Google Scholar

Google Scholar is specialist search engine for academic journal articles, book chapters, conference papers etc. An important limitation: Google Scholar has not been designed to search for secondary sources (reports, newspaper and magazine articles, blogs, videos etc.) which are not scholarly; for those sources, use generic search engines and specialist databases.

1. Access your university subscriptions

3. Select Library Links

4. Search for the name of your university, e.g. London Metropolitan, Solent or Ulster

5. Tick all the boxes related to the university anbd Save


6. Enter search terms (a search term = one concept, one thing; on the screenshot, there are two search terms: employee motivation and incentives); then search. There is no need to add the AND operator between search terms in Google Scholar.

7. The documents which are on open access and in the databases your university subscribes to are listed on the right-hand side of the screen.

8. Review the result and their number. If the documents are not very relevant and their number is large, go to Review articles or change your search terms.

2. Review articles

9. Often, review articles are a good starting point for reading: they are much broader in scope than regular scholarly articles - a bit like textbooks.

3. Advanced search

Select the Advanced search if you want to create a complex search.

In this case, Google Scholar will return the documents containing all three words: employee, motivation and incentives; plus at least one word: salary, pay or remuneration.

4. Save, cite and citation chaining

Underneath each entry, there are a number of options: