 Google Scholar is a search engine that helps you find scholarly materials such as books, articles from academic journals, court opinions, and the like. Here's the difference between Google Scholar and just plain Google. If I enter in the keywords Chernobyl and disaster in Google, here's the results list. Well over 12 million results. The top result is Wikipedia. We also see a few YouTube videos, history.com, and business insider. Some of these sources might yield you decent results, but if you're looking specifically for scholarly sources, you'd have to definitely tweak your search strategies. Different keywords, advanced search, maybe Google had a search for very specific types of sources. But if I type the same keywords into Google Scholar, my results look very different. Around 56,000 results, which is still a lot, but significantly less than 12 million. Instead of popular sources like magazines and YouTube, I've got the Journal of Radiological Protection, Social Science and Medicine, the American Journal of Psychiatry, and other academic research. The filters on the left allow me to find recent scholarship on the topic. And notice how because I'm on campus right now, Google Scholar and Western libraries are working together to help me access this material. If you're not on campus, you can go to settings, choose library links, and connect Western to Google Scholar. On the results list, you can also easily see other items that cited the source you're looking at. For example, the social impact of the Chernobyl disaster is a book that looks intriguing, and I'd like to see more like that. I might click the cited by link below the preview, and now I can see all the articles and books that used the social impact as their source. Or I can choose the related articles link to find more possible sources related to my topic. You can also easily search by author, if that author's name is a link. Let's select DR Marbles. From his library, you can see the titles of all of his books and articles, and the statistics on how his scholarship has been used. While not as robust as other research methods, such as one search, Google Scholar can be an easy and useful way to start out your search for credible scholarly sources.