## 2.7 Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a search engine for academic articles. In terms of appearance it resembles the regular Google, but Scholar is limited to searching academic literature. The advantage of Google Scholar is that it offers a simple way of searching for academic literature because databases of different publishers are included in the search engine.

Search results
At Google Scholar the search results are ranked by relevance. Scholar determines this relevance by searching the full text of each article. This takes into account the author, the publication in which the article is published and how often the article has been cited in academic literature.

(No) access?
Not all publications you find on Google Scholar can be accessed. Sometimes you must pay to read an article, or you can only find a description of the content. If you first log in to the RUAS environment and then start Google Scholar, you can view more publications. If the article is present in one of the databases of the library, you will see the link Find@Hogeschool Rotterdam on the right side of your results list. Click this link to go directly to the article.

Tips:

- A lot of information can be found on Google Scholar, but you cannot use it to track down all types of information. Statistics, company data and images can often only be found through special sites.
- A direct search in a database often produces more relevant results. So, don't limit yourself to Scholar as your only source.
- There are special links under every search result in Scholar: Cited by, Related articles, et cetera. Use this link to find more relevant articles.
- Google Scholar offers the possibility to copy or export the literature reference of an article. However, there may be errors in these references. For more reliable literature references it is better to use the export possibilities of the source (database) itself.