Use Google Scholar

Google Scholar is Google's search engine for scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories and universities.

Why use Google Scholar

• If you have have an obscure reference that is proving difficult to locate in a conventional database
• If the topic is under researched or not covered by USC programs
• It offers metrics such as how many times a publication has been cited
• It can assist with finding "grey literature" like conference proceedings 

Why not use Google Scholar

• Not everything in Google Scholar is scholarly
• There is no way to limit the search to only peer-reviewed publications
• The results do not always provide the full-text and will restrict access without a subscription