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What is Google Scholar?
- How does it compare to other databases?
- How does it work?
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- Pubmed, and online articles indexed in Pubmed
- Ingenta.com and online versions of articles indexed in Ingenta
- ACM Portal, IEEE, American Institute of Physics, arXiv.org, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature.com, American Medical Association and other medicine journals, Nature.com
- JSTOR
- SpringerLink,Wiley Interscience, Cambridge journals, Taylor and Francis, Sage Publications, Blackwell-Synergy, and others
- Online preprints of articles posted by authors on their websites
- Online dissertations and theses
- Instructional materials put up on the web
- Specific web sites dedicated to scholarly or near-scholarly material.
- Open-access legal case and discussion sites
- OpenWorldcat records for books-- but not all books; it appears that only books cited in other Google Scholar-indexed materials are included.Google Books (books.google.com)
Not all of any of these collections is searchable through Google Scholar; only article collections that provide at least an abstract for free can be indexed, and not all of the available content has been or will be indexed.
So, what is Google Scholar good for?
- Finding OpenWorldcat books by subject or keywordsFinding journal articles by words title and abstract (not subject) across a wide variety of electronic journals
- Finding materials by author across disciplines.
- Finding free preprint and open-access copies of journal articles on the web
- Searching Natural language searching for articles and resources by subject across disciplines, especially content that Drew may not have direct access to(alternative to Summon)
- Finding recently published material
- Finding papers and websites websites and papers that cite a particular paper or book
- Setting up current awareness search alerts
- Citation verification, citation capture
- First-pass legal lookup.
- Academic research when academic indexes are not available, or to supplement academic indexes
What is Google Scholar Not Good for?
- In some cases, when full text is available, there is inadequate descriptive information to show where the article came from. Use the WebSearch function to check for citations.
- Currently, the subject skew is toward science and medicine, and social sciences and humanities are not as well coveredThere is little restricted subject indexing.
- Dissertations available through UMI are not well covered.
- There is little restricted subject indexing.
- It is in no way comprehensive, and has limited field searching and proximity searching; turn to subject area indexes for sophisticated searching.
- Boolean logic searching (AND, OR, NOT) and word-root truncation (stem*) are not available. Ok, well, OR is available, but not trustworthy. Again, turn to subject indexes.
When using Google Scholar, bear in mind that the search algorithm is subject to change without notice and not well-documented to the public.
How do I search Google Scholar?
Go to scholar.google.com and type in your search terms. Boolean logic (AND, OR) will be ignored, so don't bother with it.
ONCE YOU HAVE A SEARCH RESULT, you will see options on the left side that let you limit your search
You can also go directly to advanced search, by clicking the down-pointing triangle on the right side of the search box:
Using the menu items on the left, you can limit
- Articles only, articles and patents, or legal cases
- To items published since a specific date,
Setting Preferences
Set your preferences so that you will see items owned by Drew. Click on Scholar Preferences and go down to Library Links: 
Search for Drew in the Find Library box, and check the Drew University Links. Click Save Preferences to save these settings. You will have to do this only once for each web browser/computer you use.
Features:
OpenWorldcat searching (Library Search)
The entire body of OpenWorldCat has been made available to GoogleScholar for indexing.
Book entries are likely to look like this:
Clicking on Library Search brings up the OpenWorldCat page:
If the user is in an institution or library that is part of OpenWorldCat, there will be a box in the upper right corner with any direct library services, such as a link to the institution's catalog.
To find libraries that hold this book, the user enters their postal code or state in the 'Find Libraries with Item' Box:
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Clicking on the library name will link to the record in that library's catalog; Clicking on Library Information links to the library's main or hours webpage. You can also click links in the book record to search those terms (such as Gardens -- History) in OpenWorldcat.
To search only Openworldcat, go to worldcat.org.
Reaching Journal articles
Journal and proceedings citations will appear like this:
The title link will go to the first-named cite (Springer, in this case); to try your luck at another site, click on "group of All x versions" to see other links. 
In general, when the full text or PDF item is freely accessible and indexed, it may not be the first link in the set, so if the main link is to an index or a secured full text, it's worth trying the other links.
View as HTML
When the link is to a PDF file, GoogleScholar will often provide a "View as HTML" link which shows the PDF text translated into HTML. Be careful, as some information can be lost in this translation.linked to the right of the title.
Cited by references
Wiki Markup
That will bring up a list of items in Google Scholar that cite the item.
Create Email Alert
You can have Google Scholar email you when new articles covered by your search are indexed. To do that, click on the "Create Email Alert" 
button to the left of or at the bottom of your search results.
Then fill in the blanks in the Alert box with your email address, and click "Create Alert"
You'll get a confirmation email to be sure you really are the person who wants this alert-- respond to it and you're good to go.
Related links
To see the most recent rather than the most cross-referenced/relevant items, click the "Recent articles" link in the green bar at the top of your search. The names of the most-common authors in your search results will display on the left side of the screen; click on a name to do an author search.
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Clicking on the Web Search link launches a search in all of Google, not just Google Scholar, for keywords from that item.
Advanced Scholar Search:
Click the down-pointing triangle to get Advanced Search to get this:
You can search Google Scholar using field limits, or go into Advanced Search to limit by date or publication.
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Of particular use are the ability to search by date of publication, by author and by publication (journal title), not available on regular Google. However, if the date of publication or the author is not easily identified on the document, it will not be searchable.
You can limit to legal opinions and journals as seen above.
GoogleChrome Google Scholar Button
The Chrome web browser has an add-on available for GoogleScholar that allows you to search terms in Google Scholar by highlighting them on the web page you are viewing, then clicking the button. Use this helper app to check whether articles are available at Drew or via open access institutions.
Worldcat.org/Open Worldcat searching (Library Search)
Some entries are for Books (i.e. books in Google Books), and you can use the "Library Search" to check whether the book is available. Click on "More" and then choose "Library Search"
Clicking on Library Search brings up the WorldCat.org page:
If the user is in an institution or library that is part of Worldcat.org, there will be a box in the upper right corner with any direct library services, such as a link to the institution's catalog.
To find libraries that hold this book, the user enters their postal code or state in the 'Find Libraries with Item' Box:
A list of the libraries in Worldcat holding the item appears below the Find Libraries box:
Clicking on the library name will link to the record in that library's catalog; Clicking on Library Information links to the library's main or hours webpage. You can also click links in the book record to search those terms (such as Gardens -- History) in Worldcat.org.
To search only Open Worldcat, go to worldcat.org also limit your search by subject area.
What about GoogleBooks?
Items Some ttems from Google Book Search are also incorporated into the GoogleScholar search. Google Book Search allows you to search inside the digitized text of books, and to see snippets of varying sizes of the text of books in Google Book Search. (Books that are out of copyright may be displayed in their entirety. Here's an example. 
Clicking on the title link will put you in the Google Book Search page displaying the first hit on your terms in the book:.
You can use the Find this book in a library link to search for the item, or use the Search box to search for specific terms in the book.