Google Scholar: Basic Searching

Google Scholar looks a lot like Google. Google Scholar homepage

You can search for articles - the default - or American case law - which you're probably not interested in, so we'll ignore that. Enter your search terms and click the magnifying glass. You'll then see a list of results.

Google Scholar search results page

There are three sections (the boxes with a red border labelled 1-3).

Section 1 is a series of search limiters described below
Section 2 is the search results themselves
Section 3 is a full text indicator. If the full-text of an article is available, there will be a link to it here.

Google Scholar search reslut with link to full-text

Limiters

For the purposes of searching, the first box is more interesting..This contains a list of limiters and a choice of how you sort your results. These limiters are there to help you narrow your search results to a manageable number or exclude stuff that you don't want. You can limit your results

To include only material this year
To include only material from this year and last
To include items published in the last five years (2017-21 at time of writing)
To include material from a custom range (e.g., as below, material published between 2005 and 2008)

Google Scholar Custom date range selector

You can choose to include patents (a patent is a like a copyright claim on an invention - the patent is a description of the invention)
You can choose to include citations. This is perhaps the wrong name. All the search results have titles that you can click on to take you to, if not the full text than a page with details of the result. Ticking this box will include results where the titles can't be clicked on - and the only detail you get is the actual result itself. Here's a normal result:

A Google Scholar search result

The title and the author double as links. The title link takes you to the article webpage and clicking on the will give you all other articles written by L. Hale. Here is a citation only result

Google Scholar citation only result

See how the title - and the author's name are not links? All you get is E. Hartman wrote 'The functions of sleep' in 1973. Other links are provided below the item, and they'll be discussed on the Search Results page.

Sorting

You can choose to sort the results by relevance. Not what you might consider relevant, but what the secret Google sorting algorithm (an algorithm is a set of instructions for a computer) considers relevant. Sorting by relevance is the default, but you can also sort by date of publication

Google Scholar: Searching

Google Scholar: Basic Searching

Limiters

Sorting