Search Tips

• Keyword:  Use important words or phrases
• Phrase (“”):  Quotation marks can be used to enclose a particular phrase for searching.  For example, enclose the title “Faith in Leadership” to retrieve results with that particular phrase. 
• Author:  Enter the author operator with the author’s name.  Ex.  “author:  Brown” or “author:  JH Brown”
• Title:  Enter the title or part of the title in quotation marks.  Ex. “Creating a Safety Net’
• Author and title:  Enter the author’s last and words from the title.  Ex. Brown “faith leadership”
• Intitle:  Only returns results that include your search term in the document’s title.  Ex. “intitle: faith leadership”
• OR:  Returns results that only include either of your search terms
• Operator (+):  The “+’ ensures that the results include common words, letter, or numbers.
• Operator (-):   The “-“ excludes all results that include a particular search term.  Ex.  “brown –author brown” will search for papers about brown subjects, not authors called Brown.
• Operator (*):  The “*” is a placeholder for any unknown or wildcard terms.  Ex.  “a * saved is a * earned”

• Find useful terminology using secondary sources such as Wikipedia.  For example, a search for language learning could list the term, “language acquisition” to help perform a better search.
• Look at references of articles to generate ideas for other searches.
• Explore the related articles to find similar sources.
• Use the course textbook to find ideas for topics and references to generate searches.

• Google Scholar is a search engine to quickly search for scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources.    This is a great way to generate ideas and retrieve citation information to research in the library’s databases.   Google Scholar can also work with LETU’s Library to retrieve articles within EBSCO’s databases.  Access Google Scholar at scholar.google.com.

Scholar Settings

1. Log in if you have a Gmail account in the top right corner.
2. Click on Settings on top menu.
3. Click on Library Links on left menu.
4. Type in LeTourneau University in the search field.
5. Select LeTourneau University-EBSCOhost Full Text & Open World Cat-Library Search.

1. Use the basic search box on the homepage of Google Scholar to search for the author, title of a paper or a keyword within the text of the paper.
2. Enter the search terms in the search box and click the blue magnifying glass icon to perform your search.

1. Click the Advanced Search option by clicking the arrow in the search box.
2. Search in the author, title, publication, and date fields.
3. Once the desired search terms are entered click on the blue magnifying glass icon to perform your search.

1. The search results display in a list of citations based on relevance-ranked order.
2. At the beginning of the citation it will usually list the format of the resource (book, citation, pdf, html, etc.)
3. The title of the resource is written in blue while the remainder of citation information is written in green.  If a citation is referenced it will be listed in black.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4.  There are several helpful features listed under the citation information.  

• Cited by:  Lists the number of times the article has been cited by others
• Related articles:  Lists articles similar to the versions available from different locations on the web,
• All versions:  List all versions found from other sources on the web
• Cite:  Copy and paste a formatted citation or use one of the links to import into a reference manager.  The only citation formats available are MLA, APA, and Chicago.
• Save:  Save this citation to your Google Scholar Library for later reference.
• More:  If the citation is a book, click on Library Search to access the Inter Library Loan WorldCat database.  It will list libraries that own the title.  You can click on the Request Item to generate an Inter Library Loan request.  Fill out the contact information and click on Submit on the left side of the screen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5.  If immediate access to the article is available there will be a link to the right of the citation.  Click on the link that says PDF, EBSOChost Full Text, HTML, etc.  This should automatically bring up the article.  You may have to sign in with your LETU credentials if prompted for database access.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6.  Refine your search results by using the limiters in the menu on the left side of the screen.  Select the publication date or create a Custom Range.  Select/deselect the include patents and include citations to limit results further.