David Dillard invites us to read his lengthy post on NetGold about how search engines, while not the end-all of research, do have their place in scholarly information retrieval. Specifically, he was looking for references to the term “Tourismification” in order to respond to a discussion thread in a sociology forum. He had no luck with the social science databases he normally turns to, but Google found him paydirt:
Notice the Google search picked up in the
first ten records sampled mostly scholarly work…. Peer reviewed literature may be much more palitable [sic] to the academic scholar in terms of
its academic ethnic heritage, and the World Wide Web may be viewed as having been raised on the bad side of town. Nevertheless, not looking at
all possible search tools for a topic, particularly a hard to find topic may only result in impoverishment of the search result, and we all know that low income can send publications to live in the bad side of town.
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