Google: Google Scholar

What is Google Scholar?

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 web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.

Features of Google Scholar

• 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

How are documents ranked?

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.

*information from http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html

Want to make sure you have access to the articles in your results?  You need to link Google Scholar to Alvernia's library.  

Here's how:

• From the Google Scholar homepage, click on the "Settings" link at the top of the screen
• Click on "Library links" on the left hand side of the page
• Type in "Alvernia" & search
• Click to select "Alvernia University - Full-Text @ Alvernia"
• Click "Save"
• Continue to search!

Search by author:

• Use author: (author with a colon) before the name of the author you wish to limit the search to
• Examples:
• author:"Frederick Wolfe" -- limit your search results to a specific author by using author: and quotation marks
• author:"d knuth" -- limit your search to a specific author like D. Knuth

Search by title:

• Put the paper's title in quotation marks
• Example
• "A pet therapy intervention with geriatric psychiatry inpatients" -- will search for the exact title of the article
  

Sort by date:

• Use the sort by date option in the side bar of your search results
• Examples:
• Since 2009
• Since 2013

Exclude a term from your search:

• Use the – (minus sign) before a word to exclude it from your results
• Example:
• – depression – when added to a search this would eliminate results that mention depression
• social work –abuse –will search for social work but will eliminate any results that discuss abuse

Search for synonyms or related words:

• Use a ~ (tilde) before a term to search for any related words
• Example
• ~geriatric-- will search for related words like elderly

Find other relevant & related articles:

• Use the Related articles link under the article information
• Example:
• Related articles link

Search for a legal documents:

• Use the Case law option on the main search page or on the results side bar to search for specific cases
• You can also select specific courts from the search page
• Example:
• Case law, Federal courts