Advanced Google Searching for Academic Research: Google Scholar

Google Scholar can be useful for locating scholarly, academic and general articles on a variety of subjects. It is another great tool to help navigate the web and narrow down your results to focus on more relevant content. 

The type of content you may find on Google Scholar includes:

• Scholarly journals, particularly those published by academic institutions
• Dissertations and thesis projects
• Academic books or book chapters
• Abstracts for most articles (abstracts are short summaries of what you will find in an article)
• Articles that require a subscription or fee for full-text access

Pay Walls in Google Scholar

Pay walls for article access are becoming more prevalent online. For some articles you will be given the abstract, but to access the full-text you either must have database access or pay a usage fee. You will probably encounter pay walls more frequently while using Google Scholar, as it is becoming a common practice.

Locating "free" scholarly/academic articles on Google or Google Scholar can be challenging and frustrating. Remember, your online ECC Library has multiple databases to help you locate scholarly and academic articles at no charge to registered students. 

Here is an example of a pay wall in Google Scholar:

1. The abstract is provided.

 

2. Clicking on the article link will lead you to to following pay wall.