We believe it's tremendously valuable for college students to learn to use and take advantage of the SCCC library website and on-campus resources—including the librarians themselves, whether you ask them in person or remotely via phone, chat, or Zoom (see links on the library website).

There might be times, however, when you aren't quite finding what you're looking for in the SCCC library databases and may not be able to reach a librarian. A solid alternative is to try Google Scholar. This is the Google search engine that you're familiar with, but it indexes scholarly articles and related publications. 

The image below shows an example search done by one of my students who was researching the racial wealth gap in America. That is exactly the search phrase they used. Some notes: 

  1. In the panel at the left, you can define the years of the articles you'd like to see. For example, another student who was doing research on the value of the college education showed very different results before the pandemic (pre 2020) and after the pandemic (2021 to present). (Research still shows that attainment of a bachelor's degree can result in around $1 million more in lifetime earnings vs. someone without a bachelor's degree.) 

  2. Also on the left side, you can click the hamburger menu to the left of the Google Scholar logo to access the Advanced Search feature which can help you fine tune your search terms. 

  3. On the right side, you will see the options that you have for accessing each result, which may be a link to a website, a pdf, or a means to access the article through the SCCC library website.

Give Google Scholar a try so you can learn from and cite more authoritative and reliable sources. 

Screenshot of Google Scholar search for racial wealth gap in america