Google Scholar helps you finds peer-reviewed articles, preprints, technical reports, books, theses, abstracts, and even patents and court opinions, from multiple sources. These include academic publishers, university presses and repositories, professional societies, preprint repositories and the web.
Change your Settings before you start:
Find sources that include those held by the UVA Library:
Install the Google Scholar Button (a browser plug-in that adds a Scholar button to your toolbar and works with Chrome, Firefox and Safari):
Finding recent papers - Your search results are normally sorted by relevance, not by date. To find newer articles, try the following options in the left sidebar:
Locating the full text of an article - Abstracts are freely available for most of the articles. Alas, reading the entire article may require a subscription. Here're a few things to try:
Getting better answers
If you're new to the subject, it may be helpful to pick up the terminology from secondary sources. E.g., a Wikipedia article for "overweight" might suggest a Scholar search for "pediatric hyperalimentation".
If the search results are too specific for your needs, check out what they're citing in their "References" sections. Referenced works are often more general in nature.
Similarly, if the search results are too basic for you, click "Cited by" to see newer papers that referenced them. These newer papers will often be more specific.
Explore! There's rarely a single answer to a research question. Click "Related articles" or "Cited by" to see closely related work, or search for author's name and see what else they have written.