HED Community Colleges: Google Scholar

Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. The most relevant results will always appear on the first page.

What is included in Google Scholar?

• Peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, patents, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.

How are results arranged?

• Results are ordered by relevancy, as determined by Google Scholar. This seems to be determined by the how often your search words appear, how close together they are AND by how often the work was cited. This last rule can show many older works at the top, as they’ve had more time to be cited. (Use the 'anytime' menu to see only articles from the most recent years)
• Related works (preprints, copies of same work from different vendors, etc.) are grouped together, and the phrase “All # versions" appears below the entry.
• [Citation] means that the result was only found in the references of other works.
• [Book] means the result can be searched with the Library Search to see which libraries own it.

The limitations are:

• you can't limit your search to peer reviewed
• you can't browse by title
• you can't limit your search results
• it has a bias towards older literature - much of which is not fulltext
• you don't know when Google Scholar was last updated.

If Google Scholar does not meet your needs, try our research databases.

Google Scholar is a great place to scan across a lot of sources at once. Unfortunately, when clicking on titles of books or journal articles, you may be asked to pay for items - DON'T DO IT! Instead, look for the Find It @ UToledo  hyperlinks beside or below the entries. UToledo's libraries, working with our statewide consortium, OhioLINK, have worked with Google Scholar to embedded access. Your status as UToledo student/staff/faculty may allow you to access selected subscription content without fees or borrow books.

These Library Links will appear automatically when you are on campus.  Off-Campus? Go to Scholar Preferences and set University of Toledo as your library. View the Library Links in Google tutorial for details.

Click here "Finding UToledo Full Text from Google Scholar" to watch in new window.

In short:  go to Google Scholar > Settings (the 'gear symbol') > Library Settings and type in Toledo, check off all available options.