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 that are available online through the publisher, although it will also retrieve non-scholarly material such as news announcements, academic websites (.edu), slide decks, and the like.
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 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, literary topics
- It cannot limit, organize, filter, or sort your searches
- 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
Connecting Google Scholar to UC Library Search
The University of California has partnered with Google Scholar to allow our users to click the 
to access the full text of the item if we have access to it. To connect your Google Scholar account to the UC Libraries:
1. Access “Settings” from the expanded menu from the top left corner of the Google Scholar landing page
2. Click “Library Links” in the left-hand menu
3. Search for and add
- University of California, Santa Barbara - Get it at UC
- Open WorldCat - Library Search
4. Click the blue “Save” button in the bottom right