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 websites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. While Google does not publish the size of Google Scholar’s database, scientometric researchers estimated it to contain roughly 389 million documents, including articles, citations, and patents, making it the world’s largest academic search engine in January 2018. Previously, the size was estimated at 160 million documents as of May 2014. An earlier statistical estimate published in PLOS ONE using a Mark and recapture method estimated approximately 80–90% coverage of all articles published in English with an estimate of 100 million. This estimate also determined how many documents were freely available on the internet.
To access it, simply type Google Scholar into your search bar, and click the top result, which should look like this:
That will take you to the Google Scholar Home page, where you can begin searching:
You might also see in the upper left corner of the page, there are some options. “My Library” will contain everything you have starred, which allows you to reference it later without having to search for it again.
“My Profile” allows you to input information about yourself, if that is something that interests you.
When you enter a search, the results will appear like so:
If you click the star at the bottom left of each result, that will save it to your library. You can also filter the results by year of publication, as well as create an alert to get updates about any new publications in your area of interest.
Features:
• Search all scholarly literature from one convenient place
• Explore related works, citations, authors, and publications
• Locate the complete document through your library or on the web
• Keep up with recent developments in any area of research
• Check who’s citing your publications, create a public author profile
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 downside to Google scholar is that most of the items you will find are not free, but it can be a good starting point in your research, and once you find something you would like to read or reference, you can see about getting it from the JCLS Library for free.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact Digital Services, and we will be happy to help you.
Phone: 541-734-3990
Email: digitalservices@jcls.org