Just in time to help with those end-of-semester papers, the UNC University Library offers Google Scholar, Google's beta search engine designed to search much of the scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports on a wide array of subjects.
By searching Google Scholar from the Library's home page you will automatically have access, on and off campus, to many of those articles already paid for by the Library. When you are searching off-campus your search will be redirected to a page where you can enter your PID or other authentication information and the system will recognize your UNC affiliation.
If you wish to search Google Scholar directly, and you use Mozilla Firefox, the Library has also created a plugin you can download and use from anywhere.
It's important to keep in mind that Google Scholar may not be the best tool for your research. Google Scholar is currently weighted toward the sciences and not all Google Scholar results are "scholarly." As with any research tool, it is important to check your sources carefully and evaluate their suitability for your research.
It is also important to recognize that unlike the Google search engine, Google Scholar's relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared, and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.
If you have any questions about using Google Scholar or any of the Library's many other article databases, don't hesitate to Ask a Librarian for help.
