Cited Reference Searching  Tags: citation indexes self-citations cited_reference google_scholar crossref impact_factors journal_analysis  

Explanation of Search Results

Advanced Search Tips

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature.  It is designed very similar to the main Google search, but the results are limited to just scholarly resources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.  One of the key features is that it will show how many times a piece has been cited by other scholarly literature within Google Scholar.

Typical Results look like this:  Gschneidner Metallurgy or Wells Psychological Uncertainty or Cravens American Culture.  Notice that the social sciences and humanities search results contain more information on books, book chapters, and other types of non-journal resources.  Google Scholar is also ideal for interdisciplinary areas - such as in this search for papers by Wallace Huffman, ISU Economist, dealing with agricultural economics: Huffman Human Capital.

Google Scholar is not comprehensive, but it is a great resource for locating cited reference information.  The downside is that it can be almost impossible to figure out what Google Scholar will or will not cover.  In general, it tends to cover free web resources as well as journal articles from a wide range of publishers.  It also tends to primarily cover materials published in recent years; however, some publishers have also submitted information on older articles.