Week 3 Day 3 Research Methods

This assignment consisted of a comparison of the search results obtained using Google and those obtained using Google Scholar. I decided to use Rhea darwinii, the bird Darwin famously realized he had just eaten, after searching intently for it. Farber mentions it in chapter five of Finding Order in Nature. A search on Google yielded general encyclopedic descriptions of the bird, for the most part, and references to natural history museums, etc. A search using Google Scholar, however, obtained mostly links to scientific publications, and especially links to original works by Darwin. For instance, the first link was to a 1961 article from The Geographical Journal titled "Man and the Environment in the South Chilean Islands". I also noticed that I could directly access the articles, since I had logged in through the OU libraries. When I did the same on Google Scholar without logging in, the articles were usually not available. This gives me another valuable tool in my research arsenal, and reinforces previous notions about using direct, original, and scientifically sound references as much as possible.

Google:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=rhea+darwinii&btnG=Google+Search

Google Scholar:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=rhea+darwinii&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Search