I’ve spent a few hours searching Google Scholar for academic source documents relating to the use of wiki technology for learning. Google Scholar provides only scholarly citations (references that claim to have been peer reviewed). So far, I have come up with very little that I can immediately access through my university’s online library. Most of the sources I have found are from conference proceedings, resources my mentor considers less desirable than articles from peer-reviewed journals or chapters from academic books.

A search on the non-academic Google produced a lot of hits, but these are generally not suitable as serious academic references. Sometimes I do get lucky and find leads to useful academic sources among the reference lists of non-peer-reviewed articles. Both Google and Google Scholar have made my research life immensely better, but most scholarly research is still locked away in subscription-based research databases. My university does provide access to quite a few of these, but they do not offer any comprehensive meta-search tool. Google Scholar fills that role quite nicely. Consequently, I have a multi-stage research process. First, I locate citations of interest in Google Scholar, and then I look for the full articles in the university’s electronic library. If the desired sources are not in the electronic library, I submit a request for document delivery. Requested documents usually are ready for download within a week. Despite the disjointed nature of this process, it beats the old search-the-stacks method hands down.