Google Scholar is a free search engine but with a certain twist that fits academic purposes. While a normal search engine searches information from the normal web, Google Scholar searches its information from repositories of publishers, universities, or scholarly websites.
Among other ideas and concepts from Google, Google Scholar is one of the longest-running services that Google runs as it has a really comprehensive database of research papers, legal cases and other scholarly publications.
While function wise it basically works the same as a normal Google search and with enough effort can even show the same result as Google Scholar, the benefit of utilising them over normal Google is that it will automatically sort its results limited to reliable scholarly resources.
Here are some of our tips to help you better equipped in the google scholar research endeavour:
1. Use the cite function from Google Scholar
With just a single click or tap of a button, you can cite your selected google scholar articles to a citation style that fits your needs; either it is MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, or Vancouver all available with just one click.
To access that, just click the “cite” button which sits below the article entry and there will be a popup selection of the citations available.
2. Try giving the related articles function a shot
In doing research, it is necessary to gain as much information as possible and Google Scholar introduces the function “related articles” which works similarly to the related searches function however it will attempt to find you a published article with similar topics that might be useful.
Similar to the cite function, related articles can be found just under the article entry. Another thing to note is that both related articles and related searches exist in Google Scholar so it’s best to maximise its usage.
3. Read the paper you find
One thing that Google Scholar has over the normal Google search is that they have partnered with various libraries and publishers worldwide to integrate their subscriptions directly into the search results.
This means that you can download or read articles directly by clicking the [HTML] or [PDF] links.
4. Learn more about the writer
There may be times when you read some articles and get curious about the author. With Scholar, you can see the author’s name just under the main search result.
By clicking the hyperlink, it will lead to the author’s profile and there you can see their own works or their co-authoring works.
5. Use your Gmail account to log in to Google Scholar
You can make an alert on your favourite authors, bookmark and save articles, and even organise your collection by labelling them all can be done with one account via My Library.
Google Scholar login only requires you to be signed in with your Gmail account and it will automatically do the rest for you.
6. Go advance with advanced search
If you are unable to find what you are looking for or want to find something specific, it can easily be done by using the advanced search function.
Advanced search can be found by clicking the hamburger icon at the top left of the page. There, you can fine-tune your searches to be more specific.
7. Take your Scholar “anywhere” with the Scholar Button browser extension
The Google Scholar Button is currently the closest thing we can have for now to the google scholar app. This extension acts like a mini Scholar search that can move around the web with you and can find related articles on topics that you just opened in another tab with just one click of a button.
The extension works with all Chromium-based browsers; this means that other browsers such as Edge, Opera, or Brave can use this extension. It is available on the Google web store under the name “Google Scholar Button”.
Summary
Google Scholar is generally acting as a smaller subset of the pool of Google searches and while you can use normal Google searches to help your research, Scholar provides plenty of convenient such as the ability to automatically made a citation with various styles, going for specific searches, and saving articles to your Scholar library.
As the scope of Scholar is worldwide, this means that google scholar search australis works for Australian audiences as well.
