Google Scholar is an easy-to-use, web-based database that indexes and and searches peer-reviewed journal articles, books, theses, preprints, and technical reports from all broad areas of research.

Setting Up Google Scholar

View a brief Flash demo on setting up Google Scholar

If you are a current member of the UB community and using Google Scholar from off-network, you should complete the following steps:

• Click on Scholar Preferences.
• Type University at Buffalo in the 'Library Links' section.
• Click Save preferences.
• Start searching.
• When you link to a full text article from off campus you will be presented with a log-in screen. Log in with your UBIT name and password.

When you search Google Scholar from on the UB campus it recognizes you are entitled by licensing agreements to view full-text articles.

Using Google Scholar

View a brief Flash demo on using Google Scholar at UB

Google Scholar is an easy-to-use, web-based database that indexes and and searches peer-reviewed journal articles, books, theses, preprints, and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Although it holds much potential, it should NOT replace BISON or subject-specific databases when conducting library research.

Strengths:

• Google Scholar can find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
• Google Scholar is multi-disciplinary, but coverage appears to be strongest in science and technology, and for scholarship that is available online.
• Google Scholar attempts to index gray literature . This includes technical reports, working papers, business documents, and conference proceedings.
• Google Scholar's 'Cited by' link will display a list of articles and documents that have cited the document originally retrieved in the search. This makes it possible to uncover other documents related by topic or subject to the original document.

• Not all results from a Google Scholar search are scholarly.
• Google Scholar is in "Beta" status, which means it is still under development. Inconsistent, peculiar, duplicate and fragmented results sets may be retrieved.
• Unfortunately, Google is not stating which organizations are participating in this project (and, therefore, which organizations are not). This means that some material you need for your research may not be indexed in Google Scholar, but rather in one or more of our databases.
• Google Scholar does not provide dates of coverage.
• Google Scholar may retrieve preprints and gray literature which may undergo significant revision before publication. If using a preprint, you may be referring to a document that has been substantially modified.
• Google Scholar is freely available to anyone searching the Internet, but when searching Google Scholar from an off-campus computer that is not connected to the UB network, the same full-text may not be accessible. In some instances, links to pay-for document delivery services are displayed when UB Libraries' owns a subscription.
• Google Scholar lacks many advanced search features necessary to refine a search.
• Google Scholar does not index the entire full-text of an article.

Last Update: 20 August, 2008