You should use Google Scholar because:
- It offers access to a huge number of high quality resources across a broad spectrum of academic disciplines.
- Those resources come from many different types of sources (e.g., online repositories, professional organizations, academic publishers, etc.)
- Much of it is free.
Keep in mind...
- Your Google Scholar search will bring you much less than everything relevant. There are many other high quality resources to be found in proprietary databases. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, for example, pays large annual fees to database companies so that students will have access to cutting edge materials in their fields. These resources are not available via Google Scholar.
- The algorithm Google Scholar uses rank search results in a specific order, and, as with Google Search or any other information seeking tool, it is up to you - the user - to evaluate not only what comes back from a search but the order of results.
- The Google Scholar algorithm tends to count anything that looks like an article, especially items from a .edu domain, so quality control might be an issue. If you have questions about whether a specific source might be appropriate, ask your professor or a librarian.
- Not all of it is free. To access some of the content to which Google Scholar provides access, users would need to be pay. If you're an Embry-Riddle student, you can setup Google Scholar so it will bring you back to the library's databases so you can find the article for free. Here's how
- Open the hamburger menu (three lines) on the top left
- Select Settings
- Select Library Links
- Search for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
- Click the checkbox and
- Save!
