Google Scholar

Google Scholar is an interface of Google that makes it easier to do academic research than is possible through the standard Google interface. It is designed to search for scholarly articles and case law, though it can also uncover books through Google Books. 

Ways Google Scholar is Better for Academic Research: 

• Ranking of results is affected by number of citations, journal metrics, and author metrics.
• You can more easily do advanced searching and filtering of your search results.
• Citation indexing is a feature.
• Google Scholar allows you to track new results to your search and new citations to your articles. 

What Google Scholar Searches:

• Journal publisher websites
• Open Access repositories (university, discipline-based, and government)
• Preprint services
• Academic social networks
• Google Books
• Anything else Google thinks is hosting scholarly research

Because Google Scholar uses automatic indexing systems, non-scholarly sources can be indexed accidentally. 

Google Scholar will regularly link you to publisher pages, which may want payment for access to articles. Google Scholar may also link to non-final versions of an article, such as preprint (before peer review) and postprint (after peer review, before final typesetting) versions of articles. To help you find free, final versions of your results, you can connect Google Scholar to Kent Library and identify whether your results is in our collection.

Steps for Connecting

1. On the Google Scholar homepage, click the button in the upper left that is three horizontal lines. This will open a new menu.
2. Click the Settings link in the opened menu.
3. In Settings, click the "Library Links" option in the left navigation.
4. In the search box that appears, type "Kent Library" and click the search
5.  button.
6. There should be a checkbox that appears below the search box that says "Kent Library at Southeast Missouri State University - get full text." Click it. Note: on campus, this box should have appeared when you went to Library Links and have already been checked. 
7. Click the "Save" button.

Now when you search Google Scholar, a "get full text" link will appear to the right of a search result when it is available through the Kent Library collection.