CED 501 / CPY 702: Research and Evaluation in Counseling

You can search academic articles by visiting the Google Scholar website. Google Scholar is not the same as Google. It is Interdisciplinary, but it is not comprehensive. Consider using Google Scholar in conjunction with another database, such as PsycINFO.

Google Scholar is most useful for finding journal articles, but it will also yield books, book chapters, dissertations, technical reports, and other sources.

There are several key points to consider when using Google Scholar. There is no way to limit by format, e.g., you can't search just for journal articles. There are no abstracts. There is no way to determine if a journal article has been peer-reviewed. Results will be shown in relevancy order, not chronological order.

Always use Google Scholar through the ASU Library so that it will be linked to the journals that you have access to through the Libraries. This will prevent you from running into paywalls or dead ends. You can always find a link to Google Scholar in this guide or on the library's home page.

• There is an easy to use single search box where you can put in a combination of keywords; a space implies AND.  Example: attitudes marijuana. This searches for articles that include both of those words.
• Put exact phrases in quotation marks: “medical marijuana”
• Use OR to link words or phrases that mean the same thing. For example to find articles about the death penalty the best search would be: "death penalty" OR "capital punishment"
• Google Scholar will automatically add additional word endings for you. So a search for student will also yield students; emotion will get emotions, emotional, etc. You may be familiar with using an asterisk * in library databases to get different word endings; that will not work in Google Scholar.

You will often get better results by using Advanced Search. You can access this by clicking on the three horizontal lines in the upper left corner.

This will open a box that resembles the following, providing various options to construct your search.

In this example, we're looking for articles that discuss whether a person's religious beliefs or affiliation influence their attitude toward the death penalty. We want all of the articles to include the word religious and the word attitudes and one of the phrases "death penalty" or "capital punishment".

There are lots of different ways that you can combine words and concepts using Advanced Search, so you will need to put some thought into exactly what it is you're trying to find. You may end up conducting your search in several different ways. As you can see, there are some other search options available to you as well. You might want to limit your search to a certain range of years or to citations from a particular journal. 

Now that you're viewing your search results, you'll want to access the full article. To do that, you can either click on the title of the article or use the HTML or PDF links provided to the right of the citation. If no direct link is given, there should be a “get it @ ASU” link that will also work. It's always a good idea to check all the possibilities if one of them isn't working for you.

NOTE: If no link is given, there is still a chance we might have it. Click on the link that says “more”. That will open up a “get it @ ASU” link. (There's probably a reason that this happens, but let's not worry about that!)  Even if it turns out that we don't have it, the "Get it @ ASU" link will open the ILLIAD form, which will allow you to request it. This is a free service, and articles are typically delivered to your email within a day.

Word of caution: links to books and book chapters don’t link to our catalog very well. For those, it will probably be better if you search the title in our catalog.

Limit by Date: When you're looking at a page of results, you can limit those results by putting in a date range on the left. Remember, Google Scholar will never display results in chronological order. Word of warning: don’t click on “sort by date”; that throws relevancy out the window and usually will give lots of irrelevant hits. Just put in the range of dates you want to search: 2002 – 2017, for example, or use one of the preselected options.

Cited By: to get articles that have cited this article in their reference list (great way to find other relevant articles)

Related Articles: to find other articles Google Scholar thinks might also be relevant. The algorithm used is super-secret, but it works!

Cite: create a DRAFT of a citation in many particular styles, but BEWARE: the APA Style citation they give you is always wrong, because it doesn’t contain the doi. The indentation is also wrong. So proceed with caution, but it does provide a good starting point.