Beginners Guide to Google Scholar: Use Google Scholar for Academic Research

what's up smart students welcome back to my channel my name is chelsea seaburn and we've got a lot of ground to cover because i want to give you the beginner's guide tour of how to use google scholar effectively now let's start from the top what is google scholar here's how i like to explain it google scholar is essentially the little sister to google you're familiar with google we all are google is a search engine that houses all the world's information so you can take that concept and apply it to google scholar the little sister because instead of housing all the world's information google scholar focuses on the world's academic information in other words you're going to find things like journal articles both published unpublished peer-reviewed journal articles you might find academic books or other pieces like a conference piece or a court opinion the list goes on and on now from working with hundreds of you and from being a college student myself once upon a time i know a lot of you turn to google scholar for research and going back to the fact that it it is like google you try to use google scholar just as you would google and here's the thing while they're similar google scholar requires a separate set of skills to make the most out of it which is why i'm here today so now let's jump into my computer and i'm going to walk you through all of the functions in google scholar and by the way i created this in-depth comprehensive template of everything i'm going to go through in this video so be sure to download that you can find it in this description down below but with no further ado let's jump into my computer we here we are welcome to your tour of google scholar so right now we're at the home page the user interface whatever you want to call it this is ground zero and i just want to point out what a few of these things mean to you right here so i'm actually going to zoom in there we go oh too much okay on the right hand side this picture will bring you to your gmail account and so in order to make a google scholar account you do need to have a gmail so if i click on my account as you can see it takes me out of google scholar and it brings me in to my google account but we're not here for google we're here for google scholar so let's go back to the home page in the center this is where you're going to perform your search queries and we're going to get into the search queries towards the end because now i want to go through all the different features the two you see right here these are quick access features to your profile and your library if you'll know these two options are the first two options in your drop down menu like i said these are quick access but let's go through each of these starting with my profile so my profile i'll say that this is mostly important if you plan to publish articles in google scholar as a student who's not publishing you're still welcome to input this information the general information here but just know that it's not going to make or break your user experience on google scholar so if i go next and i go to articles as you can see here google scholar is trying to pull up articles that they think i wrote they have the same last name as me and so like i said this is mostly important if you're a published author and you want to track your publications we're going to go back to google scholar now let's talk about my library because my library is something that's very important to you as a college student basically my library houses all of the sources that you find important more specifically you're able to organize them categorize them and save them for later so for instance if you're researching finding a bunch of articles but you don't have the time to read through those articles at the moment you can save them in my library and reference them later so for example these are three articles that i already saved to my library that either i read and i really liked what it said so i wanted to save it so i can reference it later or i hadn't read and i wanted to reference later let me show you how to save an article to your library first then we'll get into the functionality within my library so google scholar homepage i perform a basic search query and if you'll know the first option under each article is save and that's exactly how you're going to save this article to my library so let's click save it brings up this prompt that says save to my library note how there's an option for labels we're going to cover that right now because basically i just saved it to my library it's not organized or categorized in any way shape or form now let's go back to my library as you can see i have the quick option over here on the right and that article is right here great these are all your articles saved in no particular order now let's say order does matter to you because you're writing two papers in two separate courses well using labels makes this very easy for you to do that i like to tell students to think of labels like folders when you're creating folders say in your google drive account or on your desktop in your computer labels work very similarly so i want to create two labels to organize the two separate topics for these courses what you're going to do is click manage labels a brand new account will look like this there's no labels created so what you're going to do is create a new label come up with a name let's say the first research paper i'm writing is in my leadership course so i'm going to select create and now i have my first label called leadership let's do another one you can also create a label from up there and let's say the other course i'm in is going to be a marketing class let's say i'm in marketing great great so now i have two separate labels aka folders that i can save these articles to so as you can see now over here on the left we have leadership and marketing under our labels and so if i wanted to organize these labels into the categories now you see this label option which i'm going to select i'm going to click marketing and then note how right here it says leadership telling me that this article belongs to this label so i'm going to do leadership here as well great and then here let's say this is for marketing wonderful and finally this last one was for marketing as well the other thing that's really cool about labels is not only can you save them per category but you can also save them per reading status so let's say the three articles below i've already read them and i'm simply saving them so i can reference them later however this first one i haven't read this article yet great let's assign another label to it and now we're going to add it to our reading list select done and then see how there's two labels associated with this article not only that but now i have a notification reminding me that i have an unread article saved in my library isn't that the coolest thing in the world honestly there's far cooler things and i'm just a weirdo but moving on let's go back to the google scholar home page oh again i just want to want to show you that the notification does show right there so you don't forget that you have that article by the way if you're finding this helpful you're welcome to help support this smart student channel so i can keep making content like this youtube has a great new feature called youtube thanks where you can donate directly to the channel in order to do that you'll see a thanks button or icon next to the like button where you're welcome to support this channel but anyways now let's start breaking down the different options still available to you in your drop down menu we know my profile my library let's move on to alerts alright so what are we looking at here well we're looking at an alert that i already created and what an alert is is exactly what it sounds like is that when google scholar has a new article or an article that fits your criteria it's going to let you know via email and that will always be the email you have associated with this google scholar account so what i did is i told google scholar that i'm researching transformational transformational part of me leadership styles and i want to know when something new is published and so i would receive that alert directly in my inbox which is really nice to create an alert you're simply going to use this button and then your alert query can be whatever you'd like it to be so let's say that we want to create a new alert for our time management class so we're going to type in a couple keywords we're researching time management but we want to we want to find articles associated with higher education great and not only do i want relevant results but i want all results this time so by clicking that it's going to show me a list of results first and foremost that are available to me right now great so i might peruse through some of those but i decide i still want to create the alert because i'm writing my capstone project and so this project isn't due for six months i'm researching this entire time and so that's when alerts become really helpful is when you're doing one of those longer research projects say it's your thesis paper your capstone project or an advanced tip to be proactive you can create an alert query at the beginning of your semester based on the course you're in so let's say you're in nursing and you're taking a med surg course you know at some point you're writing a long research paper you're not sure exactly what it's going to be about yet but you know you're writing a paper in med search and you want to be proactive so by creating this at the beginning of your semester you're going to be receiving articles most relevant or all results throughout the entire semester so when you go to write that paper you already have an abundance of articles to look at again isn't that super cool honestly i need to get out more because my definition of super cool is uh anyways back to our home page let's keep going down the list let's talk about metrics and so if i had to guess you the student have probably never looked at metrics thought of metrics and quite frankly what google metrics are is essentially the way that published authors can quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications so yeah google metrics is something that's geared towards published authors but the reason i'm bringing it up is because you the college student there's still something to be gained if you know what google metrics is so here we are listed by top publication and basically what i like to show college students is because this is showing you the top publications well this is an easy way to find credible sources find what's trending find sources that are relevant in other words within the last five years and it's just a great way honestly to do preliminary research and so what i would do if i were a college student is i would go to categories note how there's all these different categories listed let's say i'm in social sciences i'm going to go to social sciences that's going to bring up categories based in social sciences but more i want to be more specific so i'm going to go to subcategories because i'm in an education course or part of me i'm in a management course but i'm writing about education higher education so i'm going to select higher education and this is going to show me what's trending in higher education right now so if i were to click on studies in higher education pardon me this is going to show me specific articles and not only that but who is citing these articles where can i find them so if i were to click on one of these let's say journal of college student development now i have all of these articles i could look through this is great for helping me find a direction for my research and let's say i like this article influencing academic motivation this goes into my time management in higher education and how students be successful well i can look into the cited by section and now i have options that correlate with that study they're not all going to be a slam dunk but i guarantee i can find a handful of articles within here that tie in with my main topic so that's going to be metrics in a nutshell as a college student i always say don't be afraid to browse the metrics you never know what you're going to find even though it is built for published authors you can still get value out of it so now let's go ahead and move down to the advanced search feature and this feature is probably one of the most important features on google scholar available to you because this is how you're going to communicate effectively with google scholar now i know that most college students when they use google scholar they use it as if it were google in other words they type in whatever random thoughts they have they type them in questions into google scholar and google scholar does not work the same way that google does because you need to use keywords and you need to use functions with those keywords in order to speak the language that google scholar does now that's getting into next week's video my advanced search tips on google scholar which i don't have time to go into depth right now i am going to go through and tell you which each of these are which each function does and then if you want to watch the full video know that it's going to be linked down below but okay so the easiest way to remember what each of these search feature does is well to read the bolded word or phrase so one find articles all of these are helping you find articles this first section is going to be all of the words so if i type in my keywords here this is telling google scholar that i want to find articles that contain all of these keywords in no particular order doesn't matter they just have to be present in the article now let's say instead of all of them i want to find with this exact phrase and actually it doesn't make sense because you want to find articles that matches this exact phrase verbatim exactly how it is so time management college students that's going to be hard to find that that doesn't make sense so instead i might put just college students or if i want to refine this i might put higher education instead now moving on to the third option now we're telling google scholar that we want at least one of the words so order doesn't matter exact phrase doesn't matter we just want to return a search where there's one of these words and so in this case maybe we type in masters doctorate phd for example we're not too picky on the results we're keeping an open mind here but moving on to the fourth criteria without the words so this comes in handy when you're doing your research and something keeps popping up and you don't want it to be in those results and so you oftentimes don't know that there's something you want to put in this search field until you're doing your research so keeping with this theme i'm researching higher education and high school keeps returning in my results and i don't want to return results that are associated with high school so i put that without the words and now google scholar knows that we're not going to return any results that are associated with high school simple as that again if you want the full tutorial on all the cool things you can do with this be sure to watch next week's video but the last couple options you see here are exactly what they say so where my words occur anywhere in the article or in the title of the article so if i were to erase these going back to my keywords these are the words i'm looking for and i don't care where they're at they can be anywhere in the article or perhaps i do care i want them in the title of the article then i would click the second option now let's say i already know of an author that's notorious for writing about this topic i would type that author in here to find their articles same thing is if there's a publication that i want to search for in specifically this is where i would include that and then finally i can tell google scholar to search between a specific time period this is a really effective way to keeping your search queries current but okay i know i'm taking up a lot of your time on this one so let's go ahead and move on to the last option you have in your menu which is your settings and so within here you have a few options as well and so we're going to go quick but we're going to be efficient so collections search articles this is what most of you will use so you don't want to change this if you want to include patents great and if you're in law maybe you want to search for case law but i would say leave that where it is you're fine there now results per page this is going to show me 10 results per page i can increase that to 20 but that's not really a big deal now where results open i do like clicking this box because open each selected result in a new browser window basically instead of clicking on an article and it changing your current browser window it's going to launch a new browser window every time you open a new tab and so that can be effective if you're trying to organize a lot of sources now coming over here to languages it's exactly what it sounds like this is where you get to select the different languages that you want your articles written in so if you have no preference any language is great but let's say you only speak english you can select english and google scholar will only return articles written in english let's say you're super awesome and you're multilingual you speak french and german same criteria applies there but i'm going to keep mine for any written language just to keep my options open but now let's move down to library links and library links is one of the most important things you should do when you open google scholar for the first time because essentially what you're doing is you're linking your google scholar account with your university's online library which is going to give you abundantly more access to the articles on google scholar so what you're going to do is search for the university that you're attending and we're going to say i'm at harvard university we're going to search and there we go make sure harvard is checked you're going to select save and then now when i do a basic search pay attention to the right hand side and note how harvard library all of these articles i have access to through my universities library and now pretend that harvard wasn't linked note how many i wouldn't have access to if i were only using the access google scholar gives me so very important to do but let's go back into our settings we had a couple more things to go through you have a count just a few additional options associated with your account for instance if you tick this first box it's going to use your on campus library subscription to enable off-campus links if you take the second one this is signed in search activity so it's going to use your search activity to improve your search results and recommendations in other words google scholar keeps track of your searches to fine-tune your search results if that makes sense and then finally this last option is button and this is the option to install the google scholar button on your web browser so for example if i click this option it's going to bring me out of google scholar to this chrome web store in other words the button feature is simply an extension and i've never used it and so if you are someone out there who personally has used the button feature for google scholar comment down below let us know how it goes but that is officially the final feature you have available to you on google scholar ending your beginner's guide tour that was a lot of information i really hope i didn't overwhelm you which remember is exactly why i created the downloadable template of everything i covered in this video download it save it on your computer and if you have any questions let me know down below also feel free to just say hello i love chatting with you guys and yeah that's gonna be it for today i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Smart Student

Views: 26,437

Keywords: google scholar, beginners guide google scholar, google scholar advanced search feature, Academic research, google scholar tutorial, google scholar for research, google scholar search tips, how to use google scholar, how to use google scholar for research, search strategies for research, google search strategies, google scholar search strategy, google scholar search

Id: EevV36TGIE8

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 05 2022