Google Scholar

I enjoy several aspects of blogging, especially the opportunity to communicate with other people.  In the blog entry “Using Google: What You Can Do, What You Can't...” (http://ihelib.blogspot.com/2012/02/using-google.html), I wrote, “Google is useful, but it cannot find everything.  You might need to find scholarly articles for a research paper.  Google is better at finding popular sources than scholarly ones, but your professors probably will require you to use scholarly articles.”

In response, a reader commented, “I thought you could find peer reviewed scholarly work on Google Scholar?”  

 

Yes, you can find scholarly work on Google Scholar, but that website has its limitations.  It does not connect to every scholarly source.  Also, it does not always link directly to the articles themselves.

 

For example, visit Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/).  Notice that the layout looks similar to the Google (www.google.com) you probably already know.  In the search box, type a subject that you would like to research and click on Search.  How many hits (results of your search) do you get?  (The number will be near the top right corner of the page.)  Look at the first page of hits.  How relevant do the articles seem?

 

Click on the title of an article that seems like it would give useful information.  What do you see?  You should at least see the title of the article; the author; the name, date, and volume of the journal that features the article; and perhaps an abstract, or short summary, of the article.  What about the article itself?  Do you have access to its full text, meaning the entire article, or can you read only the first page--or none at all?  Does the page offer you any ways to read the article?  Do these ways require you to pay?  Before you spend money on an article, see a librarian, who might find a way to get the article for free.

 

Google Scholar can find some articles’ full text online for free, but others require subscriptions to journals.  Remember that if you have a Jersey City Free Public Library (JCFPL) Card (and as an IHE student, you can get one; see http://ihelib.blogspot.com/2012/01/you-can-get-jersey-city-free-public.html), you can get access to thousands of online journal articles from the computer you are using right now (http://www.jclibrary.org/resources/online-resources-home-access).  Use the databases and other online resources to see if you can find the article you need.  Actually, if you log into JCFPL before visiting Google Scholar, or if you use one of the computers at a JCFPL branch, you can save yourself time while trying to get access to an article’s full text. 

 

For information about indentifying scholarly articles, read my blog entry “What Is a Scholarly Article?” (http://ihelib.blogspot.com/2012/01/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_23.html).  This entry mentions that “not every article that appears in a scholarly journal is a scholarly article.  Editorials and book reviews, for example, are not considered scholarly articles.”  Google Scholar, like online databases, cannot differentiate between a scholarly article and other types of articles that appear in journals, so a search on Google Scholar or any database may give you results that are not scholarly articles.

 

As always, if you have any questions, your IHE librarian is happy to help.