My lovely girlfriend, who is a teacher, forwarded me some information today about Google Scholar, a new search engine by Google designed to search scholarly articles such as those from peer-reviewed journals.

According to ResourceShelf, Google Scholar works by identifying scholarly articles on the Web and searches only those articles. Exactly how Google determines what is a scholarly article is unknown, as is its usefulness compared to more targeted search engines such as EBSCO, which is used by most colleges and libraries.

Being a current college student (my MBA concludes next May), I find locating scholarly material on non-traditional topics very difficult. I’ll be very interested to see if Google can make this process any easier.

Disclaimer: Any viewpoints and opinions expressed in this article are those of Nicholas C. Zakas and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employer, my colleagues, Wrox Publishing, O'Reilly Publishing, or anyone else. I speak only for myself, not for them.