The Skinny on Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a quick and easy way to broadly search scholarly literature. Google Scholar searches across academic disciplines for scholarly materials like peer-reviewed journal articles, theses, books and abstracts.

“Citation chaining” is nearly effortless with Google Scholar thanks to the inclusion of “Cited by” links. Clicking on a “Cited by” link will display a list of the books and articles that have cited the document originally retrieved in the search. This allows you to uncover additional sources and quickly gauge the importance of the article within the field (if a lot of other authors are citing it, it should be an authoritative source!)

Links to “Find It @ BSU,” which direct Ball State University users from citations to full-text articles in the University Libraries’ databases, also appear in Google Scholar search results. If you are searching Google Scholar outside of the Ball State University campus, you will need to configure your Google Scholar Preferences to display Find it @ BSU links:

1. Go to Google Scholar
2. Click on the Scholar Preferences Link
3. Type Ball State University in the “Library Links” box
4. Save Preferences

Don’t forget that you can also remotely access the University Libraries’ databases to search for journal articles!