Google Scholar: About GS

Don't pay for full text! Set your Google Scholar preferences to show when Lister Hill Library has full text of articles. Use Illiad to request articles Lister Hill doesn't have.

Use quotes for author, title, or exact phrase

Use + to include a stop word (a, the, for), words that would otherwise be ignored

Use – to exclude results including the term: Halo –Xbox

Use OR to include either of your search terms: Incidence OR prevalence

Use  Advanced Scholar Search to find specific citations

About Google Scholar
Google Scholar Coverage
Google Scholar Search Tips

• Provides an easy way to search the scholarly literature
• Searches across many disciplines  
• Finds papers, theses, books, abstracts, articles, citations, and working papers that can be difficult to find
• Searches full text of entire article 
• Ranks results by relevancy, not date (user can choose date range to see historical or new articles)
• Can be customized under Scholar Preferences to show links to Lister Hill Library full text, when available

Google maintains an official Google Scholar blog, which highlights the latest and greatest tricks and features of Google Scholar. Here are the most recent posts to this blog:

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The results are relevancy ranked. Google Scholar explains that it "aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature."