"Google of course!" said Serom Lee, in exclamation. "What else is there?"
The School of Engineering junior, like so many others, simply pulls up the Web site's homepage and types in her query. In fractions of a second, Lee - like thousands of other students - has her question answered.
But not efficiently enough for many University professors and librarians, the search engine presents its users with sites of varying degrees of academic credibility.
Instructors fear that students are therefore not able to discriminate between sites that are valid and others that may be badly researched or biased.
"A lot of things are not relevant, current or unbiased when you just search online," said Martin Kesselman, a Life Science librarian at Chang Science Library on Cook campus. "In doing a regular Google search you're not going to find scholarly journals."
In response to this growing concern, University librarians have come up with a compromise - Google Scholar.
Yet another free beta program by the search engine giant, the program works as a liaison between the libraries' databases of academic writings - such as articles or dissertations - and the Internet savvy student both on and off campus.
"The nice thing is that it works just like Google - you don't have to use fancy syntax," Kesselman said.
Google Scholar boasts stronger filters that limit its shown results to academically reliable sources and even offers separate citation pages to the user.
It links students to documents that are already available through their libraries and also to ones that are not - often offering different versions of the same article for further analysis.
Normally, students are asked to pay for full access to these outside journal articles and find themselves at a disadvantage, said Rosalba Barbalace, assistant supervisor at Alexander Library on the College Avenue campus.
"However, Google Scholar and the libraries offer free access to them," Barbalace said. "Many students don't realize that."
The Web site also allows its users to read fugitive or gray literature - hard to find abstracts or pieces that are not well documented in indexes - such as conference papers published only on company Web sites or some government documents, Kesselman said.
But not all are completely enthusiastic about Google Scholar being integrated into the libraries' system. Ammy Chen, a student worker at Alexander Library, questions the impact search engines like Google Scholar will have on the libraries themselves.
"Programs like Google Scholar hinder libraries because people don't need to go to libraries to get information," Chen said. "People are too dependent on the Internet. Instead, they'll just search online from their computers."
Kesselman admits the matter is complicated, but defends the program as a positive and proactive approach taken by the libraries to stay involved with students.
"The big challenge we have as librarians is that so many of our users don't come into the library," Kesselman said. "The thought was, here is a service that people are going to go to anyway."
But both Kesselman and Karen Hartman - a social sciences librarian at Alexander - warn that Google Scholar is not the end all solution to a student's research needs.
"We don't see it as the isolated solution. We don't recommend that students go only to that," Hartman said.
