Google Scholar has been an indispensable tool in gathering research for my thesis. For those not familiar, its a google search engine that is indexing the content of academic journals (including PDF content) and websites.

Interestingly, the most powerful aspect of it, in my opinion, is that it separately categorizes citations. For example, Sherry Turkle of MIT, has published a great deal on the subject of interactions with artificial intelligence online. Her book Life on the Screen is a seminal work. Google scholar allows you to specifically search for all the papers in it’s database that cite Turkle’s work. Since that returns an ungodly numbers, you can also restrict it to the papers that cite Turkle’s work AND contain “bot” in the body of the paper.

Anyone who is doing any form of serious research and not embracing Google Scholar is, quite frankly, doing themselves a significant disservice.