1. Google Scholar

2. Google Scholar a freely-accessible Web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of the world's largest scholarly publishers.

3. Scholars use a number of publication types in their research. These include: - Peer-reviewed papers : Papers published in journals that have scientific peers review the paper before publication - Theses : Publications written in support of doctoral and masters degrees - Books : Books written by scientific professionals about their research - Articles and abstracts : Articles that are not peer re viewed but still contain important scientific in formation, and short abstracts of those articles also used in scientific research

4. Google Scholar creates a way to access this valuable information through academic publishers, professional societies, universities, and other scholarly organizations. NOTE: This is only in its BETA stage, so make use of it often so Google will improve its features. Searching Searching through Google Scholar is done in a manner very similar to that of performing Web searches.

5. Ranking The foundation of Google’s search technology is its PageRank system. This is not completely applicable to the way Google Scholar ranks the information it provides. Google ranks articles by weighing the full text of each article. This probably doesn’t involve a scale. Seriously, each article is ranked by a number of factors: Text of the article Author The publication Number of citations by other scholarly works

7. As usual, the most relevant results appear first. The text of the article must be relevant to your search in the same way the text of a Web page is relevant when doing a Google Web search. This is where it all changes. The author, who is completely unimportant in a Web search, becomes very important in a Google Scholar search. The author, based on standing in the scientific community and number of publications, helps rank the article. In addition to the standing of the author in the scientific world, the publication is also ranked. The journals Science and Nature are ranked differently than a less scientific work such as Scientific American .