What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar allows you to quickly search across literature from numerous disciplines. Google Scholar includes scholarly articles, theses, books, conference papers, and more from multiple organizations, including professional societies, academic publishers, and universities. Google Scholar will provide links to material that is freely available on the web; for other material it will show at least an abstract.
Why not always use Google Scholar?
While Google Scholar is good for quick searching and verifying citations, the list of publishers and organizations from which it collects materials is proprietary, which means you don't really know what publishers are excluded from your search results. It's also difficult to tell how your results are ranked, and features that allow you to narrow your search are not included.
Google Scholar also lacks the depth that subject-specific databases provide. Remember that most everything in Google Scholar will be included in subscription databases, but not vice versa.
Linking to Full Text Content in Google Scholar
You can get to the full text of items listed in the results of a Google Scholar search. There are three ways this can happen:
A. The item is freely available to anyone and so Google Scholar will present a link to the item.
B. The item is from a publisher participating in the Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) program. Read about the CASA program and how you can enable it here.
C. You have set up library links in your Google Scholar. This allow you to access library subscription materials via Google Scholar's library link. To set this up:
1. Access Google Scholar. Make sure you are logged into any Google app so that it recognizes you when you get to Google Scholar.
2. Click on “Settings” in the left menu.
3. Click on “LibraryLinks”.
4. Search for the name of our library: Knox College.
5. Select the checkbox next to the name, then choose “save”. The name appears as "Knox College - Find It-Knox College".
Note: If you have previously set up the Knox College library link in Google Scholar, you may need to do it again because the library changed linking systems as part of the library system migration that happened in June 2020.
After viewing results of a search in Google Scholar, links to Knox College subscribed content will appear to the left of an item:
