Google Scholar@EMU

Connect to Google Scholar

In November 2004 Google introduced a test (beta) service called Google Scholar. While it has its own web address, http://scholar.google.com/, the main Google site now provides a link to Google Scholar above its search box. With the Scholar service, Google has refined its search algorithm to identify on the free, public Internet "scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research." It has also developed a way to extract citations to books and articles from the bibliographies of the materials it indexes. These citations, while listed on Google Scholar result screens, do not link directly to additional information. As the 'About Google Scholar' page notes, "[t]his means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications."

Google Scholar organizes search results by relevance. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article (when available), as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in the other materials in the Google Scholar index. Google Scholar displays the number of times items have been cited as well as provides links to the materials where the citations appear.

Going further, Google Scholar provides access to content that was not available from the Google web search service before-information about articles, reports, and books stored on the web servers of scholarly commercial publishers. While in some cases Google has been permitted to display the full text of these scholarly commercial materials, in many more cases, only a description of the material is available. So, while Google Scholar can now alert you to the existence of some potentially relevant research items, when you navigate to them the publisher says "to read this you have to pay for it." This is not what most have come to expect from the original Google service.

It is important to realize that the EMU Library might have already paid for and can provide access to the commercial material found in Google Scholar. And if we have not already paid for materials, the Library's Interlibrary Loan Service can probably acquire for you, at no cost, the full text of the items you desire.

How do you determine whether the EMU Library provides access to the full text you want, either online or in the library building? Some good news! Google Scholar now supports the EMU FindText+ OpenURL link resolver service.

What this means is that if you connect to Google Scholar from on-campus, or from off-campus using the links on this page, after you perform a search you will often see links labeled 'EMU FindText+ eJournal', which will lead to electronic full text, and links labeled 'EMU FindText+ catalog', which will allow you to check our catalog for print/microform ownership, as well as request items via our Interlibrary Loan Service if we do not own them.

Does the existence of Google Scholar mean that the Library does not need to subscribe to its broad array of academic indexes? Absolutely not! Google has not been forthcoming about who its information partners are and what sources are indexed. In addition, reviewers have found that for those partners who are known, e.g., Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), arXiv, Blackwell-Synergy, IEEE, Institute of Physics, PubMed, RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), Springer, Wiley Interscience, the Google Scholar depth of content coverage is not as great as on the original source sites. That is, you discover significantly more material when you perform a search on a native 'partner' site than when you perform a search for that site's material on Google Scholar. Google Scholar is not a reliable alternative to the Library's licensed databases.

Why use Google Scholar? Its vast index of many types of publications spanning the gamut of human investigation and knowledge often means you will turn up some new perspectives that you did not uncover using more narrowly focused research tools. It is, therefore, ANOTHER tool you can use to facilitate your discovery of illuminating resources, but not the ONLY tool.

Some Suggestions for Interpreting the Google Scholar Results Screen

Connect to Google Scholar