Intro to Google Scholar

AN INTRODUCTION TO GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Randy L. Miller

Graduate Research Assistance Librarian

September 2013

434-592-3096

RLMiller5@liberty.edu

What does Google Scholar include?

Google Scholar www.scholar.google.com 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.

(Important note: If you are doing a comprehensive review of the

literature, you should always check other sources such as Summon and

discipline-specific databases rather than relying solely on Google Scholar.)

 Google Scholar only contains citation references to books, journal articles, and other resources, not general websites like

the Google Search engine.

 It is more complete in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and medicine) literature. It is also fairly

comprehensive in the Social Sciences (such as Education and Counseling).

 Has the fewest indexed articles in the Humanities, including Religion and Biblical Studies. (See the “Metrics” link at the

top to show the major disciplines and the most highly indexed journals in each discipline.) It also tends to include more

recent literature rather than pre-1990 literature because this older literature has often never been digitized and put on

the web.

 Although it contains patent records, court cases, and legal documents, we will not be discussing those in this handout.

What are some advantages of using Google Scholar?

1. In addition to showing resources like journal articles in our subscription databases, it also shows free “open access”

and gray literature items (like conference proceedings, organization white papers, etc.) found on the web. The open

access movement is increasing in...