Tag Archives: Scholarly

Doing research, especially that which requires studying deep, meaningful pieces by the greatest scholars and thinkers, can be difficult—both to find and to sort through. Libraries and college textbooks are an ideal start to finding what you need for your paper or project. However, Internet services have made your access to scholarly resources much broader and more readily available. Google Scholar is just one of those ways to access these great resources. This is one step above doing some vague web search from the home page. Google Scholar will find you in-depth, deep content from our greatest thinkers, scholars, and philosophers.

First, click the “more” link at the top of Google’s home page and then click “scholar” to access Google Scholar. You will then be redirected to the Google Scholar home page. Much like Google’s main home site, the page is quite plain with a search bar in the middle. You will notice that under the search bar is an option to search for articles or legal opinions and journals. To the right of the search bar are two links:

*Advanced Scholar Search—allows you to search for exact phrases, exclude words, or specify search results to only display for certain authors or dates, etc. There are further categories to choose from depending on whether you are searching for articles or legal opinions.

*Scholarly Preferences—allows you to make basic preferences of how you would like search results to be displayed, includes options such as “Library Links” and a “Bibliography Manager”.

If you were to perform a search query from the main search bar, you would then be taken to a list of related results, including several ways to display the results that can be adjusted from the top of the page. Each entry in the results list is a hyperlink to the original text, the author’s name and what book the entry is from, a short description including the words you queried, the number of citations, a link to related articles, and a link to other versions of the entry.

If you click on the link of the entry, you will be taken to a reader showing the contents of the text from which the search query found the related keywords. Depending on the source of the text, you may also see an overview, reviews, and a link to buy the book that contains the text. There is also an addition search bar that allows you to search for words and phrases within the text shown.  You may also see links of where to buy the book, find it in a library, or see related books.

The text you see here is original from the book or other media from which it is referenced. It excels that of using an actual book because you can find specific topics or phrases carefully. Yet, finding the original book is made simple with the many links Google Scholar provides to buy or loan it. If you need to do some in-depth, meaningful research, try Google Scholar!