If you are doing some research on an area that requires that the research be limited to scholarly papers or document, then you need to use Google Scholar. As described by Google, "Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites"

Something that needs to be taken into consideration when using Google Scholar is that this service ranks documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.

Google Scholar search Results: include the following information from each of the search results listed:

Title of the document or paper

Author(s), Publication, Year and database.

Some general information about the document. Sometimes this can be the abstract of the paper.

Cited By: This Hyperlink which includes a number (# of times that the paper or document has been cited) links to a page that includes a list of all the documents or papers that cited the paper.

Related Articles: Articles or papers related to the paper.

View as HTML- If for some reason it is important to view the article on HTML format.

BL Direct: if there is a direct link to the British Library

All X version(X being a number) - Here the number represents how many different direct links to the article or document are there.

Google Scholar Preferences: Some of the preferences are the following:

Interface Language- Here you can select the language used to display tips and messages.

Search Language- You can decide to perform the search on papers or documents written on a specific language.

Collections- You can pick between searching articles only, patents, legal opinions or journals.

Library Links- If you are a student with access to some libraries, you can use their database to look for articles that you might not have access to.

Number of Results- How many results to be presented

Results Window-If a new page with the search results is required

Bibliography Manager- As of 9/20/2010, Google scholars allows to import citations on the following applications:

BibTex

EndNnote

RefMan

RefWorks

WenXianWang

While Google Scholar does not have access to all available databases, the search results provided can be used to search more specialized databases.

It is important to understand that sometimes, search results include links to external databases that require authentication to get access to the actual document or paper. In this case, it helps to have an account with a college library that might have access to the database referenced in the search result.

Google Scholar Summary:

If you need to do reserach on any area that requires the sources to be "scholarly" sources, the Google Scholar is for you. Since it ranks the search results based on the weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature, it provides a very good foundation to use the best research papers out there. If you want to know the latest updates on Google Scholar, you can visit the Google Scholar blog.