What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar is an online, freely accessible search engine that lets users look for both physical and digital copies of articles. It searches a wide variety of sources, including academic publishers, universities, and preprint depositories looking for:
- Peer-reviewed articles
- Technical reports
While Google Scholar does search for print and online scholarly information, it is important to understand that the resource is not a database. A database is a subscription-based resource that searches for articles that have been published.
How can Google Scholar help you?
- is easy to search if you are familiar with the Google search engine
- provides some basic and advanced search options, like a database
- attempts to help you find the most useful scholarly resources by ranking articles in order of relevance
- you can search a specific article title in Google Scholar to see how many times it has been cited
- provides direct access to full text of articles if they are available for free online
- can link to library catalogs (including the University of Illinois catalog), helping you find resources within your own library and beyond
* We would like to thank the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University Library for this information.