Introduction to Power Searching Workshop: 4. Outsider Discovery Tools

• Google Scholar is a SEARCH ENGINE, not a bibliographic index.
• It crawls across publisher's websites
• You get some control in ADVANCED SEARCH FORMAT [see box below]
• Free text searching / Natural Language

Pros :

• It is free !
• Crawls open access institutional repositories** which hold Open ACCESS articles for download
• Connects to Refworks
• Currency

Cons:

• No controlled vocabulary [subject headings/descriptors]
• What is included? What is not?
• Cannot export groups of citations
• Even Google is not sure what they are crawling [ or it is a trade secret and they are not saying !!]

When I use Google Scholar the most :

Best for quick reference or discovering keywords.
Useful for complementing your power search.

Weakest for comprehensive scholarly searching, e.g. CRR / Literature Review

Bonus : Google Books ngrams [frequency of a word in print over time]

ACCESS - Google BOOKS -  ADVANCED SEARCH 

Read more about Google Books at Google

The Google Book Project : Scan in every book in the world !

The Law Suits re. copyright and fair use, International Law

Where Google Books is today [and this is always a moving target]

• "The Preview" version is publisher's option if "in print"
• Public Domain / out of copyright books can be found in full text - often free download
• Some books may be purchased through Google Play ["largest bookstore in the world"] - Download in many formats, for many readers - sometimes First Chapter Free
• Individual authors may publish in Google Books

Library Uses :

• Discovery:  If, after preview, you see a chapter you like, order on We Deliver
• If you seek the whole book, check to see if held in our ebook collection
• If not, order on We Deliver 
• Full text phrase searching across so many books : powerful, if your phrase is unique  - overwhelming, if common
• A good look at a Reference chapter may be helpful for discovery