Google Scholar is a large search engine for scholarly publications. It searches primarily journal articles and, contrary to almost all other search engines, searches the full text. From Google Books the data of a large number of scientific books are included in Google Scholar.
- you search articles as well as (a selection of) books
- your search is full text, so you will also find sources in which your search terms are only touched upon
- Google Scholar does not tell you what publications are included and what publications are not: you will have to find out by trial and error
- the order of results is also based on the number of received citations: that is why more recent publications are harder to find; always use the menu to filter on recent years!
The text in this box has been adapted from Universiteit Utrecht Library Libguides. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Locating the full text of an article
Abstracts are freely available for most of the articles. Alas, reading the entire article may require a subscription. Here're a few things to try:
- click a link labeled [PDF] to the right of the search result;
- click "All versions" under the search result and check out the alternative sources;
- click "Related articles" or "Cited by" under the search result to explore similar articles.
