What is Google Scholar and how does it work?
Answer
Google Scholar performs a Google search across scholarly content on the internet. Most academic publishers make the tables of contents for scholarly journals and descriptions of scholarly books available on their websites. A Google Scholar search will link you to those publications. However, the actual articles or books may not be fully available online for free. Still, Google Scholar is helpful in doing a broad search for scholarly content across a wide range of disciplines.
You can adjust the Google Scholar settings to know that you have access to library databases through RVCC. Follow the instructions on our Scholarly Articles guide, and then when you search Google Scholar, you will see links to your results in library databases if we have access.
If the article you want is not freely available online, you can also use our Full Text Finder to determine if the library has access to a specific journal or magazine. Once you know that the journal is available in a database, you can go to that database and search for the title of the article that you found in Google Scholar. Or, try searching for the article title in RVOneSearch.