Google Scholar is another tool that can be used to help you research. It is a way to search for material such as articles, theses, books, abstracts, court opinions, technical reports, patents and many other document types. You still need to evaluate the sources you find in Google Scholar because not everything is scholarly material.
The Advanced Search feature will allow you to search by author's last name and publication title. It will allow you to limit your results for articles published within the specified years or articles in a specific subject area. Google Scholar will not allow you to sort your results by publication date.
Not every document will be available with full text in Google Scholar, however, you can use the CORE Library to link to or find full text. Before you can link to the full text, you must set your Google Scholar Library Links Settings.
You must set up your preferences in Google Scholar to link to the full text. To set up the preferences for the CORE Library, please follow these steps:
Pros of Google Scholar |
Cons of Google Scholar |
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• Relevancy (relevant hits at the top of the list - tend to be older) • Web-based materials not in other databases • enabled (linked to PUL library resources) • Searches a broad cross-section of subjects and disciplines • "Cited by" links to works that cite a particular book or article • Strong in the Sciences (Engineering, Chemistry, Biology etc) • Improving all the time
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• Frequency of updates? • Gaps in coverage • Incomplete Citations (often omit years, issue numbers or journal titles) • Doesn't handle variant spellings of author names or journal titles • No saved searches like many library databases • Bias towards older literature - much of which is not full text • Exporting citations : Only one at a time |
