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International Studies: Google and Google Scholar Research

Google and Google Scholar Research

Google is an excellent tool for discovering primary documents from the U.S. government, international organizations, and foreign governments. Google scholar searches the full text of many peer-reviewed publications, searching capabilities that go beyond many of the capabilities of our library databases.

Searching Google Effectively The trick to searching Google effectively is to determine the Internet domain you wish to search, and then to perform a focused search using a site limit. To discover top-level Internet domains for other nations, you can consult Domain Name Registries Around the World.

Here are some sample searches.

1. To find documents from mainland China on food security, you can use the Domain Name link above to discover that the top-level Internet domain for China is cn. Then, you can construct a Google search like this: site:cn food security. Looking at the Google results you will notice that gov.cn likely refers to government sites within China. You can refine your search this way: site:gov.cn food security.

2. The primary United Nations domain is un.org. You can search Google's indexing of UN documents following this example: site:un.org "weapons of mass destruction"

3. The various agencies of the U.S. government can be effectively searched in the same manner:
"weapons of mass destruction" site:state.gov
site:dhs.gov airports statistics terrorism
site:whitehouse.gov "dirty bomb"

 

Searching Google Scholar A complete description of how to search Google Scholar can be found in the Research Guide Google Scholar: Finding Fulltext through U. of Denver Databases.

Reference Librarian

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Christopher C. Brown
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(303) 871-3404