Google Scholar is the newest search tool from Google, separate from its main search engine.
Its purpose is “to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.” The full text of many items is available online (either freely or by using the “Find it @ WOU” link), although in some instances abstracts with links to pay-per-view document delivery services are displayed.
Google Scholar searches a specific subset of Google’s index and covers a wide range of academic content areas. The coverage is strongest in science and technology and weakest in the humanities.
One particuluarly useful aspect of Google Scholar is the ability to easily find articles that have cited the one you are looking at. Look for the “Cited by” link to take advantage of this feature.
If you are off campus, you may want to use the access to Google Scholar provided by WOU’s Articles and Databases page. This way, the “Find it @ WOU” links will show up and the content that WOU pays for on your behalf will be available to you.
Please keep in mind that since Google Scholar is a beta product, things keep changing. The content, coverage and functionality may be different from when you last used it.