Google: How To Leverage the Power of Internet Searching

About Google Scholar

Google Scholar searches for scholarly works such as journal articles, dissertations and theses, technical reports, patents, and book reviews.

Here are a few tips to make your search more relevant:

• use only first initials when searching for authors' names
• use abbreviations of journal names (instead of Journal of Biological Chemistry use J Biol Chem)
• use fewer search terms

Google Scholar Search Box

Google Scholar Library

Google Scholar Library offers you tools to organize and save your searches. You can:

• save articles right from the search page
• organize them by topic
• use the full-text search & ranking  find appropriate and relevant articles

To find the articles you saved, you just need to click on My Library. The articles you saved will appear there for when you are ready to start reviewing them.

Google Scholar Blog can help you get started.

Using Google Scholar

When you search Google Scholar, your results are displayed as a list of citations. These citations are detailed, providing you information such as:

• title of work
• author and publication details
• number of published versions
• related articles
• cited by counts
• identification of material type - book chapter, article, etc.

There may be links to full text articles, if:

• COTR Library subscribes to the journal
• it's an open access journal,
• the researcher author posted the item on his or her website
• you have set your Google Scholar Preferences to include COTR Library (search for College of the Rockies in the search box beside "Library Links")
• Google Scholar often links to versions of papers from commercial publisher websites.  These sites will prompt you for your credit card requesting you to pay. DO NOT PAY for articles.  COTR Library already purchases access to thousands of journals that you get for FREE.

Google Scholar uses a weighting system to return the most relevant results. Find out more about the weighting system.

When you use Google Scholar, think about these questions to be sure it is the best resource for you to use:

• What characteristics of the results help me refine my search and provide me access to full-text articles?
• How does Google Scholar fit in to your research process? After you've looked at books in the library? Before accessing licensed databases from your Library?
• When should you use Google Scholar, and when should you use a different scholarly search engine? Intute? iSEEK? refseek? academicIndex?  Bioline International?
• When would it be more productive, reliable, or efficient to use a licensed database to which COTR Library subscribes?

Google Scholar Engine vs COTR Library Search Engine

How does COTR Library Search Engine compare to Google Scholar?

Google Scholar has been used as a wide-ranging, cross-discipline database by many.  It returns citations from a variety of sources including books, e-resources, newspapers, and media.  Now a new search engine provides an alternative offering you resources available through COTR Library.

COTR Library's search engine and Google Scholar are search engines that let you quickly search across countless numbers of scholarly information sites and publications; however, each search different selections of scholarly content.  While you will find some overlap, content in COTR Library search engine is not available in Google Scholar, and visa-versa.  The two search engines perform relevance ranking in very different ways.

Features unique to COTR Library Search Engine

• Results are from COTR Library collection - these search results are content to which COTR Library subscribes or purchases or licenses and is available to you for free.
• Search features - you can more efficiently search across COTR Library content using the a guided-style search selecting "Fields" and "Also search for related words" expander and "Publication Type" located on results page.
• Full-text - you can get to an article right away using the full text feature: PDF Full Text Viewer allows you to view PDF full text content using a variety of features.

Features unique to Google Scholar

• "Cited by"  - Google Scholar will display a list of articles and documents that have cited the document originally retrieved in the search.
• Google Books content - Google Scholar includes this content in its search results

Google Scholar Blog