Subject Guides for Websites

Last update: 8/11/2021

Google Scholar is a variation of Google.  It is designed specifically for scholarly literature searches.

Advantages

• It’s free to use.
• It has a simple, familiar interface that works much like regular Google.
• It finds scholarly books, articles, and conference papers from a wide range of disciplines.

Disadvantages

• 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 Search results can be a mixture of articles and books as well as unpublished manuscripts, course syllabi, and high school term papers, so you must critically evaluate what you find.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 or free like regular Google. Often the link for an article will take you to the publishers website where the full article is available only if you buy it.