The Role of Search Engine in Research Journey

, September 10, 2022, 0 Comments

google-search-engine-research-marketexpress-inThis article aims to evolve around the concept of search methodology to conduct quality literature reviews. Literature reviews are not just a summary of randomly collected articles from different sources but a meaningful selection of documents that are collected, evaluated, and summarised to arrive at meaningful conclusions.

To facilitate the entire process the basic requirement is a well-planned and well-phased search process and a suitable search engine. Hence, this article provides a holistic view of the search process and associated elements in conducting a quality review of the literature and other research endeavors.

In addition, search engines play a major role to facilitate the entire process. Not just to conduct a literature review, but also to find research articles for different purposes. Different databases have different features and serve different purposes. Hence the researchers need to go through the entire search process. Apart from research, as academicians, the thirst for knowledge is always unquenched and hence all scholars must make the best use of search engines to acquire knowledge, share knowledge, and transfer knowledge to the other scholarly community.

Introduction

Searching for the right article to conduct a review of literature is very important and is the primary goal of research. It is not very easy to identify the right article for the review of literature because articles cannot be randomly collected from different databases. There should be a common thread between the articles being used in the literature review. In addition, literature reviews are a daunting challenge for researchers especially when they conduct research in a few unexplored areas.

Most of the white reports which are published by various ministries, corporate organisations, and standalone platforms appear on the website. It consumes more time to locate the right articles because of the unavailability of search strategies. Omitting various white reports and not including them in the research work may not help the researcher produce a quality article as it does not focus on the comprehensive approach. Literature reviews should be very comprehensive and should help the researchers in several ways. Researchers should be able to find the research gap through the literature review and establish something new and meaningful to different stakeholders. In addition, the researchers will be able to define the research objectives, plan the scope of the study and introspect the pros and cons of the research. To facilitate the basic requirements, it is important to follow certain search designs and approaches. Hence, the process of conducting a literature review is essential beyond the boundaries of just conducting a research study. Researchers must systematically synthesise the information to arrive at meaningful conclusions and to introspect contrasting viewpoints of previous studies. However, there is no set of defined rules to organise literature reviews for a research article.

Literature review takes different forms depending on several factors such as nature of research, area of research, Articles search strategy, inclusive and exclusion factors, availability of articles, nature of documents, etc. Since there are no well-defined parameters to conduct the literature reviews there is no uniformity, transparency, visibility, or ethics. Literature reviews are a mere summary of all the collected articles. However, the impact of literature review in enhancing the quality of a research article is not realised by the researchers. Literature reviews are not just a summary of randomly collected articles from different sources but a meaningful selection of documents that are collected, evaluated and summarised to arrive at meaningful conclusions. Researchers should understand the importance of literature reviews as it helps them make valuable contributions to a particular field of study says (Winchester & Salji, 2016). Researchers can adopt a less formal approach for scanning the literature sources keeping in mind a standard set of parameters. However, the parameters considered to scrutinize the articles have to be holistic without being biased. This will enhance the richness of information and will boost the visibility of the article. Inappropriate literature will be an accumulation of information from different sources but will not have the fibre to identify the research gap. Perhaps the main problem in positing a research gap is the selection of appropriate literature. Locating the research gap from literature is a systematic process. The gap does exist not only in articles published in journals but also in the white reports published by corporates and Government institutions. These reports are highly knowledge-driven, socially relevant, and updated in terms of facts and figures. Indeed, they are not biased about population and data collection. A failure to consider these reports will lower the quality of research. Hence, research gaps spotted through literature reviews should consider various sources which are put together to be critically evaluated and summarised. Long gone are days when the research was very traditional and systematically done in an old fashion. Modern research thoughts are dynamic and need based. It intends to serve its purpose and creates an impact on society and the economy. Thus, research materials and methods have become more agile and resilient depending on the need. Systematically searching articles for conducting the review of literature should involve transparency in the entire process. This will help the researchers incorporate a systematic approach to article search, filtering, and reporting process.

There are a few popular databases that are widely used by researchers to find articles for their respective research purposes. However, the search criteria are not common among all these databases. Different databases have different parameters as a default filter option. Some are flexible and allow the researcher to use multiple search options and filter options, but few databases are rigid and are confined only to limited parameters.

Moreover, grey literature reviews published by standalone companies and government agencies are avoided because of the unavailability of the search and filtering parameters. A comprehensive literature review cannot depend only on popular databases but should also consider a wide range of databases including the databases for grey articles and reports. Moreover, consideration of multiple databases will help in avoiding publication bias and will help the researchers to widely get exposed to many hidden ideas and knowledge.

Thus, this article aims to first provide guidelines for a systematic search of scholarly articles, define and list down inclusion criteria and exclusion criteria depending on the nature of databases and finally chalk out a few strategies for the researchers to avoid article selection bias. Thus, the objective and focus of the chapter are to propose guidelines and strategies for literature search and selection for transparent and unbiased reporting. Few popular databases such as Google Scholar, Emerald, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, ProQuest, and IEEE have been considered. In addition, the Social Sciences Evidence-Informed Decision-Making (EIDM) approach plays an important role because research aims to benefit multiple stakeholders and hedge toward decision-making. The EIDM process also involves systematic and rigorous research of articles to synthesise the evidence. Thus, the secondary objective of this chapter is to highlight the importance of the EIDM framework exclusively for Social Science research. From this research, it is possible to understand the existing bias in the article search process, data selection, and screening and to contribute to the research community a holistic framework that explains appropriate search strategies, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and strategies to avoid information redundancy in the entire process.

Importance of search engine

The quality of research depends on several factors and one of the most essential ones is the rich collection of knowledge, facts, and figures. Every researcher has an intention to produce something new for the world and with this intention, he/she searches for wide resources from various databases. Higher Educational Institutions having a library have taken efforts to scan and store the resources in the digital format which is available to researchers across the world. In addition, there are many famous databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, ERIC, IEEE, ScienceDirect, DOAJ, etc. which have huge volumes of resources. Researchers depend on these databases to collect articles based on their needs and expectations. Whether starting with a research project or dealing with doctoral research it is a must to enrich knowledge by reading articles published by various other researchers. For this process, there is a felt need to depend on multiple databases. The development of search engines has helped researchers in multiple ways. Research work is enriched with quality when it showcases something new and interesting. To identify the research gap and to narrow down the research scope it is necessary to find appropriate articles and data resources for which search engines are useful. However, researchers must know the art of using the right keywords to identify the right data resources according to their interests and needs.

Searching the pioneering authors

Before starting with a literature review it is important to systematically search for articles that will fit into the scope of the study. First and foremost, it is important to identify a few pioneers in a particular field who have distinguished themselves by finding a profound theme, theory, model, methodology, etc. This will help the researchers find the original article which would be available in any of the databases. In addition, the original idea of the pioneering researcher can be traced to understand the original piece of work. This process can be facilitated by searching the articles using the founding authors’ names. In addition, this search will also help in knowing the definition of a concept or a term by systematically investigating the original work. As time progresses a concept will be modified according to the situation and hence the originality would be lacking. Thus, searching the original work and introspecting the same will give the researcher a fresh opinion and will help them trace the growth of a concept over years. Hence, in the search methodology, the researchers should first know about the pioneering authors and search accordingly.

Perl growing or snowballing

In the search process, researchers should also give importance to the Perl growing approach which is also known as citation searching or citation tracking. Few good research articles can be found using this approach which is less time-consuming but needs patience because it uses different parameters to locate the article. Article title, Journal name, DOI number, Author details, and year of publication are the primary factors that are used. This method is more suitable for conducting a systematic literature review. The researchers can depend on Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI), Book Citation Index (BCI), Emerging Source Citation Index (ESCI), Data Citation Index (DCI). Instead of using a predefined search strategy, this method helps in the easy identification of the relevant sources.

Google Books and Google Scholar

Academic search engines have gained popularity in recent times as researchers have started to use methodologies that require extensive usage of articles to be used in the review of literature chapters. Hence, research scholars are now dependent on different search engines to find suitable articles for their research. One of the search engines which remain unused is google books and Microsoft academic. On the other hand, in recent times research gateways and academia have become popular. Google books are a combination of self-published books, publisher-supplied, etc. In addition, google books are classified into four categories which include: full view, preview, snippet view, and no preview. Research scholars can use the full view option to find books of their choice that are available in the public domain. There are also a few rare collections of books that are available in google books however only a few pages are available for view. In this case, researchers can purchase those books if needed. Google books also provided advanced search options for the readers to exactly locate the resources that they expect. The advanced search option includes filter options such as search, content, language, title, author, publisher, subject, publication date, ISBN, ISSN, etc. This advanced feature with flexible filter options will reduce search time and effort.

The second most well-known search engine is Google scholar which helps in finding scholarly articles based on three popular matrices. Google scholar has a huge collection of various resources. This also helps in finding grey literature, which is a collection of government reports, organisations’ white papers, and all the other articles and reports which are produced out of the commercial or academic arena. Though grey literature sources are avoided from being cited in research articles they are rich in information and provide extensive knowledge to the readers. Moreover, google scholar is not very much narrow focussed and does not limit the search hence researchers who are beginning their research career can start exploring google scholar for various purposes. Since google scholar relies on keywords for search and not the metadata researchers can use different search terms to scrutinise the articles.

Research gate for discovering research and staying connected with the scientific community

Research Gate is a platform for researchers to connect with other world researchers for the scientific search of knowledge, share research articles, ask questions and clear doubts and extend research collaborations. Since every researcher across the world is taking efforts to showcase their research profile they update and maintain a clear profile. Moreover, each researcher is given a profile score and shows the number of readers that a particular has fetched. It gives readers the confidence to depend on certain documents to be used in their research.
Altmetric for researchers
Researchers across the world are interconnected with each other with the help of Information Technology. Various research documents are uploaded to different databases and academic portals. Academic, and ResearchGate are all a few examples where researchers comment, follow, request, post, read and extend research collaborations with other researchers. Altmetric gathers information from different sources where research is being discussed. The data is collected from research forums, research blogs, documents, white reports, social media, etc. All the hidden information is well pooled together and the same is made available to the world researchers. The journals and collections tab helps researchers know the best performing journal in terms of audience outreach. This feature will help the researchers identify the maximum reads fetched by an article and its outreach. Almetrics will help the researchers find the most popular articles which can be further used to conduct a review of the literature.

Microsoft academic

Microsoft Academic is also a platform and a database that allows researchers to showcase their research publications to the outside world. It encourages researchers to upload their research publications and helps them unleash the power of knowledge sharing and knowledge acquisition. There were millions of publications available with Microsoft academics. In the year 2021, this database was closed and was taken over by OurResearch. However, researchers can use OurResearch platform to search and locate the best data as per their needs.

Conclusion
Search engines play a major role in the life of each researcher. Search engines are of different types and have different features. There are more than 100 search engines available for researchers. These search services, if used correctly, will help the researchers find the best resource which can be used in their research work. However, not all search engines are useful. Few may not be as per the researchers’ expectations; hence the researchers must use filter process, and inclusion and exclusion criteria to finalise the resources they need.

Reference:
Winchester, C. L., & Salji, M. (2016). Writing a literature review. Journal of Clinical Urology, 9(5), 308–312. https://doi.org/10.1177/2051415816650133