Narrow Down Your Research Topic with Google Scholar

If you don't have access to library databases at home, you should definitely start your research using Google Scholar. To describe Google Scholar as simply a website that archives and organizes online journal articles would be an understatement.

Google Scholar not only lets you search for articles by search terms (like every other journal database), but it provides you great search features like:

Related Articles Link
Most every article listed within Google Scholar has a "related articles" link. The "Related Articles" link expands on articles not cited within the article itself, and can provide you with a long list of scholarly journal articles you might not have thought about checking out. You can spend hours just clicking through the related links of the journal articles you're interested in.

Cited By Link
Another great tool on Google Scholar is the "Cited by __" link. This nifty link will give you set of online journal articles that cite the article you're interested in. So the articles with more citations should give you an idea of the article's importance (depending of course on the date it was published) within your research topic. A great tool to quickly find articles most referenced in other journals, which means you might want to consider reading it and citing it too.

There are many other advanced search features that allow you to confine your searches by article type, author, journal title, etc. The best way to learn all the great features is to get start using. So go check out Google Scholar.