, Jira or Java – sometimes we are asked to use a system because that’s what our employer has decided is the best system for them and there’s no Googling your way around it. So, yes, Google Scholar might be easier to use, but the question you should be asking yourself is: is it the best for my studies? And if your answer is no, then remember that you (and your work) deserve the best. Start your search here.