Google Scholar searches scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including books, articles, abstracts, and theses, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other web sites. Watch the video below (2:20 mins) to learn more about searching with Google Scholar.

Transcript (PDF)

Note: this video is courtesy of Utah State University Libraries, and uses USU examples.
Follow these instructions to sync Google Scholar to U of T Libraries.

Search results

Theses
Journal articles
E-books

Quality of search results

Good

Results are good for...

Getting a specific article
Starting your academic research

Be careful of...

Peer-review: Not all articles in Google Scholar are from peer-reviewed journals
Multidisciplinary results: Select sources from your discipline
Limited coverage & scope: Google Scholar is not comprehensive. Be prepared to continue your search in the library if you need to conduct a more thorough search

Adapted from The University of Manchester Library: Knowing where to look: Your search toolkit (Cheat sheet) https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/learning-objects/mle/search-toolkit/

This course content is offered under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. Content in this course can be considered under this license unless otherwise noted.