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Google Scholar

The Basics of Using Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a collection of citations from scholarly literature from a wide variety of specialties. Google Scholar is free to search.  Articles that are available free of charge ("open access" articles) can often be immediately accessed. However, sometimes these articles require having a subscription to that journal. For that reason, we highly recommend that you do a few simple steps to tie the library's subscriptions to Google Scholar. You can find those steps here.

You can save citations you find in Google Scholar and can even export them in bulk. To learn how to do that, click here.

Searching in Google Scholar

To access Google Scholar, , use a link on the library's home page or https://library.rush.edu/google-scholar. Keep in mind that while Scholar is available to everyone, it will not provide links to RUSH's subscriptions unless you access it via a link on this site or complete the steps on the Access RUSH's Subscriptions... page.

It is important to know that Google Scholar puts an “AND” between words. For example, let’s say that you are looking for articles about diabetes or hypoglycemia.  If you type in the two words diabetes hypoglycemia you will get articles that mention both words. This search returns over 500,000 articles. But if you search for diabetes OR hypoglycemia, you will get articles that mention EITHER word. This search returns over 3 million articles.

The OR boolean needs to be capitalized. Otherwise Google Scholar will continue to put an “AND” between words and you will get articles that contain the words Diabetes AND or AND hypoglycemia. 

Once you’ve found a good article, look at the righthand column.

  • If a PDF is immediately available, you can click on the word “PDF” in the right hand column and will be brought directly to the PDF.
  • If you see the word HTML, you can click on it and be brought to the webpage of the article.
  • If you see “Get it @ RUSH,”  click that and you will be brought to the RUSH library’s internal page where you can request it via a publisher website.
  • If you don’t see any of these, click the double arrow at the very end of the citation and you will be brought to the RUSH library’s internal page. You may need to request the item via ILLiad, our interlibrary loan function. 
  • It can also be helpful to check the various versions of an article. Sometimes a PDF is available in one of the other versions of the article.