Just a quick note today… There are many reasons to search the Internet for scholarly articles. The problem with actually finding what you are looking for is that a simple search on most search engines will return a bunch of “junk” results in addition to what you are really looking for. Sorting through all of the “junk” can be very time consuming. Google Scholar helps solves this problem.
By using Google Scholar you can weed out non-academic websites and information while you search. Google Scholar is one of the first things I show my students in our introductory technology classes. Here is what Google has to say about this service:
Each Google Scholar search result represents a body of scholarly work. This may include one or more related articles, or even multiple versions of one article. For example, a search result may consist of a group of articles including a preprint, a conference article, a journal article, and an anthology article, all of which are associated with a single research effort. Grouping these articles allows us to more accurately measure the impact of research and to better present the different research efforts in an area.
Each search result contains bibliographic information, such as the title, author names, and source of publication. One set of bibliographic data is associated with the entire group of related articles and is our best estimate at the representative article for the group. This bibliographic data is based on information from the articles in the group, as well as on citations to these articles from other scholarly works.
To use Google Scholar simply go to this address:
http://scholar.google.com
Whatever you do, I recommend that you don’t tell the GCC librarians that you recommend this resource; during their “how-to-research-for-class” presentation, a student asked them about Google Scholar, to which they responded with discontent, stating it was unreliable and not worth using. I’ve not used it enough either way to determine if it’s good or not, but I’ve always been impressed with Google’s tools, so I’m sure this one is bound for success also.
collegedj86,
Well it’s certainly not as good as the resources you’ll find in a library, especially if they subscribe the major journal search and retrieval systems, but it does do a good job, and it’s available everywhere there is an internet connection and it’s free! (at least most of it) :).
Joe