If you’ve taken Northern Buckeye’s Google Certified Educator Level 2 cohort, you’ve learned about Google Scholar. If you haven’t taken our cohort, it is likely you’ve never heard of Scholar. Allow me to enlighten you.
So what is Google Scholar? Well, Google has this to say:
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.
Google Scholar is a great tool to find articles and case law. It is a great companion to Google Books, which I will outline in a future tip. Scholar will be useful to your students (especially those in high school) and maybe even yourself if you have to do research or are furthering your own education.
Let’s dig in!
To get started, visit the Google Scholar website at scholar.google.com. Once you are there, you see the familiar Google search box, and you can choose from Articles or Case law.
When searching for case law, you can search for Federal court cases or those in Ohio courts. In this screenshot, I am searching for Brown v. Board of Education.
Once you’ve found what you are looking for, you can click the star to make it a favorite, which adds it to your Library. Or, click the quotation mark to cite it. The default citation is Bluebook.
You can also use Scholar to search for Articles in scholarly journals.
Here I did a search for Intermittent fasting. You’ll notice that I got a number of articles both in PDF and HTML format. I can also use the sidebar to narrow down the publication dates, change sorting, or even create an alert that will notify me when something is added that matches my search.
Again, you can make it a favorite, or cite the article. When citing, you have a choice of many formats including MLA, APA, Chicago and more. Simply copy the correct format into your Works Cited page.
Your library holds all of your favorites, both case law and scholarly articles. This is a great way to keep track of your findings.
I think Google Scholar is a great tool for teachers and students alike. I wish it was around when I was in college!