Google Scholar
Claire Nickerson
What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) is a web-based tool for finding journal articles that you might normally get from a library. Unlike library databases, which use keyword searching (covered in Chapter 9), Google Scholar uses natural-language searching, also known as phrase searching.
| Google Scholar | Library Databases |
|---|---|
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When to Use It
Google Scholar is usually not a good place to start your research, as it sometimes contains resources that are not scholarly. However, there are a few good reasons to use Google Scholar later in your research:
- To find resources on your topic when you’ve already done some searching in library databases and didn’t find much
- To get a full citation for an article you don’t have enough information about
- To find an open-access copy of an article that isn’t available through your library
- To find newer articles that have cited an article you already identified (citation tracing)
Get a Full Citation
Sometimes you may want to find a specific article, but you don’t have enough information to find it through your library. Here are some examples:
| If you know . . . | Search for . . . | Example Search |
|---|---|---|
| Article title | “Article title in quotation marks” | “Artwork in anatomy education” |
| Author and year of publication | Lastname(s) YYYY | Huang Beckman Ng 2024 |
Click on the “cite” button under the search result to see a full citation in multiple styles. Once you have a full citation for the article, you can search your library catalog to see whether your library has the journal it comes from.
Find an Open-Access Copy
If your library doesn’t have a copy of the article you want, search for the article by title in Google Scholar. Look for a [PDF], [HTML], or [DOCX] link to the right of the search result to access the full text of the article.
Trace Citations
Sometimes you find a relevant article that is too old to use, or you want more articles that are similar to an article you have already found. You can use the “Cited by” tool in Google Scholar to find newer articles that have cited one you already have–just search for the article title in quotation marks and click on the “cited by” button underneath the search result.
Related Topic: Google Books
Google Books (books.google.com) is similar to Google Scholar, but it searches books instead of articles. If you’re considering buying a book or requesting it via interlibrary loan for your research, you can search for the book title in Google Books to get a preview. You usually can’t read the whole book, but you can view the table of contents and search inside the book for excerpts to help you decide whether you want it.
| Google Books | Library Catalog |
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Recommended Reading
- McHugh-Johnson, M. (2022, December 13). 18 Google Scholar tips all students should know ⧉. Google. https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/tips-google-scholar-expert/
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Google Scholar Search Help ⧉. (n.d.). Google. https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html
Search terms that you arrange into a search statement and type into a search box for key word searching.
Within the search box, an instruction to a search engine (Google or BING) to search the terms enclosed by quotation marks in order, instead of separately. (Reminder: If you use quotation marks, there always have to be more than one word within them because phrases always consist of multiple words.) For instance, if you put Abraham Lincoln in the search box, Google would return all documents that had the word Abraham in them somewhere and the word Lincoln in them somewhere. Many of those documents would be irrelevant to your search for information about Abraham Lincoln because they are about other Abrahams or other Lincolns. But if you put “Abraham Lincoln” in the search box, Google or BING would return all documents that contain Abraham Lincoln in that order.
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