Google's customized search engine and tool for students and academics of all stripes

5 smart ways students can use Google Scholar

Here's something that's happened to most college students: It's 20 minutes before your final paper is due, and you haven't written a bibliography yet.

This situation, and everything that precedes it, is going to be more difficult if you don't know about Google Scholar. Google's customized search engine and tool for students and academics of all stripes was created by Anurag Acharya, a former academic who joined Google's web-indexing team in 2000. Scholar allows you to search journals, save sources to your personal library and, yes, get quick citations.

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Although Scholar celebrated its 10th anniversary in November, many students still don't know about it unless they talk to a librarian, and the navigation toolbar on the main Google page doesn't link to it. To help you out, just in time for finals, we've put together a quick guide to studying, saving and citing.

1. Search for journal articles.

The first thing you need to know about Google Scholar is that it works essentially like a regular ol' search engine — to get the best results, you should be as specific as possible. Scholar is designed to return a combination of the most relevant and most cited pages, meaning you'll get what's been cited most by other academics (which are usually the most informative, reliable sources).

Keep in mind that Scholar can search both the title and article content for search terms, even if the content is locked to subscribers.

Once you've navigated to a results page, you'll see information about the author, publisher and date for each entry. You'll also see the location of the entry (for example, Google Books or JSTOR) and a link that says "other versions," from which you can navigate to other webpages on which the article has appeared. A link on the left side of the page will link directly to the article and indicated its format (HTML, PDF, etc.).

2. Build (and search) libraries.

As you look through the results, you can save articles to your library. Once you add something to the library, you can view a comprehensive info sheet of the article, including the abstract, and put it under a label to organize it with similar sources.

http://mashable.com/2014/12/03/google-scholar-guide/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link