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Library resources are the best information finding tools that hardly anyone uses. I frequently see even grad students who should know better futility trying to google for relevant academic papers.

Use the subject headings! They are assigned by real humans who actually understand the content! It's night and day vs whatever web search engines are doing these days. If you have never used these kinds tools before to discover new information, give it a try, you will be pleasantly surprised.

It's incredibly refreshing for every result to be a long form exploration of the topic instead of mindless clickbait copied from Wikipedia intro sections.



I'm a grad student and I don't know what you are talking about. The local library software is not better than Google Scholar, in fact it's only good when you know what you want to find already and there is a paper version in some of the libraries of the university (top-3 of the country). Otherwise GS and Sci-hub are doing the job very fine.


The parent comment says that, of all the information-finding tools that hardly anyone uses, library resources are the best, not that library resources are the best information-finding tools; there's no contradiction between what the two of you have noticed.


I think you misunderstood one or both of the comments. The original commenter was saying that for certain use cases, the library tools are far superior to typical web search tools. Then the other commenter was saying they disagree, saying that the library tools are only good if you know exactly what you want, and how they prefer Google Scholar.


Maybe there is more to it that you're missing?


I wanted to come and say the same thing




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