 This video will share some basic information about Google Scholar and how student researchers can make the best use of it in their schoolwork. What is Google Scholar? Google Scholar is a handy research tool. It has the familiar layout of a Google search and adds in the benefits of limiters that filter out most non-scholarly sites. It favors articles that have the layout of a scholarly article. Many are from peer-reviewed journals, but some are not. Be aware that how Google defines a scholarly article and how your instructor defines a scholarly article might be different. Always check the source of an article to make sure it meets your academic needs or assignment requirements. Does Google Scholar find everything the library search tools find? There is significant overlap between articles found through library databases or WorldCat Search and articles found through Google Scholar. But there are many articles found only through library databases, and Google Scholar also returns articles which are not found in library databases. So you should never think that you're finding every source or even the best sources by using Google Scholar. The library's resources are still important to search on their own. Is there anything special about searching Google Scholar? I have a few tips to make the most of your Google Scholar search. First, use the link to Google Scholar in the library's A to Z databases page. This connects your Google Scholar search with many of the library's articles so that more full-text articles show up in your search. From the library homepage, click on A to Z databases. Then scroll down or Ctrl-F to find Google Scholar in the list. You may bookmark this link to use in the future. Second, once you're searching Google Scholar, make use of the built-in publication date limiter on the results page to quickly get results within the date range you need. Third, use Google Search operators to get finer control over your search. For example, use quotation marks to search a keyword phrase like nursing home or film noir. Or use quotation marks when you know the title of the article you want or a portion of the title. Put the title in quotes, add in any other keywords like the subject or author, and Google Scholar can usually find the citation. If you know the author and maybe something about the subject, enter the author like this with the word author and a colon in front of the name. Again, you can add any other keyword terms you know about the subject or title. With Google Search operators, you can always use more than one in the same search. Now for some more helpful Google Scholar functions. Site creates a citation for the article in MLA or APA format. However, you will need to check it for accuracy. In this example, the MLA style citation actually has several mistakes, although all the basic information is there. Sited by lists articles that used this article as a reference. This is a way to find more recent articles that built on the research of this article. It's also a good indication of how important the article is in its field. The more articles it's cited by, the more significant it's likely to be. Related articles is another handy way to explore articles on your topic. Let's circle back to the library and services we provide. What do you do if you find a citation in Google Scholar, but the full text isn't available, or the website it links to wants you to pay for it? That's when you head back to the library website. Let's say you want this article that came up in a Google Scholar search. You see there's no link for the full text, so you copy the title, open a new tab in your browser and go to the library home page. Then paste the title into the search box and hit enter. At this point, you might see the article at the top of your results like this. If you do, click on the title and you'll either see a link to the full text to follow or you'll see a request this button. The full text link means you can get the article right now. The request this means the library can get the article for you through our interlibrary loan system. Just fill out the form and you'll get an email when the article is ready to download. If you search for the article on WorldCat and don't see it in your results, change the search limiter from Kirkwood only to libraries worldwide. Almost any article can be located this way. If you still don't find the article at this point, that's the perfect time to ask a librarian for help. Those were the basics on using Google Scholar as just one of the many search tools available to you as a Kirkwood student. For more resources to help you with academic research, see the Kirkwood Library website.