Google for Scholars

Google Scholar offers several features of interest to scholars.  You will want to use Google Scholar, in combination with library databases, to cast the widest net to find sources.  For example, library databases often do not include conference proceedings articles. Google Scholar will often find conference articles.  

• Quotes - search by phrase using ("") with either a topic or article title
• Advanced Search - use the drop-down arrow, on the right, after your initial search to 
  • limit to a specific author
  • limit by a specific publication
  • limit by date
• Cited By - Scholar results will show the articles and books that have cited a work since it was published. 

• Settings - customize your search result experience
  • Results per page - can increase and tell to open results in new window
  • Library links - add St. Mary's University to see full-text results from our library databases

• Creating Alerts - create alerts to searches by topic, author, journal; receive by email
• Claim Profile - published authors can create a profile to showing publications and their impact

• Impact - number of times articles from a particular publication have been cited in the past 5 years
• Journals by Discipline - highest cited journals by discipline
• Search by Journal Title - look for an individual journal to get an idea of impact and articles with highest number of citations

Google Books includes searchable text of books and magazine articles. Some books are available full-text if they are out of copyright or if the publishers has given permission to Google to offer the text.  Most books are not available online.  But, Google Books is a great search to find topics and keywords in books.  Google links to library collections that include books found in the service.

• Search - searches within the book as well as the title and author
• Quotes- search by phrase using ("")
• Advanced Search box - use gear icon, on the right, after your initial search to:
  • limit to a specific author
  • limit search to words in the title
  • limit by publisher
  • limit by date
  • Iimit by ISBN (books)
  • limit by ISSN (magazines)

• Book record - includes title, author,  and often, publisher, and date of publication, general subject, description, reviews, related books
• Places to purchase the book - links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. 
• Find in a library - links to WorldCat.org which gives detailed book record and lists libraries that own the item

• Select good keywords.  Ask yourself: How would someone creating a site about my topic write about it?
• Word order matters - example: blue sky vs sky blue finds different results
• Special characters - Google recognizes: %, $
• Some things don't matter: capitalization, most special characters 

• Quotes - use to search for a phrase  ("international monetary fund" )
• Site operators - site:edu; site:gov; site:org to limit your search a type of website
• Filetype searches - search for specific types of file, Ex: filetype:pdf; filetype:ppt
• OR search - search: cat OR feline to find both variants on cats
• NOT search, cut out words you don't need - Ex. search for e-Readers but not Amazon Kindle: e-reader -kindle
• Tools menu
  • Limit by date - set date range
  • Verbatim - results without Google's personalization options enabled (no synonyms, spelling corrections, stemming/truncation, similar results. 
• Advanced Search box - the gear icon from a Google search will bring up the Advanced Search

A useful browser feature is to search for text on a webpage - use Control-F (PC) or Command-F (Mac) and search for your word.