Open Access Google Scholar

Description

Google Scholar is an easy-to-use , Web-based database that indexes and and searches peer-reviewed journal articles, books, theses, preprints, and technical reports from all broad areas of research. As a current SUNY New Paltz student, faculty or staff member, you will be able to link to many full text scholarly articles in Google Scholar. When you search Google Scholar on campus it recognizes you are entitled by licensing agreements to view full-text articles. However, if you are a current member of the SUNY New Paltz community and using Google Scholar off-network, you must first select "Scholar Preferences" on the main Google Scholar search page and type SUNY New Paltz in the Institutional Access box.

Google Scholarholds much potential and may find useful material, but it does NOT replace the library catalog or subject-specific databases. As a researcher, you should be aware of its strengths and limitations:

Strengths:
  • Google Scholar can find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
  • Google Scholar is multi-disciplinary, but coverage appears to be strongest in science and technology, and for scholarship that is available online.
  • Google Scholar attempts to index gray literature . This includes technical reports, working papers, business documents, and conference proceedings.
  • Google Scholar's 'Cited by' link will display a list of articles and documents that have cited the document originally retrieved in the search. This makes it possible to uncover other documents related by topic or subject to the original document. However, Google Scholar only includes articles that are indexed within its database, and this is an incomplete and much smaller subset of scholarly articles.
Limitations:
  • Not all results from a Google Scholar search are scholarly.
  • Google Scholar is in "Beta" status, which means it is still under development. Inconsistent, peculiar, duplicate and fragmented results sets may be retrieved.
  • Unfortunately, Google is not stating which organizations are participating in this project (and, therefore, which organizations are not). This means that some material you need for your research may not be indexed in Google Scholar, but rather in one or more of our databases.
  • Google Scholar does not provide dates of coverage.
  • Google Scholar may retrieve preprints and gray literature which may undergo significant revision before publication. If using a preprint, you may be referring to a document that has been substantially modified.
  • Google Scholar is freely available to anyone searching the Internet, but when searching Google Scholar from an off-campus computer that is not connected to the SUNY New Paltz network, the same full-text may not be accessible. In some instances, links to pay-for document delivery services are displayed when the Sojourner Truth Library' owns a subscription.
  • Google Scholar lacks many advanced search features necessary to refine a search.
  • Google Scholar does not index the entire full-text of an article.

Dates Covered

Coverage unknown.

Print Counterpart

No print counterpart.

Related Databases

· Resources by Subject

Access Notes

This database is freely available to the general public via the Internet.