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Develop with Derby: Finding and Evaluating Sources of Information

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a free search engine that searches across a range of academic material including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports.  In many cases it indexes the full text of items, rather than merely bibliographic information, although the full text will not necessarily be available. Google Scholar is a great starting point for any academic search as:

  • It has a familiar interface (looks like Google) and is easy to use
  • Unlike Google, it only retrieves academic type material 
  • It searches Open Access repositories (see the Open Access section for more details)
  • It is a multidisciplinary resource in that it searches across many different disciplines and subjects

However, although Google Scholar can be a useful research tool, it is important to bear several things in mind: 

  • Not all material will necessarily be peer-reviewed. There is no editorial process within Google Scholar, so you need to be careful what you rely upon.
  • Google Scholar’s search options aren’t especially sophisticated - it is limited in terms of options to filter and refine results. The coverage is also broad. 
  • Some articles may not appear as they do in the final published work. Preprints and drafts are all indexed by Google Scholar as well as open-access final articles.

Have a look at the following video, and the other sections on this page, to find out more about how to use Google Scholar.

Egan, M (2022) How do you use Google Scholar? 14 April. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cZfjGCTahE (Accessed: 28 April 2023).

There's a lot of tempting looking links on a Google Scholar results page and you might want to follow them expecting it to work like normal Google, but they'll usually just take you to a paywall (e.g you will have to pay to access the article). The actual important stuff is elsewhere.

Let's take a look at the results page for a typical Google Scholar search:

Top tips

  • If the full text is available, the link will appear on the right-hand side of the screen, so ignore the title links (the things you’d normally click on in Google) and concentrate on the full text links;
  • Full text items may not be the published version of an article (they may be an earlier draft, or more often an unformatted copy of the published text).

Additional features

Under the hamburger menu (☰) you'll find Advanced search which gives you a lot more control over your search. Have a look at the advanced search section for more information.

The ☆ Save buttons beneath each result work with the ★ My Library feature at the top right and is handy for managing and keeping track of useful articles. See the My Library section.

For any article you can also see Related articles, while the Cited by button on each result lets you see what other articles indexed in Google Scholar have cited this one (another useful way to find related articles).

 

"Searching for information: Google Scholar" by University of York Library licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 / modified from original with additional text.

Use the ☆ icon to add items to My library. To access your library, follow the My library link in the top right. In the My library screen, you can use the search box to:

  • Search your starred items
  • Organise them using labels
  • Edit the bibliographic details of items
  • Export them to a reference management program

The image below shows the different icons available in My Library and their function.

"Google Scholar" by University of York Library licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 / modified from original with additional text.