“After spending two years now as a student at university, I

3 COMMENTS

  1. The headline is a bit off he’s not actully talking about google and wikipedia but the huge catalog of government funded databases and university journal arcchives.

    Many academic branches have gone all some time ago, rest asure that all of those books sitting on the shelf at the law professors office is purely for show, they browse their pricy thompson databases for almost everything. Ive experience Social science professors handing out JTSOR refferences(Google index’s jstor) instead of book refferences.

    Wikipedia’s refferences are often filled with links to similar sources.

  2. Relying solely on “Google and Wikipedia” – absolutely not. However, I did my whole research masters degree in law only using online databases. In fact electronic searching and linking, combined with the sheer volume of data available, made it possible to do far more research than would have been possible the old-fashioned way. It is highly unlikely that my university library would have all of the journals available in print format, that were available online. Manually searching through book indexes and so on would have taken significantly more time, not to mention the time it would take to physically find each specific journal article that was referenced. Electronically, all this was a breeze. In just a couple of hours, I had literally hundreds of articles to read on my chosen topic. Of course, this volume of data can make research much harder, but I’d rather read a research paper that was written using 500 academic journal articles, than one that referenced only 10 or so books.

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