Google and Google Scholar: Google Scholar

Google Scholar has many positive points:

• Search across many disciplines and sources for scholarly literature
• Helpful for beginning researchers in getting started
• Good at finding obscure references that may be hard to find in some library databases
• Helpful with finding the source when you only have a partial citation
• Finds books, chapters, and magazine/newspaper (non-scholarly sources) in one search

..... and also some drawbacks

• Can't limit to peer-reviewed material - can find too many non-scholarly materials
• Not a lot of full text articles (unless at IMSA or your Google Scholar has been linked to the IRC)
• Doesn't limit or sort by discipline
• Can include articles from predatory journals
  • List of predatory journals
• Google doesn't say what journals are covered or what issues of journals are covered
• Google doesn't say how often it is updated

Google Scholar casts a wide net when searching. This means that you will want to make your search very specific to find the most relevant articles. Using the Advanced Search feature is an easy way to narrow your results.

This tutorial will quickly show you some of the highlights of Google Scholar Advanced Search.

Screen shots below give you an image of the Google Scholar Advanced Search options.

Scholar.google.com

The Google Scholar advanced search screen