Teaching Google Scholar: A Practical Guide for Librarians

Teaching Google Scholar in your library instructional sessions can increase students’ information and digital literacy skills. Students’ familiarity with Google Scholar’s interface works to the instructor’s advantage and allows more time to address students’ information needs and teach foundational information literacy skills and less time teaching a new database with a less-intuitive database interface.

Teaching Google Scholar: A Practical Guide for Librarians will illustrate instructional methods and incorporate step-by-step guides and examples for teaching Google Scholar. It begins with providing you with essential background:

• What Google Scholar is
• How to set up Google Scholar using OpenURL
• How to design Google Scholar instructional sessions
• How to incorporate active learning activities using Google Scholar

After reading it, you will be ready to teach students critical skills including how to:

• Use specific Google Scholar search operators
• Incorporate search logic
• Extract citation data, generate citations, and save citations to Google's My Library and/or a citation management program
• Use Google Scholar tools- including “cited by,” “alerts,” “library links,” and “library search”

Google Scholar is a powerful research tool and will only become more popular in the coming years. Learning how to properly teach students how to utilize this search engine in their research will greatly benefit them in their college career and help promote life-long learning. Google Scholar instruction is a must in today’s modern information literacy classroom.