Section Three B: Find Books and Articles - Finding Articles and Journals - Google Scholar

Searching Google Scholar

Google Scholar, http://scholar.google.com, is a subset of Google that is designed to search for academic and scholarly articles, patents and legal documents, and books. Google Scholar uses its own criteria to consider whether a publication is scholarly. This may not be the same criteria used by your instructor so always evaluate the sources before you use them!

Google Scholar offers citations but does not necessarily provide the full-text of articles! Like Google you can search with a Basic or Advanced search. The Advanced search offers users more ways to narrow and refine their searches.

Advantages of Google Scholar

• It's free and uses a simple, familiar, interface that works much like regular Google.
• It finds scholarly books, articles, and conference papers from a wide range of disciplines.
• You can set up Google Scholar to link to books and articles available through the SUU Library.

Disadvantages of Google Scholar

• Coverage is not comprehensive. It is a good first place to start researching a paper, but not comprehensive enough to be the only place you look.
• Criteria used for selecting "scholarly" materials is not given. Search results can be a mixture of articles and books as well as unpublished manuscripts, course syllabi, and high school term papers, so you must critically evaluate what you find.
• Results are not always full-text and books and many articles are not available full-text and online.

How to set Google Scholar Preferences to access fulltext articles from the SUU Library:

1. Go to Google Scholar, http://scholar.google.com, and click the Settings icon
2. Click Library Links 
3. Type Southern Utah or SUU, click Search, then select the Southern Utah University box
4. Click the Save button

Once Scholar preferences have been set up, articles accessible through the SUU Library will show up as Full-Text@SUU to the right of the article. Click Full-Text@SUU, then click the Article link under Links to Content to view the article. When searching off campus you will be prompted to login with your SUU username and password.

The following Google Scholar video (1:48 min) shows how to set up and search Google Scholar for articles available through the SUU library:

The following Google Scholar Citations video (0:42 min) shows how to find citations for articles found in Google Scholar: