Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature.

From one place, users can search across many disciplines and sources:

• peer-reviewed papers,
• theses,
• books,
• abstracts and articles,

from...

• academic publishers,
• professional societies,
• preprint repositories,
• universities and
• other scholarly organizations.

Google Scholar helps users identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

Features of Google Scholar

* Search diverse sources from one convenient place
* Find papers, abstracts and citations
* Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web
* Learn about key papers in any area of research

How are articles ranked?

In their words...

"Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. The most relevant results will always appear on the first page."

Try it out at http://scholar.google.co.uk/.

P.S. Take a look at the Tips-n-Tricks in this eMagazine