Vol. 2, No. 2 Spring 2005

Loyola Notre Dame Library Partners with

Patty MacDonald, Head of Reference

Faculty and librarians warn students against relying on Google for their research; however, since Google is so quick and easy to search, students find it a hard habit to break. Now everybody's favorite search engine is developing a new service, Google Scholar, that retains Google's ease of searching but retrieves mostly academic information from a variety of sources, including library catalogs, academic publishers, professional societies, and scholarly articles on the Web. Does this new service represent the Googlization of academia, or is it a gold mine for researchers?

What It Will Do
Google Scholar provides fast, free, easy access to scholarly information for all users. However, Google Scholar typically only provides a description of or citation to a book or journal article – not the full text. For the full article, the user can usually purchase it online from the publisher. A new option is for the user to access it through his/her library. Many of the nation's top universities (e.g., Harvard, Yale, Duke, and the University of California) have provided Google Scholar with links to their electronic holdings for their respective faculty and students. Now the Loyola Notre Dame Library has joined this partnership in order to provide access to some of the library's full-text journal content through Google Scholar for our library community.

What It Won’t Do
Google Scholar currently has access to only a fraction of the scholarly research available in proprietary databases. There are many databases that Google Scholar will provide access to, such as the publicly-accessible Web version of IEEE Xplore, but this version of the database provides citations only. Many databases reserve access at any level for subscribers only; LNDL subscribes to over 100 databases (e.g., WRDS, ValueLine, JSTOR, Project Muse) that are currently not searchable through Google Scholar or any other Internet search engine. In other words, Google Scholar makes a first pass and searches the information out there that is available, but doesn't have the depth of scholarly information that is found only in proprietary resources. In addition, Google Scholar does not focus on the resources available to our library community. So users will find many references to information in books or articles that are NOT available through the library, and will also miss many resources that ARE available. For a search focused on the library’s collection of electronic and print holdings, the library’s databases and catalog are still the best sources. For the near future, Google Scholar can supplement, but not equal or replace, the retrieval of scholarly information possible through direct searching of library resources.

How It Works
Google Scholar searches the scholarly information that is available on the Internet and returns citations according to their relevancy and importance. Importance refers to the influence of the work as determined by the number of times it is cited by other scholars. Thus, the “Cited by” links will take users to subsequent works that refer to the original article or book. For participating libraries, users can also get access to their library holdings (although this access is limited, as described above). Check the "scholar preferences" link and soon you should see the LND Library listed. If LNDL is selected, an icon will appear whenever you find journal citations in Google Scholar search results. ArticleLinker will provide a link to the article text if the library has online access to the journal and the faculty or student user is in the library or on either campus. If off campus, users will need to authenticate with their library barcode. When the library does not have an online subscription to the journal, there will also be links to search the library catalog to see if the journal is available here in print. Whenever a book reference is found using Google Scholar, a link to the LND library catalog also appears so that users can search to see if the book is in our collection. If not, a user can select WorldCat, which includes over 200 library catalogs, to search for other libraries that own the book.

For Further Research
As mentioned, Google Scholar is free, but access to the text of books and articles is limited. Users can pay for documents or see if they are available at the library. So check your "scholar preferences," select the LND Library, try out Google Scholar, and remember to use the library's subject-oriented databases to further your research.