Google Scholar is the scholarly version of the search engine, and a good tool to search for scholarly literature in. In addition to scholarly literature, it also contains publicly available government documents, reports from NGOs and corporations, theses and dissertations from universities all over the world, and more.
Google Scholar is a great place to begin your research, because it searches for literature across every corner of the Internet, across disciplines, sources, and types of information, and will help you explore your topic in an even broader sense than Discovery might. It also uses a different algorithm than Discovery, so you will see different results on the first page- which is why it's a good idea to try the same search for both and see what comes up!
The downside of Google Scholar is that it does not have many filtering options, including a peer-reviewed filter. You'll have to investigate whether a source is actually credible. See our Evaluate Sources page in this guide for more.
RRU Library has made it possible for you to find scholarly material in our collection through Google. It is important to access Google Scholar from the RRU Library homepage to ensure you find our subscribed full text. Use the link for Google Scholar @ RRU from the “Find” box on the library homepage.
Watch the video below for a short tutorial and example of how to use Google Scholar.
Google Scholar @ RRU provides a way to broadly search for scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, and find full-text articles to which the RRU Library subscribes.
Google Scholar is a search tool that allows you to search for scholarly literature. Google Scholar is a good place to start your research or to find a specific journal article. Google Scholar will help you broadly explore your topic area because it searches across disciplines, sources, and types of information.
RRU Library has made it possible for you to find scholarly material in our collection through Google. It is important to access Google Scholar from the RRU Library homepage to ensure you find our subscribed full text. Use the link for Google Scholar @ RRU from the “Find” box on the library homepage at library.royalroads.ca. For example, a search for “disaster preparedness technology” will retrieve a number of articles that include a “Full text @ RRU” link. Click the “Full-text @ RRU” link next to the search result to authenticate with your RRU username and password.
To explore your topic further, try out the “Related articles” or “Cited by” features for each search result. The “Cited by” link will retrieve a list of articles that have referenced the article from your original search results. Click the quotation mark under the search result to view an APA-formatted citation for the article. Keep in mind that citations from Google Scholar should be treated as a first draft. Be sure to check all your citations and references for completeness and accuracy before submitting your work, and remember to make sure your citation follows the edition of APA that you have been instructed to use.
If you don’t see the “Full text @ RRU” link, let us know. The linking to our collection is not always accurate, so we may have the item you need even if Google says we don’t. Also, we can obtain articles that are not in our library collection through our interlibrary loan service. Request help from our staff via the Ask the Library link on our library homepage.
For more information, check out our Google Scholar resource guide.