What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar is a subset of the Google search engine that searches the web for what it considers to be scholarly publications. Its focus is on providing access to journal articles, conference papers, technical reports, pre-prints, and post-prints, although it will also retrieve non-scholarly material such as news announcements, academic websites (.edu), slide decks, and the like.
Note that not all of UCSB Library's licensed content is available via Google Scholar. We recommend using library databases for more comprehensive and precise searches.
Google Scholar is especially good for:
- Quickly discovering whether UCSB Library has full-text access to a particular article
- Locating obscure references that are difficult to find in conventional databases, either because you have an incomplete citation or you are trying to track down an article is not included in other indexing services
- Finding gray literature such as conference proceedings, pre-prints, policy papers, and government reports
Google Scholar drawbacks::
- It cannot limit, focus, organize, sort, or otherwise let you filter your results
- It cannot reliably access content within proprietary databases such as MLA or Literature Online
- It is not an index and is not organized by discipline or subject, so you cannot focus your search to, say, political topics
- It is NOT a full-text database. Most records in Google Scholar are citations, not articles in their entirety
- It is not very good at tracking down print articles
- You may get a long list of results but you will only have access to the full text of articles that UCSB Library has paid subscriptions for (if you have set up Library Links), or that are open access
- Searches are not nearly as precise as they are in the library's subscription databases
Search Google Scholar
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Advanced Searching
To do advanced searching in Google, you can alter your search terms and syntax, and you can also utilize their Advanced Searching option. On the left side of the page, click on the three lines (known as a hamburger menu). Select Advanced Search.
That will open a new window on the main Google Scholar page that will allow you to search by author, title, date range, and more.
Searching Tips
1. Avoid filler words.
- As with all database searching, avoid adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and any other terms that are not considered your key words (i.e. essential to your search)
2. Use quotation marks, OR and -
- Google automatically places AND in between each word, so there's no need to use AND as a Boolean operator.
- Use OR to search for two words right next to each other (Google doesn't recognize parenthesis). It must be completely capitalized.
- NOT is replaced with a minus sign in Google. It must be placed directly before each word you want to exclude. (EX: "social media" -Twitter -Snapchat)
- Use quotation marks to search for exact phrases.
3. Narrow your search with author or title operators
- For title searches, use "intitle:"
- For author searches, use "author:", plus your keywords. (EX: Twitter author:Hodges)
4. Google doesn't use truncation operators, so you'll need to get specific.
- Truncation is when you search for the root of a word using a symbol. For example, in many databases, searching environment* would display results for environments, environmental, environmentalism. Google automatically searches the word you typed in, as well as similar words. If you need to search for a specific form of a word, use Boolean operators to specify the words you want to search.
Connecting Google Scholar to UCSB Library Full-Text Resources
Learn how you can connect UCSB Library to Google Scholar to easily access the full text of an article through UC Library Search.
Connecting Google Scholar to UCSB Library Full-Text Resources from UCSB Library on Vimeo.
Transcript:
Title: Connecting Google Scholar to UCSB Library Full-Text Resources: Teaching & Learning Series
Body: Starting on the Google Scholar homepage, login to Google using your UCSB NetID and password. Once you are logged in, find the menu in the top left corner of the screen and select the “settings” option, then the “library links” option. In the search box, enter “University of California, Santa Barbara” and search. Find the “Get it At UC” option and make sure the box is checked, then save your changes. Now, you can search for full-text articles in UCSB Library from Google Scholar! On the Google Scholar homepage, enter your search terms and search. Look for the “Get it at UC” links to access the full-text resource through the Library website. You’ve done it! Having trouble? Ask for help. Need help with your research? Visit us online: library.ucsb.edu/ask