In November 2004, Google launched Google Scholar, a new search tool designed to help you access peer-reviewed journal articles and other scholarly materials. With Scholar you can easily find citations to journal articles, dissertations, books, preprints, abstracts, conference proceedings, and technical reports. In many cases you can also find and display linked full-text.
Search Google Scholar just as you would search Google. Scholar ranks and lists results according to how relevant they are to the search query. The most relevant references should theoretically appear at the top of the page.
How do I access the full-text of articles cited in Google Scholar?
You can often access the full-text of articles and other documents via Google Scholar. Most access is made available through subscriptions purchased by the UC Libraries. Google Scholar provides links to these licensed copies. If you are connected to the campus network a UC-eLinks link will appear after these items.
How do I access the full-text of an article when the UC-eLinks link does not appear after the article citation?
Try accessing the article by clicking on one of the other blue-colored links listed beneath the citation. The search engine may have found several sources for the same citation and one of these might provide free access to the document.
How do I limit my search to certain authors, publications, dates, or subjects?
Use Advanced Scholar Search to limit your search by author, publication and date range searching (see also the “Search Tips” on the Advanced Scholar Search Page).
The Advanced Scholar Search now allows you to limit your search by subject, e.g., Medicine, Pharmacology, Life Sciences, Chemistry.
Google Scholar searches materials from many publishers, including some of the resources to which the UC Libraries subscribe. Its coverage appears to be strongest in science and technology and weakest in the humanities.
Google Scholar searches only a fraction of the published scholarly literature and does not provide a complete list of publishers, professional societies, or other organizations whose content it indexes. This means that you can not be sure how much information is available on Google Scholar or how comprehensive your searches are.
Can I use Google Scholar instead of MEDLINE (PubMed)?
Google Scholar includes articles from many of the same journals that can be found in MEDLINE. However, it contains only a fraction of the articles indexed by MEDLINE and there are large gaps in its coverage of important medical journals, especially for recent articles.
Clicking the 'Cited by' link displays a list of articles and documents that have cited the document originally retrieved in the search. This makes it possible to find other documents related by subject to the original document.
However, Google Scholar only includes articles that are indexed within its database, and this is a much smaller subset of scholarly articles than found in some other UC databases such as Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index.
If you have a citation, you can click "Web Search" to see if you can find the full text through a Google search. Clicking "Web Search" for a book will take you to sites to purchase the book online.
"Library Search" will try to locate the book in a local library using the OCLC WorldCat database. When you click on the link, you will see a record for the book. If you want to buy the book, click on "Web Search" to find where you can purchase it online.
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