When it comes to writing papers for your classes, most of your instructors, especially in psychology, will ask you to use peer-reviewed journal articles as references. We teach you how to use PsycInfo to find these articles, which is a search engine that searches through psychology journals.
However, the omnipresent search mammoth, Google, also has a special search engine dedicated to academic publications. Here’s a few reasons why you may consider using Google Scholar over PsycInfo:
- Google scrapes the web for full-text versions of articles, so on the rare occasion that Penn State doesn’t have access to the journal that the article was published in, you may be able to get a copy this way. Sometimes, you will see the paper in its pre-formatted, word processor format due to copyright limitations, but the content will be the same as the paper is in its published format.
- Google Scholar tends to produce far more results than PsycInfo. With that said, this can be a double-edged sword as sometimes, articles from less than reliable sources may sneak into Google’s results. If you ever have any questions about whether you think a source is reliable or not, ask your instructor.
- Searching in Google is way easier than PsycInfo…just type what you’re looking for and let Google work its magic!
In order to use Google Scholar, you need to link it up with your Penn State account. If you allow your browser to save cookies, you should only have to do this once.
- Visit scholar.google.com and click the hamburger menu
and then click Settings. - Click Library links and type in “The Pennsylvania State University” and search. Select “Pennsylvania State University – Get It! @ Penn State”. Click Save.
After this, the search results should show a “Get It! @ Penn State” option like the one pictured below. Anytime you see that, you can click on it and Penn State will try to locate the full-text article for you.
A bonus with this example…Google was able to find the full-text version of it on the internet, so if that Get it link didn’t provide the full-text, clicking on the [PDF] link would take you to the full-text version of this paper.
For some additional information, check out these search tips from the Google Scholar team. Additionally, if you want to execute more advanced searches looking for specific keywords, authors, years, etc., you can find an Advanced search option in the menu.
There you have it. Another way to locate academic, peer-reviewed journal articles for your next term paper. If you have any questions, please let me know!