Did you know that Google has a special version of its search engine that is geared towards college students a scholarly research? It’s true. If you want to do a search on scholarly literature, Google Scholar can be a excellent tool. The search engine allows you to view peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports covering a variety of broad areas of interest.
Colleges and universities that use Google Scholar incorporate into the student resources links. You may find a page on your college’s website that offers access to this selective database. Of course, it is available by visiting www.google.com or by going directly to the Google Scholar URL at http://scholar.google.com.
How it Works
When you’re on campus, Google recognizes you by internet address. That way you’ll have the ability to link directly to many full text articles without logging in. Google Scholar will link directly to full text articles that are made available through you school’s library’s databases.
If you are off campus, you must set your Google Scholar preferences to those of the school you’re attending. Select “Scholar Preferences” from the link at the right of the search box, and find your college’s name, then save it as your preference.
If you link to a full text article from off-campus, you will need to provide login information to proceed. This is typically a school-issued email or a student ID number. Once you’re logged in you should be able to get moving immediately.
You will be able to tailor your search parameters in order to find exactly what you want. You may be able to link directly to the full text. If full text is not available, one click may provide you with information about the whether the material is available in the school library in a print form. Now, the technology supporting Google Scholar is still evolving so there problems do crop up here and there. You may get inaccurate search results that could prompt to search your library database directly.
Things to remember:
There are a few things to remember when you are using Google Scholar.
1. Google Scholar won’t provide all the material you need so you should supplement it with those materials available to you as a student or staff member of a college or university.
2. You should not rely on a single source to do the best research. It’s a bad strategy. Instead, if you want to do serious research for your thesis or some other important project, you should conduct searches on all of the relevant databases that are accessible to you. That way you can vary your search strategy, taking advantage of the indexing that databases can offer.
3. Google Scholar is basically a good starting point before you turn to more comprehensive research tools that supply higher quality information.
4. When you do use your school’s library databases to study, remember to access those that have been selected specifically to provide current, comprehensive, and retrospective examples of scholarly.
This has been a short college student’s guide to Google Scholar. While Scholar does have many interesting and helpful features, it is still just one tool among many that you should use when doing college level research.
S. Kilgore writes about how to interpret online university rankings.
