Google Scholar is a search engine for scholarly information. On the About Google Scholar page, Google describes Google Scholar as "a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature". 

From where does Google Scholar find information?

Google Scholar makes available information that its 'robots' find (imagine little robots that go searching the internet for documents that meet certain criteria), or that an author, university repository, or journal publisher have chosen to list. This may not sound like much, but it is actually a huge amount of information. For more information, see the Google Scholar: Inclusion page. 

Unlike Primo Search, which searches only CSU Library's holdings, Google Scholar searches everything. This means that Google Scholar will show you all results, whether you can access them through CSU Library or not.

How do I get Google Scholar to show me which results are available through CSU Library?

There are two ways that can help you see which Google Scholar results are accessible through CSU Library. You can either:

• Access Google Scholar via the Library's Google Scholar page; or
• Go to Google Scholar and change the preferences to show CSU Library holdings (see video below).

Google Scholar is useful because it:

• Searches across many resources and returns many resource types, including journal articles and book chapters;
• Uses the familiar Google search functions (ie: you can type your keywords into one search box).

Things to keep in mind when searching in Google Scholar:

• The results are not always from academic-quality sources;
• It will show both results you do have access to via CSU Library, and those you do not;
• It does not have the same sophisticated search functions as journal databases, and is not as good as Primo Search or the journal databases for refining search results.
• It defaults to a keyword search, so if you are searching for a phrase, use double quotation marks (" ").