Google Scholar for GW Scholars

Google Scholar can be searched using keywords, just as you would use in any Google web search.

• Is your search a phrase, such as "adult learning styles" ?  Use quotation marks to search for phrases.
• Use the Advanced Scholar feature to restrict your search for articles:  by author, by journal and by date.  
• Cited By: is a feature that works like a springboard--allowing you to see other scholarly articles that have cited a scholarly work.  This allows you to trace forward how a research topic has developed since the date of that scholarly publication.

You can find many more search tips at scholar.google.com.  Click the "Help" link at the bottom of the page.

A publication-restricted search only returns results with specific words from a specific publication.

For example:
If you want to search the Journal of Finance for articles about mutual funds, you might start like this:

Keep in mind, however, that publication-restricted searches may be incomplete. Google Scholar gathers bibliographical data from many sources, including automatically extracting it from text and citations. This information may be incomplete or even incorrect; many preprints, for instance, don't say where (or even whether) the article was ultimately published.

In general, publication-restricted searches are effective if you're certain of what you're looking for.

Finally, bear in mind that one journal can be spelled several ways (e.g., Journal of Biological Chemistry is often abbreviated as J Biol Chem), so you may need to try several spellings of a given publication in order to get complete search results.