Google Scholar

Introduction

Google Scholar is your one-stop free repository of scholarly articles, books, court rulings, publications, magazines and abstracts. Google Scholar looks and feels like a normal Google search engine, however, it only searches for academic articles or academically themed articles. Google Scholar can help a person search, find, locate and learn from scholarly articles. It rates articles by their weight, both metaphorically and physically, age and citations.

Google Scholar also includes an option where publishing houses can publish their scholarly works and another option where libraries can help people find their list of scholarly articles.

Google Scholar can be accessed via any electronic device that has a screen, an alphabetical input method (keyboards, QWERTY boards) and an Internet connection. You can access the service via a desktop computer, laptop, tablet smartphone and feature phone that runs or supports JAVA 2.0. The Google Scholar app can also be found on the Android system. There is no iOS app for Google Scholar.

Step 1

The first step is to start by accessing www.google.com and searching the term "Google scholar", you can also access it by selecting Google scholar from the drop down menu or by typing scholar.google.ca in the URL bar. This method might not work on some smartphones and JAVA phones.

Step 2

The second step is finding the results, you can change your preferences, you can specify scholarly results with scholar preferences. Most of the results will either be scholarly articles or links to Google Books. 

Once you have found an article or book that is satisfactory, simply click the link and you're done.

Step 3

A rather underused trick when it comes to Google Scholar, is the phrase search. If you're looking for a particular phrase rather than an entire article or book, simply enclose the phrase within quotation marks.

An example: "germs in the kitten's intestine", this will lead the search engine to search for all scholarly articles within its database for the phrase "germs in the kitten's intestine." This will hopefully reduce the amount of results and lead you to your article or citation sooner than a normal search would.

Step 4

The second specialized search technique is title searching. If you know the exact name of the title you are looking for, add the tag "intitle:" (without the quotation marks), and follow with the name of you article, book or citation.

An example: intitle: The Bible Of Karate Bubishi. Using the intitle tag prompts the search engine to find any articles, books, citations, references or abstracts with the exact title of "The Bible of Karate Bubishi."

Step 5

The final form of specialized search is author search. If you know the name or initials of the author of the particular citation, reference, book, article or journal you are looking for, you can hunt down his or her works directly. An example would be "author:" (minus the quotation marks), doing this will trigger a search response from the search engine, and it will look up all the works which are tagged by whatever name you entered.

Entering the search term like this, author: J. K. Rowling, will turn up all of the scholarly articles tagged with her name. It's important to add the author's initial or full name, as not doing so may turn up inaccurate or incorrect results.

Tips

Bookmark your results to make them easier to find the next time.

Bookmarking Google Scholar itself is also a useful idea.

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