Stay sceptical!

No. 5 (May 2025) in the 'Mastery in Writing' series of articles: https://www.paramedicpractice.com/content/mastery-in-writing. Hi, I'm Georgia Howat – a senior lecturer at the University of Cumbria. I thought I would give Sally a break this month from knowledge-imparting in the world of level 7 writing and impart you with some of my own. I wanted to talk to you about the academic ‘elephant in the room’: Google Scholar. Through early university, regardless of your course, you will no doubt be taught how to search using potentially new terminology such as ‘truncating’ and ‘Boolean operators’, and will be strongly encouraged – forced even – into using these techniques to search databases for work published in academic journals. PubMed. COCHRANE. Sage. At some point, you will no doubt stumble into the world of Google Scholar. Despite what you may think, I am not bringing this up to discourage you; Google Scholar is a resource that can produce massive amounts of literature across most of the same journals without needing to search the journals individually. It pulls from a vast range of sources – not only academic journals but conference papers, theses, books, patents, and even legal opinions – making it a one-stop shop for most scholarly content. Unlike choosing specific databases, it allows you to span across disciplines, meeting the needs of most paramedics. For example, if you are an educator within an ambulance service, do you look through clinical journals, or education? Both will give you different, and possibly awkward-fitting results. Scholar can begin to gap-fill information for you.