What is Google Scholar?

Google Scholar is a World Wide Web search engine designed to find scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, technical reports, and scholarly web sites. It allows for more focused search results by ignoring online resources and sites which are not considered scholarly in nature. Google Scholar partners with a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, and universities to facilitate access to full-text resources. It includes full text and citations.

Why should I use Google Scholar?

McDermott Library subscribes to many electronic resources for scholarly research, but it is not always intuitive to know which electronic resource is best for your research. By searching Google Scholar through the library's web page, you can search across the wide array of online materials subscribed by the library as well as other material of relevance available on the World Wide Web. Google Scholar links to full-text resources when they are available. The full text to which the library subscribes will be available free of charge. Links to full text to which it does not subscribe may ask for payment.

When should I use the library's research databases instead of Google Scholar?

There are a number of very good reasons why a researcher will not want to resort to Google Scholar for all research needs. If a researcher wishes to conduct the most thorough and complete research of most or all published literature (journals, magazines, newspapers, and essays) in a particular subject, databases will have greater depth than Google Scholar. In other words, Google Scholar does not include coverage of every electronically published journal or book. It has great breadth, but not the depth.

Also, Google Scholar does not permit the researcher to limit to peer-reviewed (also known as scholarly, academic, or refereed) articles or other types of literature (dissertations, essays and letters, and statistics) only. If a researcher demands such a limit, only databases will allow the option to limit to this particular type of literature.

Lastly, while Google Scholar does support a limited form of searching by subject area in its "Advanced Scholar Search," it does not support the robust set of features found in native interfaces of databases. For example, the psychology database PsycINFO (covers over 2,000 periodicals in the field of psychology back to the 1800's, including dissertations, books and book chapters) permits the user to limit by language, age groups, population group (human or animal), intended audience (general public or professional), methodology (clinical case study, empirical study, etc.), and more as well as peer-reviewed articles only. For fully customizable searching in specific fields of interest, researchers are better served by using databases for their research.

Using Google Scholar through the library's web page.

By using the link to Google Scholar on McDermott Library's web page, your Google Scholar preferences are automatically set to pull relevant search results which include online material subscribed by the library. This will ensure the maximum amount of full-text linkage from your search results.

Using Google Scholar from off campus over the internet.

You may still search Google Scholar from off campus over the Internet, however, your Google Scholar preferences will need to be set to include the fullest access to online material subscribed by McDermott Library. If your preferences are not set in this way, many of the links to full-text resources will ask for payment before you can pull them. This may be unnecessary if McDermott Library has already paid for the access for you.

How do I configure Google Scholar to look for McDermott Library resources?

McDermott Library has gone to great efforts to make its electronic collections compliant with Google Scholar. This means that for selected resources you encounter in Google Scholar, access to the full-text content will be made available if the library subscribes to it. You will know if the library has access when you see the link next to your search results.

Linking to UTDallas resources is automatic when using Google Scholar on campus. However when accessing Google Scholar from off-campus, you will want to be sure to configure it to indicate UTDallas McDermott Library resources. By doing so, you will get access to the full-text of any electronic resource to which the library subscribes through one simple click.

1) To begin, you will want to click the "Scholar Preferences" link on Google Scholar's starting search page:



2) On the next screen in the Library Links search blank, insert the phrase University of Texas at Dallas and click the Find Library button.


 

3) Select "University of Texas at Dallas (Get It! UTDallas)."

 

4) Search for and select "worldcat." This will enable you to search the UT Dallas McDermott Library and local library holdings for books.

5) If you would like to configure Google Scholar to automatically export references found to the bibliographic/citation manager RefWorks, be sure to adjust the "Show links to import citations into" setting under the Bibliography Manager.

6) Finally, be sure to save your preferences by clicking the button at the top or bottom of the page and return to your search.