Biological Sciences: 03-124: Modern Biology Laboratory: Google Scholar Tutorial

Google Scholar is good for searching broadly since it contains content from all disciplines or for performing comprehensive searches since it pulls articles from most journals.

Let's start by going to Google Scholar and entering the search terms "development visual cortical neurons."

Things to note from this example:

• Google Scholar defaults to sorting by relevance. 
• Click Since Year to show recently published articles, sorted by relevance, or create a custom range of years (i.e. 2015-2018).
• Click Sort by date to show the new additions, sorted by date.
• Click the Create Alert envelope icon to have new results periodically delivered by email.
• Click Related articles or Cited by to see closely related work
• If you find a good article, put the author's name in the search bar to see what other articles they have published.

Abstracts are freely available for most of the articles. Reading the entire article may require a subscription, but CMU probably has subscriptions to journals you would be interested in using for this class. If you are on campus, you can click directly on the title of the article to get full-text and PDFs on the publisher's website or you can click on the [PDF] links on the right to go directly to a PDF.

Note: If you are off campus, you will usually need to log in to the VPN to access full-text and PDFs. Follow the instructions here. Email sciref@andrew.cmu.edu if you are still having issues accessing articles.