Google Scholar is a version of Google Search Engine that specializes in scholarly information, so when you use it, your results are gonna feature worthwhile documents like articles and books. That's pretty great and all, but you don't wanna just jump in and start searching, you gotta tweak it settings first. Like this.


Go up into settings, then the library links, and search for the University of West Florida, and check the box next to our name. While you're here, you might also want to go to search results and tell Google's Scholar to show links to import citations.


That'll make it play nice with rough works or other bibliographic management software, which I hope you're using. You also have to be on campus or logged into the UWF library website, otherwise paywalls might show up and try to charge you like 60 bucks or something per full text article. Information's valuable and all, but as a UWF student, you should never have to pay for an article. Ask a librarian before you give anyone a card number. We'll help you get it for free.


Google Scholar is most useful when you have an article citation or at least gets title and want to track down the full text. Check it out. Here's a citation for an article I found in a list of references. I want to see the full text so I copy the title and punch it into Google Scholar. I also put quotes at both ends which tells Google I only want results with these exact words in this exact order. I hit search, glance over the results, and ta-da! There's the article in all of its full-text glory, nestled incidentally in a UWF library database.


This doesn't always work, but it works off and enough that it's where I start when I want to quickly track down a specific article. Google Scholar has one more really useful feature, decided by link. It's right down here below each search result. Click on it and you get a list of all the articles Google knows about that have cited this particular article.


Why does that matter? Well, research is hard, and sometimes you can only find one or two articles that seem relevant to your topic. Articles in the cited by-list are probably going to have topics similar to the original article, and might just be relevant to your research.


So that's Google Scholar. It's a great tool for locating the full text of an article you already know about, especially if you have its exact title, and also for getting a list of everyone who cited it. You can use it for other kinds of research too, but that's where it really shines.