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- Finding 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.
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