What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar is a web resource that allows users to search for journal articles, citations, theses, preprints and book availability on the web. Materials located using Google Scholar come from a wide variety of sources, including:
- Selected academic publishers
- Selected Professional society publishers
- Preprint repositories
- Universities
- Scholarly articles available across the open web
Logging in as a CWU affiliate will provide access at no charge to many of the articles that you might otherwise have to purchase. You can do this by going to "Settings" on the Google Scholar homepage. From the left menu, select "Library Links" and enter "Central Washington University" in the search window. Check off the CWU box and select "Save". Performing these steps will give you access to a much wider variety of articles because of your affiliation with CWU.
We all surf the web for credible, authoritative resources. Gathering your information this way puts the onus on you to assure the information is coming from a valid source. This can ultimately make locating good resources more time consuming than using OneSearch or directly consulting our online databases.
As a seasoned researcher and web user such as yourself fully understands, anyone can create a beautiful, authoritative-appearing website and post it to the web. That doesn't mean the information is accurate or current, let alone scholarly enough to be used in your research.
Before relying on any website for the information it contains, you must scrutinize it with particular attention to the following characteristics:
There are several good checklists that can be employed to evaluate a website, and you are invited to use the one that works best for you. Just be sure to use at least one when accessing information from web sources that are not edited.
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