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Google Scholar |
Library Databases |
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Coverage |
Google Scholar says it contains “articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.” |
Includes scholarly, newspaper, and magazine articles, books, book chapters, theses, and other sources. |
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Access |
Searching is free. Some articles have freely available full text, many more do not. Often, you will end up at a publisher’s website who would like to charge you for the article. (Don’t pay, articles can be obtained through interlibrary loan.) |
Your library pays for access to the databases, many of which have full text and all of which can be requested via interlibrary loan. |
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Indexing |
Does not use indexes such as subject terms. |
Has subject terms and other indexes developed by librarians and information professionals. |
My library is a feature in Google Scholar that allows you to save articles from your search results for reading, printing, or citing at a later time. It works with any existing Google account, so you don’t have to create or maintain another login. (If you have multiple Google accounts, you’ll want to pay attention to which account is signed in when you save articles!)
While you are viewing search results and signed into your Google account, just click the star under the article you’d like to save. It will turn dark blue.
Once you’ve saved a few articles, you can click the “My library” link in the upper right hand corner of the screen to view them in a list. You can search the list or label them with a topic or assignment.
To start a literature review, you want to perform a comprehensive search for your topic. Google Scholar indexes articles, abstracts and books from major academic publishers. Google Scholar limits searches to 1000 results, but the advanced search allows you to search by author, publication and date ranges.
Once you’ve set up the My library feature, you can change some of Google Scholar’s default settings. To access the settings, click the three lines in the upper left hand corner of the screen.
Alerts: Google Scholar allows you to receive e-mail notifications for changes in specific search queries. Users with a Google Scholar profile setup will also receive notifications when new articles site your published articles.
Bibliography manager: Located under Settings, then Search results. You can also set up Google Scholar to use a specific citation management program (e.g. EndNote, RefWorks). Just select the one you use, and you’ll get an option in your results list to save the citations specifically formatted for that program.
Library links: Located under Settings. You can also add a link to your library to help find full text available from their journal databases and other subscriptions.
Button: Located under Settings. This browser add-on allows you to search in Google Scholar through your web browser’s URL / search box.