POL JP08: National Security, Intelligence, and Law Enforcement Reform Post 9/11 

Yes you can, but use Google wisely.

Here are some tips for searching Google effectively to find more scholarly content for your research:

• Take advantage of the Advanced Search.
• Limit your searches to specific kinds of Web sites like educational, government or nonprofit organizations.
• Limit your searches to specific types of documents like PDFs, Word documents, Power Point slides, etc.
• Make your searches specific but keep them simple.
• Carefully evaluate the pages you find (see more tips below).
• Use specialized search engines like Google Scholar and Google Book Search.

See the Using Google for Academic Research Guide for more tips.

You should approach your searches in Google much the same way as you would approach a keyword search in the library's catalog or an article database.

• Break your topic up into its component concepts.
• Think of more than one way to express each concept (identify synonymous keywords).
  • Construct search strings for each concept.
  • Use double quotation marks for phrases.
• Join the search strings together using Boolean logic (i.e. AND & OR).
  • Connect similar concepts (synonyms for the same concept) with OR.
  • Connect different concepts with AND (Google uses a blank space for AND).

Here are some examples of Google's operators and what effect they have on a search:

Note: Google searches are not case sensitive, with the exception of the OR operator, which has to be entered in all capitals!

You should be a critical consumer of anything you find on the Web. Here are some questions you should ask yourself about the sources you find to help decide if they are appropriate for scholarly work:

• Who is the author of this source? Is this person recognized in the field? Has this person written other works that convince me of his/her authority?
• Is the information on this site accurate? Will I find the same sort of information if I looked in more traditional sources like authoritative encyclopedias or edited volumes?
• Where does this source get its information? How are its arguments backed up? Are the sources of information cited?
• What sort of organization is responsible for this site? Is this legitimate research coming from a major academic institution or is this someone's personal views?
• What is the political slant of the entity responsible for this site (i.e. is this a liberal or conservative organization)?
• Are there other sources out there that agree or disagree with this source? What other sources might I use to balance with this one?
• When was this page last updated? Is the information presented here current?
• Will my advisor freak out if I cite this in my paper? Should I run it by him/her first? What would the librarian suggest?

For more guidance on evaluating Web sites, see this page from UC Berkeley.

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