Google Scholar Source Check

Using Google Scholar to Find Scholarly Sources

We’ll start with the claim that there was a concentration camp in Natchez, Mississippi, during the Civil War. You could search “Natchez + concentration camp” but doing so brings up a slew of unfamiliar sites and random YouTube videos. If an event of such magnitude happened—twenty thousand deaths at the hands of a liberating army that was supposed to protect these freed men, women, and children—there’s bound to be some kind of scholarly footprint, even if it didn’t make it into your history book. To evaluate this and other claims, a great place to start is Google Scholar (scholar.google.com), which, according to Google, “provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature.”9

Google Scholar operates on the same principles as a regular Google search. You put in keywords and see what comes up. In the authors’ search exercise, “Devil’s Punchbowl + Natchez + concentration camp” turned up little—almost nothing. The only result they found was a thesis by a master’s student at Louisiana State University, who heard about the Devil’s Punchbowl but found little concrete evidence.10 When he consulted historians, “most had not heard about the story, and some were doubtful of the story.”11

That an event of this immensity lacks a scholarly footprint should, by itself, raise a red flag. At the same time, the tweet about it has a link to an article on a website called Black Main Street.

Figure 6.5 Article on the Devil’s Punchbowl in Natchez, Mississippi (https://blackmainstreet.net/never-forget-devils-punchbowl-20000-freed-slaves-died-forced-post-slavery-concentration-camp/)

The article repeats the claim that “20,000 freed slaves died” after being herded into a “post slavery concentration camp.” But the article contains no footnotes to the source of this information. Instead, there’s a reference to a researcher named Paula Westbrook. Putting her name into Google Scholar came up empty in the authors’ exercise—red flag number two. Their regular Google search yielded slightly more. Paula Westbrook, it turns out, is no historian. She’s not an academic or an archivist. She’s not a teacher. What, then, are her qualifications?

Westbrook is part of something called the Southern Paranormal & Anomaly Research Society, a “Mississippi based paranormal investigation team.” Her bio explains that while growing up in Louisiana’s backwoods, she became skilled in the practices of voodoo, sparking “her interest in the paranormal.” Probably not the kind of “expert” you’ll want to cite in your history paper.12