Search Tips for Google Scholar
- Google Scholar uses free-text searching, so you don't have to use Boolean operators as you do with Academic Search Complete. Here are some tips to better your Google Scholar searches though:
- Lead with the most important words—Google prioritizes the earlier words in a search string over the later words
- Use "quotation marks" if you want to be sure that a word or phrase appears in your results
- Once you've found a great article that is already useful, make use of the "Cited By" feature:
- Click on "Cited By #" below the record for the item and bring up all of the articles that have cited this material
- Browse through the titles in this list, or select the checkbox "Search within citing articles" to limit your results some
- Similar to the above, use the "Related Articles" feature to expand on the number of sources from a high-quality source you have already identified
A Note of Caution
Google Scholar is a massive indexer of high-quality information, but this is also its downfall. Be careful when you search in Google Scholar to take more time to evaluate your sources. Look at:
- the author of this information—is this a graphic design professor/practitioner or a high school student?
- the publisher of the information—could the source of the article be biased?
- the date of the material—you'll want resources that are recent when you're researching graphic design
You also have less control as to the content that you get on Google Scholar, as you can't limit to format type. While you don't need to only select peer-reviewed articles for this assignment, they are of a higher quality, so be on the lookout for them over other article types.
