Search Tools for Finding Information

The La Trobe University library homepage houses a ‘Library Search’ which is well-suited for preliminary searching across the entire library catalogue, searching for a specific resource or particular type of resource available at La Trobe.

Take a tour of the library website to learn more.

Google Scholar is a free, publicly available academic search engine, that indexes a large range and large amount of multidisciplinary academic content. In their 2018 research Gusenbauer M (2019) estimated Google Scholar to be the largest research database in terms of scope globally, holding 389 million records. 

Google Scholar is free to search but articles may not be free to access without your La Trobe University credentials. Find more information about using Google Scholar at La Trobe here.

Access Google Scholar here. 

Further Resources:

• Gusenbauer, M. Google Scholar to overshadow them all? Comparing the sizes of 12 academic search engines and bibliographic databases. Scientometrics 118, 177–214 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2958-5

Grey literature "refers to print or electronic literature that is produced by government, academia, business and industry, and is not controlled by commercial publishers" (ICGL Luxembourg definition, 1997. Expanded in New York, 2004).

Examples include conference papers, clinical trials, reports, theses, fact sheets, research in progress, government publications, statistics, and more. Sources of grey literature include Experts in the Field, Clinical Trial Registers, Organisation/stakeholder websites, University websites and institutional repositories and Advanced internet searching.

Further Resources: Grey literature for health

Most universities provide access to their library's catalogue online and there are "union catalogues" with the holdings of many libraries. La Trobe University  Library can get you most items via online request using Document Delivery. You can also request that the Library purchase additional items for the collection. Union catalogues include Trove and WorldCat.

If you are a La Trobe University student or staff member and cannot find an item in the La Trobe libraries, you are able Borrow at other academic libraries, Borrowing and Collections, La Trobe University. You can borrow from other Victorian university and TAFE libraries as part of the CAVAL program. When you travel in Australia and New Zealand, you can also borrow in person for participating university libraries. Borrowing is subject to the rules and restrictions of the institution.

Scanning the latest issues of certain journals is a valuable strategy.  After searching journal databases and identifying the best articles for your topic it may become apparent that the most relevant articles are consistently found in a handful of journals.

Some publishers may cover your subject area better than others. Journal publisher websites give quick access to the tables of contents, so you can scroll through the recent issues to get a feel for current trends. You might notice "hot topics" of the day and adjust your research scope to consider new concepts or frameworks. You can subscribe to receive notification of the table of contents of new issues of key journals by email

DOAJ indexes peer-reviewed content published in open access journals, internationally.

Access DOAJ here.