Google Scholar is another resource for finding scholarly or academic literature. Many of the articles you find in Google Scholar are peer reviewed, but some are not. Google Scholar can also be used to search case law. If your professor requires scholarly articles, make sure that you use articles that include bibliographies or headings like "method", "discussion", or "conclusion". Scholarly articles often report research that the authors have done.
Copy the following title into Google Scholar to the right and search it.
Smartphones' effects on academic performance of higher learning students
When the result comes up, right click on the title and select "Open link in new tab". Click on the new tab to the right of your results page tab.
How can you tell if this article is scholarly?
Return to the Google Scholar page. For this tutorial, we will search smartphone and academic performance. So copy and paste that search into the Google Scholar search box to the right.
My results page will look slightly different because I can see if the article is full text in a database the library has.
If you'd like to set up your Google Scholar to show what Grace has available, click on the three bars in the top left of the screen, then click on Settings. (You may have a "cog wheel" on your screen where you will find Settings.)
In settings, click on Library Links and search Grace College & Seminary Library in the searchbox.
If you looked at your settings, use your back arrow to return to the results page. Take a look at the entries that our search provided. You can see the title of the article, author's name, part of the title of the source (journal or report, etc.), the date published and part of the abstract or summary of the article. Below that you will see some other notations. Here's where you can often find lots more helpful information.
The two features that will lead you to other articles are "Cited by" and "Related articles". The number (in my example 313) next to "Cited by" tells you that this particular article has been cited (or used as a reference) in 313 other articles. If you click on the "Cited by" link, you will get the list of articles that used your original article. Some of these articles may be exactly what you are looking for and others may not be as closely related to your topic.
Here's a couple articles that are in my original search results:
1. Psychological predictors of problem mobile phone use A Bianchi, JG Phillips - CyberPsychology & Behavior, 2005
2. The relationship between cell phone use and academic performance in a sample of US college students A Lepp, JE Barkley, AC Karpinski - Sage Open, 2015
#1 was cited by 910 and #2 was cited by 107 (the day I did my search)
Why was article #1 cited so much more than article #2?
Article #1 could have been a very good article with information that many wanted to quote, but since it was published 10 years before the second one, there's been more time for it to become more widely read and cited. So don't assume because an article was cited more often that it is a better article. Be sure to take into consideration how old it is.
Now select an article from your results list and compare the titles in the "Cited by" list to the articles in the "Related articles" list. Which list has the most useful articles? It may be hard to tell, but the related articles may provide resources that are more closely tied to your topic. Those who cite an article may select a specific point from that article that was not the focus of the article. Keep in mind that both lists can provide you with several other articles to support your research.
If in the future you find an article that you would like, but it is not available for free, use the Interlibrary Loan Form on the Library web page to order the article. A librarian will order it from another library and email it to you. Or you can email ill@grace.edu to request an article as well.
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