Google for Scholars

Google Scholar is good for...

• Helping a beginning researcher identify journal titles and authors connected with subjects of interest.
• Finding "gray literature" like conference proceedings. It includes many articles that wouldn't get included in other indexing services.
• Locating obscure references that are proving difficult to find in conventional databases.
• Locating more information on partial citations.

Google Scholar cannot...

• Sort/search by disciplinary field
• Browse by title
• Limit search results
• Search the deep web

Keep in Mind:

• You may get a long list of results, but you will only have access to the text of articles that the University of Mount Olive Library has paid subscriptions for, or that are freely available.
• Not everything in Google Scholar is scholarly. Google Scholar searches academic websites (.edu) as well as journals and publisher websites. Search results can include PowerPoints, news announcements or unpublished materials as well as articles and books. 
• Searching in Google Scholar is imprecise when compared with discipline-specific databases.

Try some of these tricks:

• Try to only use first initials when searching for author names.
• Abbreviations of journal names are often used, such as J Biol Chem rather than Journal of Biological Chemistry.
• Try Advanced Search to give Google more specific information about what you hope to find

Google Scholar often prompts you to pay for full text articles. In many cases these articles are freely accessible to UMO affiliates through one of the Library's many subscription databases or journals. You can use Google Scholar's Library Links feature to identify yourself as a University of Mount Olive affiliate. This allows you to find full text library resources directly through Google Scholar results.

This is what Google Scholar search results look like when you're off-campus and haven't yet identified yourself as a University of Mount Olive affiliate:

Note: If you're using Google Scholar from an on-campus computer, the UMO Journal Finder will display automatically without any special configuration.

• To identify yourself as a University of Mount Olive affiliate, go to Settings at the the top of the Google Scholar search screen, then select Library links.
•  Search for University of Mount Olive and select the "University of Mount Olive - UMO Journal Finder" checkbox.
• Make sure this box is checked and click Save.
• Now, when you run searches in Google Scholar, you should see a link More below the results. Click on this link to see more options, like a cached view of the website or searching the university's print resources.

Please note that, even if you don't see a Discover link next to an article, it doesn't mean that we don't have it! The University of Mount Olive Library has access to thousands of journals online and in print, and not all of them are accessible through Discover. If you need help locating a particular article that you found through Google Scholar, please Ask a Librarian.

Above, you'll notice that if you hover over the down arrow, you will get access to Google Scholar's advanced search features. By clicking on that arrow, a box will pop up with many options that will allow you to refine your search. This advanced search will allow you to sort by specific phrases, as well as authors and date ranges.

Google Scholar searches specifically for scholarly materials such as journal articles, research reports, dissertations and theses, preprints, technical reports, patents, manuscripts in preparation, working papers and many other document types.

When you do a search in Google Scholar, you get a list of citations. You'll get links to the full text in the following cases:

• If the UMO library subscribes to the journal title
• If it's from an open access journal
• If the researcher posted the article on her/his website.

We don't know exactly how Google Scholar indexes items, but this is how Google Scholar defines its metrics.