Search engines help scholars untangle the Web

From the popular (the now-ubiquitous Google) to the scholarly (Lexis-Nexis), Internet search engines collectively process 550 million searches per day and may have reshaped the research landscape for both students and professionals.

"I don't know what my life and my research would be like without search engines," said senior Mitchell Lunn, a biology maqjor who is currently researching a rare, genetic pediatric disease and uses search engines daily. "There is no humanly possible way to scan journals by hand for articles relating to a particular disease."

Like Lunn, senior and biology major Rachel Jervis says she would be unable to conduct her research without online databases and scholarly search engines. As a 2003 Summer Scholar, Jervis researches how the tobacco industry targets women's weight concerns through its advertising. With online archives, she is able to search for highly specific internal tobacco company documents.

"If I'm looking for a document with the keyword 'obesity' from the 1970s by Joe Someone of Philip Morris, I can just search for it," Jervis said. Prior to 1998, when tobacco industry documents were digitally archived and made searchable as part of that year's tobacco industry court settlement, Jervis would have had to travel to a warehouse in Minnesota to access the files.

Search engines' accelerative effects have been felt in many research fields. "I spend more time learning and working rather than searching, which translates to higher efficiency," Lunn said.

But according to graduate student Joanne Jannsen, coordinator of the Tufts University Child and Family WebGuide research team, search engines' speediness also has a downside.

"The advent of the Internet has raised the expectation in many professional fields that people have easy access to a wealth of information and should be able to complete their work more quickly," Jannsen said. "This puts pressure on people to produce quickly, even though there is no guarantee that the information they find on the Internet is reliable."

In an effort to make at least one area of online researching -- child development -- both convenient and accurate, Jannsen and her team continually evaluate websites related to child development for the WebGuide. If the sites meet the research team's criteria, they are categorized and linked through the WebGuide's searchable index, a system that has been featured by The New York Times.

"One of our main services is that we make it possible to bypass random searching and uncertainty about the relevance and reliability of information," Jannsen said. "People need to be very vigilant and critical of the information they're looking at on the Internet."

Jannsen's concern about the reliability of sites uncovered through popular Internet searches is a common one.

"Popular search engines like Google are primarily bad because to do serious research; you're looking for peer-reviewed literature," senior lecturer and Director of the Tufts Community Health Program Edith Balbach said. "But Google sends people to popular websites, and students have trouble distinguishing between the two."

Jervis is one student who does not: "I've only been working with very trustworthy databases -- I know that if I'm getting Google returns, there's crap mixed in there," she said.

Lunn, however, has a more positive view of Google, pointing out that Jannsen and Balbach's caution is applicable to more than just online research. "A researcher using any book, newspaper, journal, or magazine should always read with caution, [understanding] that you may be reading an opinion or a poorly designed experiment," Lunn said, adding that he uses Google to research cellular processes or chemical compounds that are unfamiliar to him.

Though she is "wary" of search engines like Google and feels that students rely on them too heavily, Balbach concedes that Google and its ilk have had positive effects, including making it much easier for researchers to find obscure details or contact information.

"When I was starting out as a researcher, if you wanted the mission statement of some organization or the updated FDA release schedule, it was really hard," Balbach said. "The Web has totally changed the way we find that ephemeral information."

Jannsen agrees with Balbach regarding popular search engines' usefulness in finding out such details: "I use regular search engines like Google mostly to look for names and addresses of organizations, popular opinions and other background information," she said.

Researchers also note popular search engines' convenience in attaining research materials through commercial suppliers. "It's often a quick way to compare prices," Lunn said.

Though experts are divided regarding the positive and negative research implications of popular search engines, they have a uniformly positive view of scholarly search engines and databases.

"My research is mainly in the health field, and [Tisch's online database resources] have been incredibly helpful," Balbach said. "If students use things like Ovid [a collection of medical resources], it gives them a window into peer-reviewed and scholarly literature."

"When I'm researching something and I really need credible information, especially if I'm looking for empirical research, I go to the Tufts library site," Jannsen agreed.

Over 250 fully searchable online databases can be accessed through the Tisch Library's website. Many of these -- which cover topics including art, health, sociology, science, politics, and more -- provide free full-text articles, making it easy for researchers to seek out reputable information that is tailored to their research needs.

In order to survey 80 years of women's public opinion on smoking, Jervis accessed the public opinion database Polling the Nation through the Tisch site. Though the accessibility of such online resources saved time, it also made Jervis wonder if she was missing out on a more personal brand of research experience.

"It's kind of sad that when we need information, we don't go and talk to experts in the field anymore -- now, you just go online," Jervis said.

Ultimately, however, the convenient trumps the personal, and the fast facts top the face-to-face: "The payoff," Jervis said, "is worth losing the personal touch."

The Tufts University Child and Family WebGuide can be found at www.cfw.tufts.edu. See tomorrow's By the Numbers for some surprising statistics about search engines and the Internet.