According to its creators, "Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research."
Even librarians use Google Scholar! Improve your search results by learning how to use the advanced features of Google Scholar. This page covers the benefits and limitations of Google Scholar and provides plenty of tips and tricks for getting the most out of it.
Before using Google Scholar, it's a good idea to set your preferences to connect to NSU Libraries and any other libraries you have access to. Doing so will allow you to discover articles already in the library's databases. You can change your settings by clicking the "hamburger" menu in the upper left, choosing Settings, and then Library Links. You can search for libraries and add them there. Need more help? Click the link below.
Remember, as a student, you should never have to pay for an article! Through your tuition, you have already paid for access to many journal articles and other scholarly resources, which are available in the NSU Libraries database collection. Resources not in the collection can often be obtained -- for free -- through Interlibrary Loan. For more information, contact your friendly librarian.
While using Google Scholar, it is helpful to keep these questions in mind:
As a research tool, Google Scholar is good for some research needs, but not as good for others. When deciding whether to use Google Scholar or one of the Library's subscription databases for your research, please keep the following in mind:
Google Scholar is GOOD for...
Google Scholar CANNOT...
Keep in Mind:
Google Scholar searches for many types of scholarly materials, including journal articles, research reports, dissertations and theses, preprints, technical reports, patents, manuscripts in preparation, and working papers.
The Google Scholar results page provides a list of citations. In some cases, the results contain links to the full text:
Google Scholar does not publish its process for indexing items, but this is how Google Scholar defines its weighting system:
"Google Scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature." The resources deemed most relevant will appear on the first results page.
Remember, while Google's goal is to make the world of information more accessible and useful, it is still up to the researcher to critically evaluate all resources.
*These articles are often the manuscript version or a pre-publication proof. For direct quotations and page numbers, you must always consult the published article.
**There may be issues with articles posted to sites like these; see the article below for additional information.
If you don't see a way to access the full text of an article you find on Google Scholar, or if it links to the publisher's website where you are asked to pay for the full text, do not despair - there is another alternative!
You can obtain many articles through NSU's Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service, which is a way to access materials not held in our collections. ILL services are available to all students, faculty, and staff of the NSU community at no charge.
Use the link below to request an item through Interlibrary Loan.
Google does not search the deep web (a.k.a., dark web, invisible web, or hidden web). These terms refer to the portions of the World Wide Web not indexed or discoverable by standard search engines, including password protected web pages and encrypted networks. It is estimated that the deep Web is several orders of magnitude larger than the surface Web, which means that Google Scholar cannot find everything that might be of use to you. For more information about the deep web, see the article linked below.
Publishing on the web is very easy - almost anyone can do it! This can make it incredibly difficult to discern the veracity (accuracy and validity) and credibility (trustworthiness) of information found online.
Here are five important criteria to use when evaluating a website:
When evaluating a website's credibility, look for:
Ultimately, the researcher (you) must be the one to determine whether or not to use information found on a website. Below are some links to websites that provide some excellent guidelines for evaluating online resources:
After inputting your search terms into Google Scholar, you will see limiters on the left side of the results page. These limiters will help to narrow and refine your search results to better suit your needs. Google Scholar limiters include time period, relevancy (according to Google), and article type. You may also choose to include/exclude patents and citations.
Google Scholar casts a very wide net when searching, which often requires you to make your search more specific to find the results you need. The Advanced Search feature provides additional ways to narrow your results, by the use of exact words or phrases, either in the body of the text or in the title only, by author or journal name, or by date of publication. To access the Advanced Search feature, click on the three bars at the top left of the page (next to the Google Scholar title) and click on "Advanced Search" in the options; you may choose this option at any stage of your search.
Each item in the results list contains important information for locating the full text of the article. The items highlighted in blue beneath the description have the following functions:
The column to the right of the results shows means by which the article can be accessed.
REMEMBER: You should not have to pay for articles. If you cannot locate a freely accessible copy of the article through Google Scholar, request it through Interlibrary Loan!
Not finding what you need? Try this:
