Capuchino High School

Google & Google Scholar are alternatives to finding free academic sources outside of library article databases.

1. Google provides an Advanced Search page that will help you hone your searches!

2. You can also use simple but specific commands in Google, demonstrated in the four boxes below, to help you find better results. 

3. Lastly, Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for relevant scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines to find: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. 

Site:webaddress your keywords – Search within a specific website. 

      For example:

site:sfgate.com “food desert” will limit a search to only the San Francisco Chronicle website

Define  - Use google to find the definitions of words or phrases—simply type define and the type the word or phrase you want to search.

            For example:  Define alternative energy      

“Quotes” – use quotes to search an exact phrase—a search in which you want the search results to contain pages/files in which the words appear in the exact order.

For example: “Environmental Justice”  “climate change” “food desert”

site:domain type your keywords - Search within specific domain type to limit your web results. 

For example:

site:.edu food desert diabetes limits a search to just .edu sites, websites affiliated with/created by schools/colleges/universities - organizations having to do with education.

site:.gov limits a search to just .gov sites, websites affiliated with/created by government office/departments/agencies.

Google Scholar

Here are some helpful tips on searches, email alerts, citation export, and more.

Locating the full text of an article

Abstracts or summaries are freely available for most of the articles. However, reading the entire article sometimes require a subscription. Don't pay for articles online. Instead, here're a few things to try:

1. Click a link labeled [PDF] to the right of the search result;
2. Click "All versions" under the search result and check out the alternative sources;
3. Click "Related articles" or "Cited by" under the search result to explore similar articles.
4. Save the name of the article you're interested in. Then use the Ask a Librarian chat service - a librarian may be able to find the full text of the article for you.

Finding recent papers

Your search results are normally sorted by relevance, not by date. To find newer articles, try the following options in the left sidebar:

1. click "Since Year" to show only recently published papers, sorted by relevance;
2. click "Sort by date" to show just the new additions, sorted by date;
3. click the envelope icon to have new results periodically delivered by email.

Getting better answers

• If you're new to the subject, it may be helpful to pick up the terminology from secondary sources. E.g., a Wikipedia article for "overweight" might suggest a Scholar search for "pediatric hyperalimentation".

• If your search results are too specific for your needs, check out what they're citing in their "References" sections. Referenced works are often more general in nature. Again, you can ask a librarian for help locating those references.

• Similarly, if the search results are too basic for you, click "Cited by" to see newer papers that referenced them. These newer papers will often be more specific.

• Explore! There's rarely a single answer to a research question. Click "Related articles" or "Cited by" to see closely related work, or search for author's name and see what else they have written.