1. Where to find online information
Dr Meriel Patrick

2. Google for academic work

3. Google search basics (AKA stuff you probably already know)
Boolean terms and brackets can be used
AND is assumed
- before a word can be used instead of NOT
Double quotation marks for exact phrases

4. Other Google search tricks
I’m looking for the Epistle of Someone-or-other to Diognetus.
Asterisks can be used to replace a word *

5. Other Google search tricks
It’s called “The Quest for the Historical Jesus” … or was it “The Quest of”?
Vertical bars can be used instead of OR (even inside quotation marks) |

6. Particularly useful for Google Books
Google search tools
Particularly useful for Google Books

7. Google alerts https://www.google.co.uk/alerts
Let the information come to you
Set up alerts for your favourite search terms
You’ll be ed when there are new results

8. https://scholar.google.co.uk/
Google Scholar

9. What is Google Scholar?
A tool for searching scholarly literature available online
Finds articles, books, abstracts, and theses
Searches output of academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other websites
Includes some items that wouldn’t be in other bibliographic resources

10. Citations or full text? Lists every version it can find
From journals, JSTOR, repositories, indexes, websites, etc.
Bibliographic records and full text versions
Reasonably good at grouping versions together

11. Citations or full text? Will try to identify full text versions
But only PDFs or HTML copies
Will try to provide links to institutional resources (e.g links)
Advice on getting Google Scholar to show links to institutional resources is available here:

12. Citations or full text?
If there’s no linked copy, you can click ‘All n versions’
This will sometimes yield a full text version
E.g. a Word document in an institutional repository
But hunting can be a frustrating process

13. What else can I do? Filtering and sorting options in left sidebar
Create an alert to be ed about new results matching this search

14. What else can I do? See which other works have cited something
Find related articles
Copy or export a citation
Save the reference to your personal library

15. What else can I do?
Set up a personal profile and track citations of your own works

16. Advanced search

17. https://scholar.google.co.uk/
A quick demo…

18. Pros and cons Compiled via automated algorithms rather than by people
Broad spread; rapid updates
But can be prone to some odd errors
This article was attributed to the author of the preceding work

19. Some surprising results…

20. Some surprising results…
Broad disciplinary coverage means you may not always get the results you expect
Ranking of results can be hard to fathom

21. Verdict
Not as good at getting straight to relevant material as specialist subscription resources like the ATLA Religion Database
But can be better for tracking down open access copies, even if does take a bit of work
And it’s free!

22. Other online resources
(Also free)

23. Gateways Curated collections of links
Get the benefit of someone else’s expertise
But… they date very quickly
Look for a ‘Last updated’ date
Check a selection of links and see how many are broken

24. Gateways Wabash Center’s annotated links for Religion on the Web
Mark Goodacre’s directory of academic resources on the New Testament
Torrey Seland’s links for biblical studies and Philo of Alexandria

25. Text collections and bibliographic resources
Lots of primary texts freely available online
Not always scholarly editions – but some are
Thanks to open access policies, also an increasing number of articles

26. Text collections Huge collection from a wide range of traditions
Apocrypha, Gnostics, Church Fathers and more
Best critical texts of OT Pseudepigrapha

27. Text collections Large collection of classic Christian texts
1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, Aquinas’s Summa, Church Fathers, and more
Public domain ebooks

28. Text collections
Digitized books and articles – over 32,000 works available
Resources for biblical and theological studies
Over 80,000 resources, including books, periodicals, and audio recordings

29. Text collections Key texts, ‘translated’ into contemporary English
Bibliography, index, and open access archive
Comprehensive reference work

30. Manuscripts
Hill Museum and Manuscript Library - thousands of images and resources for manuscript studies
High resolution images and background information
Digital images and transcription

31. Bibliographic resources
1.6 million titles for theology and religious studies
Biblical Bibliography of Lausanne
Biblical, historical, sacramental, and systematic theology

32. Any questions?