Can't resist the urge to Google?
- Google Scholar
- Use this search engine to search specifically for scholarly literature including books, peer-reviewed articles, theses, pre-prints, and technical reports.
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Google Scholar is especially useful when doing a quick search on a topic but less useful when you want an overview of literature on a certain topic,
Advantages of Using Google Scholar
- It’s free, familiar and relatively easy to use.
- It allows users to search for a find a wide variety of materials including articles, books, "grey literature" like conference proceedings on a vast number of subjects.
- It allows for you to see articles related to the one that might interest you, how many times an article has been cited and by whom and provides citations for articles in a number of styles.
- It can display links to articles and books held in QUL libraries.
- It allows you to save both citations and articles to read later.
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Disadvantages of Using Google Scholar
- It’s coverage is wide-ranging but not comprehensive.
- It can be a good research source but should not be the only source you use.
- It’s full- text versions of many items indexed are not available for free through on the web; however, many are accessible through the library website
- It has yet to reveal what criteria they are using to select "scholarly" material. Results often vary in quality and it is up to the researcher to determine which of the results are suitable for their purposes.
- It has few options to limit or narrow search results, users cannot for example limit results to peer reviewed, full text materials or subject.
- It often links to articles on publisher websites. These sites will ask you to buy a subscription or pay for an article.
