Google Scholar searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. Google Scholar searches a variety of undisclosed academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. The full text of many items is freely available online, although in some instances abstracts with links to pay-per-view document delivery services are displayed.

Google Scholar searches a specific subset of Google's index and covers a wide range of academic content areas; however coverage appears to be strongest in science and technology, and weakest in the humanities. Just as with Google's standard Web Search, Google Scholar ranks and lists results according to how relevant they are to the search query. The most relevant references should theoretically appear at the top of the page.

Google Scholar does not replace the Loyola Libraries electronic resources but instead should be used in addition to Loyola's many databases.  Our databases contain content that is not included in the Google Scholar search and is paid for by the University and you (via your tuition dollars).

By setting Google Scholar's Settings page to Loyola University Chicago you will be able to gain access to the full-text of articles subscribed to by Loyola.  This is not to say that you will be searching all the articles available from Loyola, but will instead be able to gain access to those articles which Google Scholar provides a citation to, but not full-text access to and which Loyola does have access to. 

From the Google Scholar Settings page, search for Loyola Chicago. After you search, check the 4 boxes related to Loyola University Chicago.  This will allow you to see when Loyola has access to an article in your search results.  (See box below.)

When looking at your results you will see that some citations have a link to the right of them like this: Full-Text @ Loyola Univ. 

After selecting this, you will be taken to Loyola University Chicago's Article Linker where you will be able to click on a link that will bring you to the actual article held by one of Loyola's subscription databases.  After clicking on the Full-Text @ Loyola Univ. link, you will then have to click on another link within Loyola Article Linker to see the actual article.

Never pay for an article.  If Google does not provide the full-text of an article and Loyola does not have access to it, request it through Loyola Libraries' InterLibrary Loan (ILL) department. 

Clicking the 'Cited by' link beneath a citation in Google Scholar will display a list of articles and documents that have cited the document originally retrieved in the search. This makes it possible to uncover other documents related by topic or subject to the original document. However, Google Scholar only includes articles that are indexed within its database, and this is a much smaller subset of scholarly articles than found in some other Loyola-subscribed databases.  You may want to try Web of Science's Cited Reference Search which may yield more comprehensive results.

Use the Google Advanced Scholar Search to narrow down your search results.

There are options for specification by phrase, author, publication, date, and subject area.