URL: https://westernu.libguides.com/google

Google Better: Google Scholar

This guide goes over the different functions and features of Google.

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What is Google Scholar?

Google scholar is a search engine powered by Google that focuses on scholarly literature. It searches a wide variety of sources - articles, theses, books, abstracts from academic publishers, professional organizations, universities, and online repositories. Google Scholar ranks results by weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who wrote it, and how often it's been cited.

But remember, Google Scholar is very imprecise when compared to discipline-specific databases. Also, not everything in Google Scholar is Scholarly! Because Google Scholar searches are so broad, you might have to sift through PowerPoints, news announcements, or unpublished materials to get to scholarly articles and books.

Google Scholar CAN	Google Scholar CAN’T
Help you early in the research process to identify journals and authors	Search by disciplinary field
Find “gray literature” like conference proceedings – it includes articles that wouldn’t necessarily get included in other indexing searches	Browse by title
Find obscure references that you can’t find in regular databases	Limit your search results
Locate more information on partial citations	Search the deep web

Connecting Google Scholar to the Pumerantz Library

Keep in mind that the only articles you will be able to access through Google scholar are the ones available through Pumerantz Library subscriptions or ones that are freely available. To make sure you get access to the articles the Pumerantz Library pays for, you can lik your WesternU account to Google Scholar.

1. Go to scholar.google.com