Google Scholar is a search engine that indexes the full text and metadata of a range of scholarly literature, drawing on information from publishers, institutional repositories and websites. It has become one of the most frequently used search tools by researchers and is often the first resource they will use to find academic journals, books and conference papers (ahead of the resources that their library subscribes to).
However, not everything a researcher finds on Google Scholar will be available to download, or even peer-reviewed. However, this doesn’t put students off using it. So how should librarians resolve this issue? Perhaps take a leaf out of Cothran (2011), who suggests that librarians “may want to provide more instruction and facilitate easier links between Google Scholar searches and library databases, rather than discouraging its use altogether”. So that’s what we’ve done.
Did you know that you can ask Google Scholar to effectively search our collections at the same time and show you which resources you can access the full text of? What’s more, it’s actually really simple.
First, go to Google Scholar. Then before searching, look at the icons at the top of the screen. Click on Settings.
Then click on Library Links.
Make sure both Goldsmiths Findit@Gold options are ticked, then Save.
When you next search, you will be searching for what is available through our collections too. Look for the Findit@Gold links on the right.
You can now access these articles. If you are on-campus, you should be able to access automatically. If you are off-campus, you will probably still need to log-in as a Goldsmiths user, using your username and password as usual.
Any thoughts? Just let us know: kevin.wilson@gold.ac.uk
Reference
Cothran, T. (2011) Google Scholar acceptance and use among graduate students: a quantitative study. Library and Information Science Research, 33(4), 293-301.
digitaltoolsforresearchers 