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Google for Scholars: Google Scholar

Is Google Scholar right for my research?

Google Scholar is good for...

  • Helping a beginning researcher identify journal titles and authors connected with subjects of interest.
  • Finding "gray literature" like conference proceedings. It includes many articles that wouldn't get included in other indexing services.
  • Locating obscure references that are proving difficult to find in conventional databases.
  • Locating more information on partial citations.

​Google Scholar cannot...Google Scholar cannot...

  • Sort/search by disciplinary field
  • Browse by title
  • Limit search results
  • Search the deep web   However....Keep in Mind:
  • You may get a long list of results, but you will only have access to the text of articles that the Bethel College Library has paid access to or that are freely available.
  • Not everything in Google Scholar is scholarly. Google Scholar searches academic websites (.edu) as well as journals and publisher websites. Search results can include PowerPoints, news announcements or unpublished materials as well as articles and books. 
  • Searching in Google Scholar is imprecise when compared with discipline-specific databases.

Connect Your Account

Warning: Google Scholar often prompts you to pay for full text articles. In many cases these articles are freely accessible to Bethel College affiliates through one of the Library's many subscription databases or journals. You can use Google Scholar's Library Links feature to identify yourself as a Bethel College affiliate. This allows you to find full text library resources directly through Google Scholar results.

This is what Google Scholar search results look like when you're off-campus and haven't yet identified yourself as a Bethel College affiliate.

Note: If you're using Google Scholar frOIIf you are using an on-campus computer, the FullText@BethelCollegeKS will display automatically without any special configuration. However, if you are off-campus:

  • To identify yourself as a Bethel College affiliate, go to Settings at the the top of the Google Scholar search screen, then select Library links.
  •  Search for Bethel College and check the boxes as you see below.  Click Save.

 If you need help locating a particular article that you found through Google Scholar, please Ask a Librarian OR

use Interlibrary Loan to request articles/books.

dvanced Search Results

homepage for google scholar

Above, you'll notice that if you hover over the down arrow, you will get access to Google Scholar's advanced search features. By clicking on that arrow, a box will pop up with many options that will allow you to refine your search. This advanced search will allow you to sort by specific phrases, as well as authors and date ranges.

 

Advanced search options

Article Specifics

Once you are looking at a single result, there are a few options for the item. Some of these include:

  • "Cited By" will show you a list of works that cited this article.
  • "Related Articles" will direct you to articles on the same or a similar subject.
  • "FullText@BethelCollegeKS" will direct you to  BC library databases that contain the article.

 

How to incorporate Google Scholar into your research

Google Scholar searches specifically for scholarly materials such as journal articles, research reports, dissertations and theses, preprints, technical reports, patents, manuscripts in preparation, working papers and many other document types.

When you do a search in Google Scholar, you get a list of citations. You'll get links to the full text in the following cases:

  • If Bethel College has access to the journal title
  • If it's from an open access journal
  • If the researcher posted the article on her/his website.

We don't know exactly how Google Scholar indexes items, but this is how Google Scholar defines its metrics.

Google Scholar Search Tips

Use operators to refine your search terms. Google Scholar also supports most of the advanced operators in Google web search:

  • the "-" operator excludes all results that include this search term, as in [biomedicine -magnetic]
  • phrase search only returns results that include this exact phrase, as in ["as you like it"]
  • the "~" operator will find synonyms for that word, as in [~robotics]
  • the "OR" operator returns results that include either of your search terms, as in [soccer OR football]
  • the "intitle:" operator as in [intitle:mars] only returns results that include your search term in the document's title
  • the "author" operator [author:flowers] returns papers written by people with the name Flowers, whereas [flowers -author:flowers] returns papers about flowers, and ignores papers written by people with the name Flowers
  • using quotes around a common word makes sure your results include common words, letters or numbers that Google's search technology generally ignores, as in ["the" border]

Automatic related search terms

Google Scholar automatically searches for simple singular and plural forms of terms you enter, along with additional different endings to some words, and for some related terms.  For example:

  • sport   returns     sport ;  sports
  • diet     returns       diet ;  diets ;  dietary
  • woman  may return   woman  or  woman ;  women ;  female

The number of related terms included in the results may depend on the search being conducted. This feature cannot be turned off, and there is no separate truncation search that allows the user to designate that a term should be searched with any possible ending.