Google Scholar is an online search engine that is freely accessible and allows you to search across a wide range of academic material. When searching for scholarly literature, we always advise using the library’s discovery tool, Hunter, or specialist bibliographic databases such as Medline or CINAHL, in the first instance. However, Google Scholar should not be dismissed as it can also be a helpful search tool, although there are certainly advantages and disadvantages to using it.
Google Scholar is easy to use as it shares a similar interface to Google.
Google Scholar also contains unscholarly documents such as articles from pseudo-journals.
This 6-minute video shows you how to conduct a search in Google Scholar. Refer to the rest of this guide for specific tips and help.