Scholar

There are many people from varied disciplines; like students, teachers, professors, scientists, writers, historians or individuals who use the Internet for their scholarly research. Using the main Google Search tool may not generate the desired search results effectively; therefore Google came up with the Google Scholar Search tool that provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Here, you can use the search tool much more effectively across the various sources available on the Internet: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.

Google Scholar search tool can be accessed from the top navigation bar on the Google home page or at http://scholar. google.com/. The Google Scholar page is shown in the above snapshot. This search tool looks similar to the basic Google search tool with the exception that there are a few more options provided to narrow down your search including the “Advanced Scholar Search”.

Using this search tool for your scholarly research, you can broadly search within “Articles” that may or may not “include patents”; you can either check this box or leave it unchecked, or Legal opinions and journals. Google Scholar can be used to:

 

• Search diverse sources from one convenient place
• Find articles, theses, books, abstracts or court opinions
• Locate the complete document through your library or on the web
• Learn about key scholarly literature in any area of research

 

You can easily narrow down the search and make it more focused depending on what you are looking for. One way to increase the accuracy and effectiveness of your searches on Google Scholar is by adding “operators” that ine-tune your search terms. he Google Scholar Operators include Author Search, Publication Restrict, Date Restrict, Legal opinions and journals, Jurisdiction Restrict and other Operators.

You can either use the search operators directly in the Google Scholar search box or use the “advanced scholar search”, which can give better results.

Advanced Scholar Search

Unlike the basic search where the link for advanced search appears only on the search results page, in Google Scholar the link for Advanced Scholar Search, is provided on the home page itself as seen in the snapshot above. The Advanced Scholar Search page gives you many options to help narrow down your search. See snapshot 7.2 (a & b) below. Since the full page cannot be shown in one snapshot, it has been shown in two parts.

The various options available in the advanced search form to make your search faster and relevant are explained below.

 

•     Find Articles:

You can easily search for articles using this tool box by copy/pasting or typing words or sentences into the relevant boxes provided with the various options of searching “with all of the words”, “with the exact phrase”, “with at least one of the words”, “without the words” or “where my words occur” (here select the appropriate choice from the drop down menu as anywhere in the article or title of the article).

 

•     Search by Author:

You can search by author using the “author:” operator, e.g. author: “Wordsworth” or author: “William Wordsworth”. This is the most effective way to find a specific paper. The operator “author:” should be used specifically in cases where a word is both a person’s name and a common noun, and make sure that there is no space between “author:” and your search term.

If you know exactly what you are searching for, then you can simply type the name of the author along with the name of the work, research or study etc. to get the desired results. For e.g. the search for [L Björkman amalgam fillings] returns papers on the subject of amalgam fillings written by people or person named L Björkman. You can also search by using the authors full name, last name or even initials by entering the name in quotes: “L Björkman”.

• Search by Publication:

You can search for specific articles from specific journals or publications that they are published in. To do this, simply enter the name of the journal or publication that you are searching for in the box provided, for example: Journal of clinical epidemiology.

Here you can use the “Publication Restrict” operator to refine your search. This operator can be used only in the advanced scholar search. A publication-restricted search only returns results with specific words from a specific publication.

However, you need to keep in mind that these “publication-restrict” searches may be incomplete as Google Scholar gathers bibliographical data from many sources, including automatically extracting it from text and citations. Therefore, the information that you get may be incomplete or even incorrect. But, these searches can be effective if you know exactly what you are looking for.

•     Search by Title or Date:

If you want to search for a particular paper by its title, simply type the title in quotations within the search box to get the desired results. For example, “The Discovery of India”.

Unfortunately, Google Scholar does not yet support search by date, so you will not be able to search for specific dates or sort according to dates. But you can select the date range from the drop down menu labelled anytime provided under the search box.

•     Search for Court Opinions:

Currently this feature supports documentation from the US Courts only. You can search for court opinions by selecting the Legal opinions and journals on the Google Scholar home page or in the dropdown menu on the search results page. Similarly you can also search for court opinions from a particular jurisdiction by selecting specific jurisdictions on the “Advanced Scholar Search” page.

In the advanced scholar page you have the option to search all legal opinions and journals, search opinions across speciic courts (by choosing appropriate court from the various options provided in the drop down menu) and also search opinions in different states in the US (by selecting the appropriate state from the drop down menu).

Google Scholar Library Links

Another very interesting and useful feature of the Google Scholar search is the library links that would prove especially valuable to students across the globe. In order to make the scholarly search easier for students, Google has introduced the Library Links Program, wherein the various libraries from across campuses can register to participate. The registration is pretty simple and free. Once a library is registered into the program, Google will be able to determine which journals and papers it has subscribed to electronically and is then able to link to articles from within these sources, when they are available. For more detailed information about this program visit http://scholar.google.co.in/intl/en/scholar/libraries.html.

Using this library links feature, a student would know immediately if a particular citation or abstract or document is available in the local library, as Google Scholar will provide special links to them in the search results. On-campus users at participating libraries will see these additional links and can access the documents online. To do so, follow these simple steps:

 

• Click on Scholar Preferences. (http://scholar.googcom/scholar_preferences)
• Type the name of your library in the ‘Library Links’
• Click Save preferences.
• Start searching with links to your library’s resources

If your library is not already participating in the Google Library Links Program, you can recommend the same to them.