ITS Technology Tips

Google Scholar is a free search service that offers the capability to search for scholarly literature across the Web. With Scholar, searchers are able to find peer-reviewed papers, abstracts, and citations from a variety of scholarly organizations such as academic publishers and universities.  Scholar provides the straightforward interface and convenience we’re accustomed to with a Google search. However, the added benefit is that Scholar enables searchers to search against only academic materials. Google has also worked with academic publishers to make some information that is generally protected by subscription barriers available in a Scholar search.  The advantage of this arrangement is that searchers can access abstracts and citation information from a diversity of resources.

While full text articles are occasionally available from Scholar, you may still need to access the complete resource from a library or publisher. In this case, you can take advantage of Loyola Libraries  to help locate the materials you find in a Scholar search. If you use Scholar through the Loyola Libraries web pages or from on-campus, you will get a link to the full text journals available from the LU Libraries.  Scholar can also be customized to link to Loyola holdings. Ask at the Lewis or Cudahy Libraries for assistance with this and other resources.

While it’s all too common to “Google it” to find any information imaginable, you may spend more sifting through endless results than you need to. Using Google Advanced Search not only helps you refine your search, you might come across some information that you wouldn’t normally find.

Advanced Search

You can access Google Advanced Search by clicking on the “Advanced Search” link on the Google home page. Note: If you’d like to search for images only, click on the “Images” tab on the Google home page then click on the “Advanced Image Search” link. Once you are ready to start your Advanced Search, keep in mind that you’ll only need to enter information into the fields you’d like to use. If you’d like to search for items with a particular file type, such as a PDF or Flash video file, try selecting a File Format. If you wish to narrow your results to only Government or Education sites, you can type .gov or .edu into the Domain field. For more tips on refining your search, visit Google Help: Advanced Search.

University Search

If you’d like to narrow your search to a specific school, a link for Google University Search is located at the bottom of the Advanced Search page. You can use the alphabetical index to locate your target school and then search for information within that institution only.