Using Google Scholar Efficiently to Enhance Research In Digital Marketing

    Utilizing the psychology of digital marketing to better the company's branding and raise sales sounds ideal, but how would one go about doing so? Especially if they do not have a background in psychology. The solution is Google Scholar, an academic search engine that already has a ton of resources ready to go!

     In my previous blog post, I briefly talked about refining Google searches and utilizing Google Scholar to find research articles that pertain to psychology in digital marketing. In today's blog post, I am going to go more in-depth about how Google Scholar has made finding quality research articles so much easier than it used to be. Google Scholar has made academic papers more readily available and easily discoverable. Personally, Google Scholar is my number one go to when I need to quickly find a research article simply because it lets me find full text or metadata of scholarly literature among many publishing formats. It is easy and familiar to use since it operates similarly to the search engine I already use on a daily basis, Google. Unlike the library search engine my university provides me, the website has a simple layout. However, I do still use my university's library to find certain articles that Google Scholar may want me to pay for, since my university may offer said article to me at no cost for being a student there. Despite that, Google Scholar is easy to use and credible. 

    Google Scholar can be used to enhance research in digital marketing. There are many articles on the website that cover consumer behavior. Here are three steps for how you can utilize it as efficiently as possible.

1. Narrow your search by using relevant information that you already know. Let's say you know of an author who specializes in consumer behavior; you can enter their name into the search to find their research articles. This can be done by typing "author: [insert name here]". If you know exactly what you are looking for, other things that you can search to narrow it down even more would be the title, publication field or even limiting the searches by publication date.
2. Create a library for your digital marketing related articles! Google Scholar lets you put the articles you want to save into a personal library. You can save articles from the search page and organize them later on. 
3. Use secondary sources to look up learn new/different terminologies, for example, digital marketing can also be referred to as digital advertising. Entering in different terminologies into the search maximized the articles you can find and make use of.

And there you have it! You can now begin your research and improve your marketing skills all with the help of Google Scholar.