ICS 1-3 EIP Tutorial

Google Scholar searches the web, primarily for academic papers. It also allows you to:

• explore related works, citations, authors, and publications;
• (sometimes) locate the full text document through the BU library or on the web;
• check who's citing publications of interest.

Is Google Scholar a database or a search engine? Basically, it's a hybrid with more traits inherited from the search engine side of the family than its database relatives.

Database genes: contains a specific set of similar items, i.e. scholarly publications (articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites); Boolean options for combining search terms.

Search engine genes: spiders (search robots) prowl the web collecting citations from an unknown and ever-changing group of websites; collects individual citations rather than comprehensive journal indexing; vast retrieval numbers with decreasing relevancy.

TIP: Google Scholar ranks documents by how often and how recently they have been cited in other scholarly literature, where they were published, the author(s) and other information from the citation. Add a date range to see the most recent studies--they won't have had time for other other researchers to cite them.

Important: To ensure you get all full text options, always access Google Scholar from the MyBU>Library>Databases page.

Check this out for more information about Google Scholar and efficient ways to search it.

Google Scholar has a few search tools to help you find relevant resources. One way to use the tools available is to locate the menu in the upper left hand corner. Drop that down to locate Advanced Search.