Google Scholar is a search engine for finding scholarly literature on the Web. A search using Google Scholar will provide you with citations to books, articles, and theses.

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However, not all of these resources are freely available on the Web. Google Scholar may lead you to the full text of an article, but it often just provides a citation - you then need to check to see if that article is available at the library in print or in one of the article databases.

Searches across all subject areas, so you get a broad list of search results.

Searches only those citations that Google has found and indexed, so it's not as comprehensive a search as an article database would provide.

You can access Google Scholar from Google's advanced search screen.