Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Google Scholar has scraped from the web everyting that it thinks is a scholarly citation and put it into a form that you can search for citations and full text. As such, its strengths are:
- Scholarly articles
- Breadth. Covers both articles that Harvard has as well as those that Harvard doesn't. And with a little time, the library can usually connect you with publications that you know exist but that Harvard doesn't have.
- Smooth, intuitive interface with relevance ranking
It covers only material that has appeared on the web, so its weaknesses are:
- It might miss lesser-known publications, even those that Harvard has. That is, it will miss ones that no one has cited on the web.
- It might miss older (say, pre-1995) publications, but most active publishers have worked to make their pre-internet-era backfiles searchable.
Connect Google Scholar to Harvard Library
In each internet browser that you use, follow these instructions to link your Google Scholar to Harvard Library. This makes sure that a bit more full text is available to you through fewer clicks.
Hints and Tricks
One of the best ways to generate research leads with Scholar is to use it to follow citation trails when you have a known source -- a class reading, a book you've found on HOLLIS that looks promising, an article that's so "perfect" for a research project that you want to see if there's "more like it" out there, waiting to be discovered.
For example:
- You can click on cited by to see which scholars picked up and used a research article/book in research. Just enter the title.
- Big "cited by" lists can be whittled down by adding keywords and clicking on the search within cited reference option.
- Related articles helps you identify research that's close ----algorithmically, at least -- to the item you started with.
- Authors whose names are linked reveal lists of author's publications -- where you might find additional/related publications (and see their times cited, too!)
