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What is Google Scholar?

  • How does it compare to other databases?
  • How does it work?

Google Scholar is a search engine that indexes scholarly materials that are available through the World Wide Web, as well as library holdings from WorldCat, and citations from other materials. Some of the full text items that Google Scholar points to are available free of charge; some are not. A significant portion of the journal articles Google Scholar points to are available through Drew Library e-journal subscriptions.

In particular, many publishers who put their journal issues up on the web have submitted their sites to Google Scholar, so that pages pointing to online journal articles are retrieved, but a subscription to the electronic journal or a one time payment is necessary to access the article itself. (If Drew libraries are subscribed to the electronic journal and you are using Google Scholar from on campus, you may actually be able to get into the full text of the article.) Google Scholar tries to target "peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.. . . articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

How do things get indexed in Google Scholar?

Publishers contact Google Scholar to have their material included. The references/citations of articles are also indexed, so that while a book or journal may not be available on the web, the citation will be shown if it was cited in a document Scholar indexes.

The indexing is actually done by Google Scholar's web-crawling software, so it may take some time for new items to be indexed.

Results are ranked by 'relevance' based on occurences of terms in the result document, as well as by Google's co-citation algorithm: "This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature".

That includes selections from

  • 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
  • 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.
  • OpenWorldcat records for books-- but not all books; it appears that only books cited in other Google Scholar-indexed materials are included.

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 journal articles by title and abstract (not subject) across a wide variety of electronic journals
  • Finding materials by author across disciplines.
  • Finding preprint copies of journal articles on the web
  • Searching for articles and resources by subject across disciplines
  • Finding websites and papers that cite a particular paper or book
  • 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 covered.
  • 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. 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 drop down menus that let you limit your search:

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:

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 x" 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.

Cited by references

To find other resources in Google Scholar that cite a book or other item, bring up the entry and choose the Cited by [##] link: 

That will bring up a list of items in Google Scholar that cite the item.

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.

Web Search

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 Advanced Search to get this:

You can search Google Scholar using field limits, or go into Advanced Search to limit by date or publication.

  • author:name
    author:"ab name"
  • site:domain.edu

Also, you can use phrase searching ("surround the phrase with quotes"), the + sign before a term to require it, and the - sign before a term to remove it, such as poland history -holocaust .

Of particular use are the ability to search by date of publication, by author and by publication, not available on regular Google. You can also limit your search by subject area. 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.

OpenWorldcat searching (Library Search)

Some 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:

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 OpenWorldcat.

To search only Openworldcat, go to worldcat.org.

What about GoogleBooks?

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.

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